I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman

THE HELMET

THE HELMET Under the wind’s cold roof we are lost and homeless, And the flesh is flesh . . . — Loren Eiseley You have been lying so long with your face against the earth that the dirt beneath your cheek is warm and your teeth have a coating of grit and dust. In your body, a great heaviness. As if you had swallowed your own grave. So it’s true: a man can eat a shallow depression in the dirt to get his head just below a sniper’s line of fire. Hour after hour the artillery and the mortars coax dark mouths to open in the duff and the muck, and there are times when a man—photos, long bones, muscles, hardware—opens with them. While fifty yards away, where the light is whole and the trees unbroken, you can see the wind’s white shoulders moving through the unspoiled grasses. And how many times in the life you had before this one, did you cross, without thinking, walking upright and whistling, a distance of fifty yards? When the man right beside you dies, you know it, without looking: at the heart of the barrage, beneath the cough of mortars, enveloped in flame and slaughter, you feel, far off, on the inside of your body, a new loneliness. First there is nothing more than his great stillness; then, around his head in the dirt, the longfurled banner of his blood appearing. Under 2 the skull’s curve, inside the heavy meat of the brain, the rooms of his mind, their doors blown open, stand empty. You notice his hair, darkened with sweat, a fold of skin above the collar of his battle dress; how sunlight is thrust like a dowel through the tidy stigma the bullet has punched in his helmet, which has come to rest beside you, now, on the battlefield. Alive or not, each man here is equally dead; and so, in a lull behind a screen of smoke, you put on his helmet, aware that a helmet pierced by a bullet will help you, until danger has passed or darkness falls, in feigning death. And so the mind begins to rehearse its own oblivion. Long before he knocks off the helmet to press the narrow rictus of the Luger against your temple, you smell the breath of the barrel. He is your age— no more than twenty—and his eyes are ransacked, empty, the windows of a mansion gutted by fire. But after holding your gaze for the briefest moment, he steps back and holsters his pistol; and flat in the dirt, in a fever of grief and fatigue, you are no longer sure if he is real, or a dream with a heart made kind by carnage and darkness, or even which possibility you might prefer. Either way, after holding your gaze for the briefest moment, he stepped back and holstered his pistol. Either way, he has passed you over. 3 ...