Proportion.

Proportion.

Alfred O’Brien was never a very complicated man, in fact he was
one of the most cast characters in this play we call ‘life’.
The hours of his days were stolen by a tedious corporate job, in
which he was not valued by his employer – a man who was
traditionally hated in his pin-stripe suit and his greasy, slick comb
over; his bed-time was that of a sensible suburban husband, and his
only real priority was making enough money to keep from bankruptcy.
It was an ordinary existence, in ordinary life, in this ordinary
world, and he had numbed himself to accepting it.

Right now he was enjoying a much earned Saturday night in the way he
always did, too tired to plan anything special – he didn’t
think himself worth the effort. The whites of his eyes were almost
totally covered with red cobwebs, and the white which did show more
resembled grey. His pupils were dilated under the effects of the
caffeine which he routinely filtered through his out-of-shape,
middle-aged body, and the spaces beneath his bottom eyelids were
deeply shadowed patches on a pale plane of empty emotion. The hair
atop his head – thinning – was greasy and unwashed, it
looked like that of a man twenty years older, and he was sure that
he’d found some of it, loose from his scalp, resting on his
pillow that morning to greet him when he woke up. It said one of two
things, either “Hey Alfred, you’re going bald!” Or
“Hey Alfred, you’re going to die of stress!” The
stubble on his first and second chins, and dotted sparsely across his
pock-marked cheeks, was rough and uneven – his razor had been
blunt for the last week, at least. His face looked like that of
someone pushed deep into the dust-bin of humanity, and he got the
feeling that it was no coincidence the people in the café
seemed to be avoiding his table. Looking at his reflection, it was
difficult to remember himself as a teenager, his body sculpted like a
Greek statue, his mind filled with the inspirational words of famous
writers and quotes from his favourite movies. Now the space was
hogged by the numbers of an electric bill, or a telephone bill, or a
heating bill, or some other bill which he had no idea why he gave his
money to. More so, it was taken up with the shock and utter disbelief
of being ‘served’. His wife, Mary-Jane, had talked once
or twice about doing it, but Alfred had been too lost in his mundane
world of work and coffee to comprehend her words. He did not need
this – not now, not ever, and it seemed altogether unfair. He’d
had a fun side to his personality once, a side which attracted the
attention of many pretty ladies and many days of raucous laughter
with his high-school friends. But fun – as important and
powerful as it is – is a most vulnerable thing, and the
unfortunate twists and turns of life had amputated his share from his
slowly withering personality. Now, with his wife’s latest move
in this chess-match called marriage, he was left as a flower without
its petals, waiting for the not-so-sweet but oh-so-definitive release
of death.

The bullets were only innocent things, Jeremiah thought, as they flew
over his bobbing helmet. They were released from the barrel in a
cocoon of sparks and then they were free, tiny pieces of metal
ripping through the air, completely indestructible. They know that
they are flying, but that is all – they know that they are
flying through the air and that they are free, and that is all. Then
all of a sudden a life is taken, and in the space of seconds –
ten more lives, millions more memories, hundreds more sons and
fathers and brothers, all cut down by these innocent pieces of metal.
Tearing through the soft fabrics of clothing in which rest the
tattered, black-and-white photos of relatives, pushing their way
through soft flesh that maybe a mother would have covered in
protective aloe-vera, and burying themselves deep into organs which
were once so strong – then it is over, and all these bullets
know is that they are no longer flying. Bodies of soldiers, searching
for glory in the oldest tradition of man, turn into cold corpses
painted with dark red blood, lost amongst the ranks of souls around
them, their lives given up at the request of their country. And the
tattered photos in their ripped pockets become meaningless –
just a piece of paper with a person’s face on it, eventually
falling prey to the erosions of time and the display cases of
historical museums. These are the happenings of war, Jeremiah thinks,
and he wonders why in the name of good God he had to go. He was
drafted, of course – that was why, he told himself. He was
drafted in this ‘free country’ and made give up his
future, that of his parents and that of his baby daughter, all
because one president had insulted the other. It had been an entire
week before the entire U.S. Government had lost the battle of
insults, and the first bomb had been dropped a mere two days after.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will kill millions, so
don’t do that please.

Joey DeMarco, a man with whom the words ‘pleasant’ or
‘comforting’ could not possibly be connected, was the
leader of Jeremiah’s squadron – a decent man and a true
warrior, say the soldiers, as they shield themselves behind his
roaring machine-gun, shadowing him for fear that should they emerge
they would fall, pulled into the sea of death before them by an
unstoppable current. But Jeremiah had to wonder, if the dead bodies
from whom Joey had taken life could speak once more, would they say
the same as these fearful soldiers? In no way could he imagine they
would, in fact he imagined they would condemn the man as a devil,
taking brother from brother and son from father. But questioning the
captain could wait for a time when the squad was not suppressed by
enemy troops, squatted deep in a place which could only be described
as a pot-hole on this scarred landscape. For it was scarred as the
result of endless battle; rivers run red with the constant supply of
innocent blood, bodies pile in heaps to overshadow the walls of
sand-bags, deep cuts in the land mark the spots where grenades have
exploded, showering the areas with dirt and cutting men down with
shrapnel like a porcupine’s needles. Joey turned to Jeremiah,
his helmet bouncing lazily on his balding head, and passed him two
grenades and a colt revolver, his hands hidden beneath a layer of
soot and grime. Jeremiah took the weapons and nodded to the older
man; the fighting would start again soon, and this was no irregular
occurrence. Joey was just making sure his troops were ready, for when
the bullets did start to fly, when the grenades did start to drop
like hailstones, there would be no more time. And yet with all the
stresses of war raging around him like a plague, ever-threatening to
break into his sanity and have its way with him, Jeremiah could only
think of his family. He forced his mind to drift in other directions
– for relatives did not belong in wars – but his train of
thought kept circling back to family station. They would be sitting
at home now, watching the news like every other normal family,
drinking tea or eating biscuits, maybe both if the weekly wages
permitted it. Just another regular family feeding off the scraps life
throws their way, Jeremiah thought – but they were special,
they were his.

Alfred could not sleep that Saturday night; for every time he tried
his mind would fill with stale thoughts of Mary-Jane – the
smell of her hair strung across his once-satisfied face, the feel of
her warm skin against his in the solace of the darkness, kisses
plucked from the reddest of lips on the night of their engagement –
they were recycled memories coming back once more in an attempt to
recapture some lost love. But in spite of giving Alfred more than
what he needed for a long shower, the memories failed, and as a
result of their intrusion into a mind in desperate need of some rest,
he was more upset than ever. He flicked through the channels on his
plasma-screen television – the only thing in the two-room
apartment resembling any kind of a decent life – and found
nothing worth wasting his time on. The harsh buzz of the T.V. and its
modern blue glow seemed to taunt Alfred. They said “Why are you
still awake, you sad little excuse of a man?” They enquired as
to why he hadn’t given up yet, as to why he was still flicking
through the channels from one cooking show to the next, as to why he
even owned something so expensive when he couldn’t afford
anything better to eat than a plastic-encased microwave dinner.
Alfred ignored their mocks and kept flicking, his finger almost
methodically pressing the remote’s buttons, a sneer plastered
sheepishly beneath his nose. His eyes were like two red sores gouged
out of a greying, wrinkled face. The webs painted across them had
succeeded in mapping their entire surface by eight o’clock that
evening, and although they pulsed madly Alfred could not tear them
from that harsh blue glow of the screen. He merely sat there, a
half-empty beer can – for Alfred could not summon the will to
call it half-full – resting on his bulging stomach like the
king of the hill, his chin doubling upon itself against his hairy
chest, his feet nearly frozen in socks that were mostly composed of
holes, and he belched out his worries.

He woke unable to remember when or how he had fallen asleep, and
tried to calculate how long he’d been out. He expected at least
nine or ten hours, maybe twelve at a stretch – he hoped for it
more than anything else, but when he looked at the clock and compared
it to the last time he’d checked, he was bitterly disappointed.
His heart had risen with the thought that he had actually rested his
mind, that he had finally done something good for himself. It had
risen to happier heights than it had frequented in the last few
weeks, at least, and now it dropped to the lowest recesses of
darkness, anchored by a seemingly un-endless streak of horrible luck.
He thought that maybe his clock had broken halfway through the night,
that it had simply stopped working, but that idea was locked away
with anything else positive when the time changed again. Alfred let
out a noise somewhere between a cry of despair and a moan, much like
an injured dog being kicked in the side, and it was not because his
stomach was streaked with lines of beer, flowing in rivers around his
protruding belly-button, coating his overly-stretched skin with a
sticky new layer and soaking his good underpants; it was not because 
his head ached and pulsed and his eyes felt like hot coals burning
their way through his flesh; it was not because he realized he was
out of coffee, his best friend in this tragic excuse of a life; it
was because he had slept for a mere twenty minutes, and he knew it
was all his brain would allow him that night.

Jeremiah’s heart beat in unison with the men’s around
him, for he could hear them amongst the silence of the trench. They
spoke to each other when the mouth could not summon the strength to
open – comforting words which would most likely prove useless
in the next ten minutes. Still, Jeremiah admired their perseverance
and their willingness to make him smile in times such as these.
Listening to the others, the hearts, the souls, the thoughts –
it became easy to call them ‘brothers’ when one realized
they were what you needed to survive. Friends, people, family –
none of these mattered in the storms of war, the plague of innocent
bullets, rotting corpses and blood-soaked grounds – no, who
mattered here were your brothers in arms and nobody else. This was
how you lived and how you survived – it was the creed and the
code of every soldier worth the gun at his waist.

Now those guns shook along with the men of war who carried them,
their steel barrels gleaming powerfully into grief-stricken eyes.
Joey Demarco put a stumpy finger – cocooned in a bloody bandage
– to his puffy lips to draw a hush over his battle-weary flock
of warriors, and everything fell into a deathly silence. The pack had
crossed most of no-man’s-land, drawing close to enemy
headquarters, surviving wave after wave of vicious attacks to do so.
But they had survived – for this. It was their mission after
all, to take the enemy base, and Joey Demarco was a man of
priorities. This was not the veteran’s first war, and any
sympathy he had for either his own troops or his enemies was hidden
deep beneath a layer of armour that would not be penetrated. This
armour was called obedience – for Joey would follow the word of
his superior if it brought him to the ends of the universe, and
although this labelled him a miracle-worker to the U.S. Government,
he was taking his soldiers with him.

Jeremiah’s mind was no longer filled with the images of his
poor family, but so much worse. His thoughts were a cycle of the men
he’d killed that day, replaying over and over again like a
broken television. He saw the faces and could not help but wince
amongst his fellow soldiers – he saw rage-filled eyes buried
deep at either side of a grimy nose like two volcanoes about to
erupt, a boiling fire centred in the pupils like a furnace; he saw
eyebrows creased with determination, knitted together with thoughts
of murder and desperate patriotism; he saw lips cracked with
exhaustion and teeth gleaming in the darkness of the night, like
fangs; he saw fear, hidden beneath this angry mask the men wore. But
most of all – with the true mind of a writer that Jeremiah had
always possessed – he saw innocent souls, innocent souls
marching their final march, grimly preparing themselves to be taken
from their homes and loved ones. And for each of those souls Jeremiah
had pierced with a bullet – one nervous pull of a cursed
trigger – he shed a guilty tear. These tears marked the muddy
ground beneath him alongside so many others – a bigger
graveyard than any in existence, Jeremiah thought. And as his lip –
painted black with dirt – quivered uncontrollably in the
shadows, Joey Demarco gave his speech. Jeremiah did not listen to
most of it; the chambers of his ears seemed to fill with the screams
of dying men, voices reversing the effects of puberty and travelling
to such pitches most dogs would run from. They were also filled with
the collective booming of tens of rifles unleashing hundreds of
bullets – death machines upholding to their duties, guided by
the fingers of uncertain, terrified men pulling triggers. But
Jeremiah did try to concentrate on his superior’s words as they
drew to a close, and it was a good thing he did. Joey, with eyes of
steel that suggested nothing of emotion or care, was organising the
final charge.

They were very close to the enemy now, so close they could almost
feel the hatred emanating from that bunker of doom, so close they
could taste the end of the battle – victory or defeat; they
knew that it was coming to a close. They leaned on their guns,
shaking in their mud-caked boots, afraid of what was to come. Joey’s
words did not manifest themselves into some inspirational spiel, like
those of the captain at the end of every great war movie Jeremiah had
enjoyed as a young teen. He did not quote a famous poet to comfort
the men and cradle their fears and worries; Joey was not a mother
putting a child to bed, he was a soldier – a man broken down to
his most basic level, a fighter. His words were an attack plan –
and as the men blessed themselves with rapidly moving lips mumbling
prayers and trembling hands, he gave the final order. They had their
weapons, loaded; they had their grenades packed securely into their
belts, waiting to explode and rain death upon the enemy forces; they
had sweat pouring from their scalps, feet and arms so as if they
missed, they might kill their foes with the stench, and best of all
they had each-other. That was enough – they were going to war.

Joey ended his words with a long sigh, made eye-contact with each of
his men, and nodded. Then he did something nobody expected, something
uncharacteristic of his tight composure; he stood up, saluted with
one camouflaged arm, and said “Brothers to the end. Let’s
do this.” With those two final sentences stuck deep in
everyone’s mind, accompanying the heart in Jeremiah’s
throat, the group rose from the shadows of the night and ran for the
bunker. Boots rose mud from the ground in dark clumps, weary muscle
fibres tightened and pushed, shiny guns swayed in exhausted arms, and
determination crossed the face of every man on the line. Brothers to
the end – warriors for eternity. And as the night erupted into
a storm of gunfire, Jeremiah thought once more of his family.

Alfred buttoned his suit jacket and straightened his tie – all
black, as was the custom. He looked at himself in the cheap, cracked
mirror; his teeth were clean after a five-minute brushing, scraping
off a double layer of plaque. His hair was washed, conditioned, and
although thinning, it was streaked with a mixture of brown and blonde
and suited well to his face. His stubble was now gone, at the expense
of a new razor, and the nap from which he’d woken a mere hour
ago had evolved into an eleven hour slumber. His eyes were still red
but he could tell it was clearing; it was no longer a network of
cobwebs. He’d opted for the glass of orange juice as opposed to
the familiar temptation of a cup of coffee when he woke up, and he
felt totally rejuvenated. His plasma screen television was up on eBay
for three hundred dollars, a move which he didn’t regret for a
second after roughly his thousandth microwave-dinner. His boss had
given him a permanent raise, finally recognising him as a valued
employee. And he had agreed – finally – to sign the
papers for his divorce; his wife deserved a fresh start, Alfred was a
sinking ship, and he decided to give Mary-Jane a life-boat – it
was the least he could do.

After hearing the news last night over the phone, Alfred took a
second and reflected upon his life. Yes, his beer-can was half-empty,
but at least he had a beer can. Yes, his job was tedious and boring,
but how many people were there unemployed and living on the street?
Yes, his chin had sprouted multiple other chins, but with the loss of
his television – the one which had taunted him endlessly as
sleep eluded his grasp – he could afford a treadmill. Alfred’s
existence was not the train-wreck he’d thought it to be. And
last night, a noose hung round his fattened-up neck and a chair
beneath his chubby feet, he’d gotten the call that
simultaneously saved his life and kicked him in the gut so hard he
almost slipped from the chair. His nephew had died in war three days
ago, marching on the enemy after a week of endless combat. His body
had been torn apart by bullets, turned into something unrecognisable,
just like the rest of his platoon – but the enemy had let the
bodies be taken. The boy’s funeral was to be held today, and he
was labelled a war-hero by the government men – those who
talked and talked and kept talking but were never seen actually
fighting for anything in this world.  Alfred’s nephew was the
unlucky one – he was the one who should be grieved; he was the
one who’d died in a war while his family waited at home for him
to return. Alfred looked at the mirror and nodded to his reflection –
in it he saw his nephew, a person who’d fallen prey to one of
life’s most common tragedies. He was a good kid – a very
promising, yet unpublished writer with a baby to support. He was a
writer whose words would never be heard.

All of a sudden Alfred’s life was perfectly fine. Some things
just need to be put in proportion.