“What’s the matter?? For fuck’s sake, are you blind, or is it all one great tinkling rainbow for you?”
Suddenly Theo punched the strip of mirror. It shattered. A thin streak of blood ran down his stump and then he seemed to ignite. He spun around, lashed out: a sick devil sweeping things off the old range, smashing the already handleless jug, tearing the faded picture of the Virgin, which had been their lucky mascot since they first saw it hanging there. There was so little to destroy, yet he destroyed it.
“That was you, Ben. Not me. You wanted me to live the life you longed for—pretty colored tunes in a pretty church with a pretty house next door—well, now I’m free. Of it all.”
He leered at Benedict. Then he staggered away, reached under his bed, and pulled out a bundle of papers.
“Look! Agnes’s letters.”
He untied them, held them out, read a few anodyne sentences in a lisping falsetto voice, and then, and with pathetic difficulty, ripped them apart. There was gleeful savagery in his face, even as he winced with pain at each violent movement of his arm.
“And O, what do we have here? The cantata, the precious cantata. Raise Me, Raise Me to the Stars. You want it?” He tore the first sheet across, screwed it up, hurled it to the floor. “Why don’t you wipe your backside with it?”
Benedict reached out, tried to take the pages from him. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t, Theo.”
Theo wrenched them away. “Naughty Theo, don’t,” he repeated, mimicking, but then said “Fine, have it.”
Theo scattered more single sheets, attempted to rip a thick wad of them, then suddenly had Benedict against the wall and was trying to force the paper into his mouth. He was still strong.
“Consume it,” he said. “Become me.” Then he had dropped the music and was pushing at Benedict’s lips with his mutilated hand and one sheet of foolscap. “Take. Eat. This. Is. My. Body. Shed. For. Thee. Isn’t that what you’d like? What you’ve wanted? My body? That’s what Novello says.”
Benedict turned his head away, choking, as Theo tried to force his teeth apart. Then, as suddenly as he’d begun, Theo reeled back and sank to the bed, weeping hoarsely.
“Fuck off,” he said. “Find another billet. I’m sick of you. Stop looking at me with your great doggy, understanding eyes.”
Benedict snatched up his immediate possessions, which were few enough; and, as he dipped his head to go through the low door, he heard Theo shout: “You were always so completely second-rate.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Jean-Baptiste, France, February 1916
JEAN-BAPTISTE HAD COME TO EXPECT death. Probably the next day. Early on, he’d thought death would take other soldiers who’d been there longer. Since then, he’d learned that death was no respecter of natural justice, but was in fact a great practical joker of the nastiest sort, like Lucien Laporte at school. A bullet in the forehead: that was fair. Being blown into a hundred glistening bits of meat: that was fair, though not so good for your comrades. Being bayoneted was fair; gas was vicious but war. But dying from a septic foot or drowning in a puddle or being kicked by a mule: where was the glory in that? You didn’t have to travel across France and sleep in a trash pile—death could have found you at home for that.
Everybody knew death was out there, and it seemed the higher-ups were currently making preparations to entice him in. They were flaunting themselves. There had been a visit by little General Joffre and even the president.
Usually, officers were little seen from day to day and, when they emerged from their billets, were men of few words and no conversation, except with each other, somehow both focused and indifferent. The ones who wanted to save their own skins, just as their men did, only more elegantly, were as dangerous as the ones who were all “They shall not pass.” Their own platoon commander, Aspirant Collinette, was scarcely more than a boy, a cadet. Some claimed to have seen him surreptitiously reading a book on how to fight wars.
The men around Jean-Baptiste put what remained of their trust in Sergeant Folz, a blocky, grizzled man who had fought the fuzzy-wuzzies and run two through at once on one of their own spears. He was a brute but a survivor, and his prestige came from bringing his men through. Captain Joubert, who was the section commander, wore wire-rimmed spectacles and reminded Jean-Baptiste of the schoolmaster back in Corbie. He was glad that, unlike the two previous captains, Joubert didn’t have a saber. An officer with a nineteenth-century saber seemed to betray a worrying level of misunderstanding. Rather than telling them what the hell was happening or reciting the virtues of the Republic that had sent them to be slaughtered, Joubert trotted out little mottoes when he briefed them. Yesterday’s was “Never overestimate your enemy.”