The Post-War Dream Read online

  The Post-War Dream

  Cullin Mitch

  The Post-War Dream is the eighth book by American author Mitch Cullin and was published by Random House in March 2008.

  Initial reviews of the novel were mixed, with Kirkus calling it "a misstep in Cullin's unpredictable, adventurous and, alas, frustratingly uneven oeuvre," and Publishers Weekly dismissing the work as "sterile." But subsequent pre-publication reviews from Booklist, Library Journal, and The Denver Post were positive.

  In the March 16 edition of the Los Angeles Times Book Review and, simultaneously published, the Chicago Tribune, critic Donna Seaman praised the book, stating: "In this exacting, suspenseful, elegiac yet life-embracing novel, Cullin reminds us that no boundaries separate the personal and communal, the past and present, the false and true."

  Cullin Mitch

  The Post-War Dream

  For my sister Charise Christian,

  who taught me how to write my name and kept me reading

  and for Howe Gelb,

  surrogate big brother and my troubadour of choice

  As when a man dreams, he reflects not that his body sleeps,

  Else he would wake; so seem'd he entering his shadow.

  — William Blake, Milton

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Portions of The Post-War Dream were first published under various titles in the following literary reviews: The Texas Review (Fall / Winter 2001) and Iron Horse Literary Review (First Frost 2002).With gratitude to those who offered support, research, advice, friendship, and inspiration: Coates Bateman, Howard Bloom, James Brady, Jeff Bridges, Joey Burns, Neko Case, the Christian family, John Convertino, my father Charles Cullin, Marianne Dissard, Nicole Dewey, Jane Dibblin, Luke Epplin, Norio Fukada, the entire Gelb clan, Terry and Amy Gilliam, Jemma Gomez, Tony Grisoni, Amon Haruta, Junko Kai, Patti Keating, Erika and Kainoa King, Steve and Jesiah King, M.A.G.O., Gabriella Martinelli, Tsutomu Nakayama, Frances Omori, the Parras, Joe Regal, my mother Charlotte Richardson, Charlotte Roybal, the God Hisao Shinagawa, Rennie and Brett Sparks, Special Agent Peter Steinberg, Nan Talese, Theodore Taylor, Brad Thompson, Carol Todd, Jeremy Thomas, Jonathan M. Weisgall, Sakae Yoshimoto — and, of course, my comrade in every single thing under the sun: the most humble and kind Peter I. Chang.Lastly, two works of nonfiction proved invaluable to me during the writing of this novel, and I highly recommend both exhaustively researched and informative books: The Bridge at No Gun Ri, by Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza (Owl Books); and Ovarian Cancer: Your Guide to Taking Control, by Kristine Conner and Lauren Langford (O'Reilly Patient-Centered Guides), a book which provided needed information during my late mother's struggle with ovarian cancer.

  THE CACTUS GARDEN

  1

  Throughout the years Hollis has observed them among his dreams, watching from a distance as they foraged under a blackened sky. After a time he understood that they, like him, had sensed the flux of earth, yet were undaunted: having journeyed perhaps twenty miles in almost fifty days, a procession of cows — nomadic Herefords and Jerseys — grazed onward, wobbling over a moonlit prairie, bulky heads lowered; their hooves crunched sandstone and pumice, and their excreta, hardening behind them, marked the slender trail in uneven circles — testaments to how far they had come, symbols of presence, like the burned-out and rusting wheelless cars they encountered within unkempt pastures of bluebonnets and high brittle grass, or the gutted houses abandoned on good soil (porches collapsing, doors gone, the wind sneaking through busted panes into dim interiors), or any number of fading signposts passed along the way, those many things fashioned by man-made design and then left again and again as the herd proceeded, weaving blindly ahead for no other reason than it must.

  And there, too, he has infrequently witnessed the approach of other languid creatures: half-naked human figures emerging whenever the recurring cows failed to manifest, hundreds of pale bodies cutting through the landscape, angling across the same nighttime terrain but traveling in the opposite direction. That serpentine formation of listless souls wound back into the darkness — the shapes of children, men and women, mothers cradling infants, the elderly — coming from where the cows had been headed, drawing nearer while never quite reaching him. But it was the gas mask each one wore which disturbed him the most — such cumbersome equipment obscuring their faces, too large for the heads of small children and practically consuming the entire bodies of the infants, giving the group a uniform, superficial appearance not unlike that of cattle. Even so, he perceived their determined movements as a kind of miserable retreat, a retrogression toward the past and, indeed, toward the living — where, upon arriving at their destination, he imagined the masks would be cast aside and all of them would inhale freely once more.

  Yet every step of their bare feet was now preceded by labored breath, a collective exhalation delivered in unison and released as a muted, staccato gasp through chemical air filters — while their paper-thin skin contracted around pronounced rib cages, and many of their arms hung like broken branches at their sides. As the ragged column advanced steadily in the moonlight, he realized the physical condition of the people had deteriorated badly since he'd first seen them decades ago. Their clothing was either reduced to shreds or had fallen away, their ankles and feet were covered with sores, their hair was so long that it ran the length of their backsides, and the men's thick beards jutted from beneath their masks. In that stream of pale, dirty bodies only their protruding bones shone clearly as they marched one after the other.

  “Where are you going?” he had once asked them without speaking. “What is it you're looking for? What do you want?”

  Later on, after having grown accustomed to their rare visitations, he offered the men cigarettes, the women Dixie cups filled with apple juice, the children Halloween candy from an orange plastic pumpkin (“Please, you must be hungry — here, have something to drink — have some juice — please, help yourself — please — ”), but his gestures went unacknowledged, his voice remained unheard. They, as usual, strayed well beyond his grasp, moving resolutely on the trail, somehow receding even while approaching.

  However fast he walked, Hollis was never able to catch up with them. For years he tried without any success, his life evolving from youth to retirement while the processions continued to elude him. But as was always the case, those irregular dreams dissolved with his sudden waking, and he opened his eyes in bedrooms steeped by shadows — his body shuddering as if it had retained something unwholesome from the land of his visions and carried it then into the imperturbable, calm world he has made for himself.

  2

  Now in the waning months of the twentieth century, snow fell last evening without warning, drifting from above as if the heavens had been wrung in the hands of God, spilling down upon an unsuspecting desert, covering all which lay exposed below the dark-gray clouds. Waking well after mid-night — an open hardback of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six resting against his chin, a coffee cup half filled with Glenfiddich sitting nearby on the floor — Hollis was comfortable inside his house, stretched across the living-room couch and kept snug by a beige terry-cloth bathrobe. Lifting the novel, he began reading where he had left off, although his attention wasn't really held by the writing; his eyes scanned paragraphs, failing to absorb sentences, until, at last, he set the book aside, turning his gaze elsewhere as the Glenfiddich was absently retrieved, the liquor seeping warmly past his lips. On the other side of the living room the front curtains were drawn, revealing the picture window and what existed just beyond it: a torrent of snowflakes wavering to the earth, some pattering at the glass like moths before dissolving into clear drops of moisture. Presently, he was standing there in his bathrobe, resting a palm against the window, sensing the co
ld while buffered by efficient central heating. There, also, he caught a glimpse of himself as an obscure, diaphanous man reflected on the glass; his transposed image was cast amongst the wide residential street — the adjacent and similarly designed homes, the xeriscaped lawns — backlit by a table lamp but also illumed in that frozen vapor which brightened the night, that curious downpouring which smothered the gravel-laden property and changed his Suburban Half-Ton LS from sandalwood metallic to an almost solid white. He realized, then, that the outside cold had somehow managed to bypass the insulated flesh and blood of his left leg — needling into the marrow of his once torn-apart thigh, reviving the ancient injury caused by a North Korean's bullet that had ripped into his leg, striking him while his M1 returned fire; the throbbing, indefinite pain had been felt by him since, but only in the bleakest of winter months, sometimes giving him a slight limp as if to summon his previous incarnation: a young private in the U.S. Army, a rifleman at the outset of a half-forgotten war.

  By daybreak, however, the blizzard had reached its end, and soon sunlight vanquished those low-hanging, thick clouds. When a hard blue sky proclaimed the storm's departure, the neighborhood became a glaring sight to behold; the morning's rays were made radiant in the glossy ice patches embracing asphalt and in the immaculate snowfall blanketing yards. Then Hollis was at the window once again, standing there as if he hadn't ever left the living room. The Glenfiddich had been replaced with decaf, the coffee cup steaming while he squinted to perceive the ghostly reflection in front of him; cast discernibly now on the glass of the window, his chest's silver, coarse hairs looked golden, his forehead's rugged creases appeared less defined. He had slept less than four hours, having fallen asleep at about the time he would normally be waking up. Even so, his body felt rested, his thoughts lucid, the previous night's swift accumulation having enlivened him somehow; he was — as his wife, Debra, remained in their bed — fully awake and eager to venture into that bleak, muted scenery. But beforehand, Hollis decided, he would spend a few minutes at the computer — coffee cup on a coaster, an index finger pushing the keyboard buttons — typing a short addendum to the prologue section of his fledgling autobiography, lest he forget later on.

  “Whenever something strikes you,” Debra had reminded him, “be sure you take note of it. Anything at all. You'll see, little details help create the best picture of someone.”

  But he worried that the little details of his life weren't at all interesting.

  “Nonsense,” she ‘d responded. “Everyone is interesting, and everyone has a story to tell. If you think on it long enough, you'll see how amazing your life has been up to this point. Look, you've gone from Tokyo to Tucson, and a bunch of places in between. Now that's something to write about.”

  “I'm not sure everyone is interesting, Deb. I mean, what if I discover how incredibly dull I am, or how meaningless?”

  “You won't, dear. Trust me.”

  It had been Debra's idea that he should chronicle his life, an exercise which she believed could preoccupy the downtime of retirement and, she hoped, would foster some much-needed reflection on his part. Toward that end, she purchased a refurbished Mac and checked out several books from the library that she thought might motivate him (Fulton J. Sheen's Life of Christ, Sam Walton: Made in America, and Chuck Yeager's autobiography). As a young man, Hollis had considered becoming a writer (having immersed himself early on in the writings of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck), but following his military duty, he found serious literary fiction less and less appealing for some reason — perhaps because of the subject matter's growing ambiguity and the unheroic nature of the characters, the increasing emphasis on the human condition's darker extremes. These days, however, his tastes were allied with the works of writers like Clive Cussler and John Grisham, heavily plotted but entertaining novels which more often than not didn't get finished before they were due back at the library; so while he appreciated Debra's gesture, the nonfiction books she stacked near the Mac received the slightest of considerations — the chapters flipped through, a paragraph or two perused at random, a bookmark stuck indiscriminately in the pages to give the false impression of a reading well under way.

  But when beginning the process of addressing his own history, Hollis found the breadth of his life almost impossible to envision; it was, for him, like those casually regarded library books Debra had left for him — observed as fragments, equivocal in its significance, lacking a sustained coherence. Naturally there was childhood, teenage years, the war, marriage, work, and now retirement; yet it seemed so fleeting and generally unspecific, as if none of it added up correctly to the number of years he had actually spent alive. An apple born without a core, he concluded. A tree thriving without roots. And, as such, he didn't know how his story should commence, or what words he should choose in order to accurately describe it.

  “You're making this too hard on yourself,” Debra had told him one night, upon learning almost nothing had been written during the two or three evenings he had spent sequestered in the home office. “Just keep it simple, and keep it honest.” She encouraged him to write for her, to describe the Hollis she didn't truly know, the Hollis who existed before they met: the small-town boy, the soldier engaged in frontline combat, the local hero. He should write about the war, write about Korea, write about that period of his life which continued to remain somewhat of a mystery to her — simply because he never liked discussing what he had once jokingly called the pre-Debrazoic era, shrugging his military service off as something he'd rather not revisit in a million years. “Who knows, it might become the first of your many books to come. Could even end up a major bestseller, you never know. Now wouldn't that be something?”

  When she said this, Hollis recoiled his head and stared at her with disbelief.

  “Hollywood might want to turn it into a movie,” she said, her voice as sincere as her expression. “Stuff like that happens more than you think.”

  Hollis seemed unconvinced, but he nodded in agreement nonetheless. “That's all good and fine,” he said, “except I'm way out of my league here, Deb. I don't know how to get the ball rolling.”

  She suggested he begin with lists, abbreviated outlines describing people or events which initially popped into his mind, various moments from the past and the present: “Like case studies, I guess, and you're the scientist. I don't think it has to be too complicated, though. One or two things, a couple of lines here and there about what someone does, their jobs, hobbies, things of that nature. Or if they're dead, something essential you remember about them. That'd at least be a start, right?”

  “That's true.”

  So he had returned to the office, resuming his place in front of the computer, and let his index finger hover a moment over the keyboard before finally tapping the letter S, though it would take almost an entire week to fill half a page with the most minuscule of beginnings.

  Subject number: 01 Name: Hollis Adams Sex: Male Race: Caucasian Age: 68 Height: 6 feet, 1 inch Weight: 212 pounds, give or take

  Overweight but not fat, muscular where it counts. Long face. Thinning gray hair still manages to cover entire scalp. Wore bifocals for over twenty years until having corrective laser surgery a while back. Scar on left inner thigh, result of wound while serving in Korea with the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment. Likes a drink on any occasion, doesn't smoke. Good at a lot of things but not great at anything. No notable talents. Coupled with wife Debra (65) for almost fifty years now. No children. Spent majority of life living and working in Arcadia, California. Born in Minnesota. Currently retired at Nine Springs, Arizona. Former director of production and sales for Dusenbury-Soper Lumber Company. Hobbies include gardening, fishing, flea markets, and golfing. Sometimes sits in on the Friday afternoon painting class at the Funtivities Center. Needs to get in better shape. Played basketball and six-man football in high school. In tenth grade, won a Civics Award. Lifelong Democrat until voting for Ronald Reagan's reelection. Voted against Bill Clinton in
favor of George Bush. Voted for Clinton's reelection. Doesn't really follow politics anymore. Tries to enjoy life. Likes that the house continues to feel new. Enjoys working in the garden. Still hasn't gotten used to the Arizona summers yet. Has to watch blood pressure. Has considered medical hair restoration at some point.

  And this morning, after having steered clear of his autobiography for nearly a year, he fired up the Mac long enough to revise that opening description of himself, adding a single line at the end: Looks fifteen years younger when seen on the living room window at sunup with fresh snow on the ground.

  Hollis now dressed beside the bed he shared with Debra, quietly putting on thermal underwear, woolen socks, jeans, and a green flannel shirt. Wrapped in a comforter that she had gathered around herself, her head partly concealed beneath an orthopedic pillow, Debra was motionless — tufts of short, gray-blond hair sticking out from one end of the pillow, a lax arm jutting beyond the comforter to his barren side of the mattress — and wasn't disturbed when he sat at the bed's edge to slip his leather winter boots on, keeping still below her cave of sponge rubber. Of late he had been getting up several hours before she stirred, and with all their years of living together, she no longer had to be awake for him to hear her. She could speak to him even now, as he dressed himself, without saying a word, without being aware of herself; for they had had such conversations many times in the past.

  “Hollis?” she would ask, and he would answer her, half whispering for no reason, while vaguely aware of the pungent, somewhat sickly aroma permeating the bedroom — the smell of morning breath, of hours spent resting behind closed doors and windows.