The Architecture of a Mechanical Body

Shepherds and mechanical cavaliers, with tracers dealing heavy blows to hit his hardened body, scratching past before shredding themselves against stone. Twenty-three confirmed kills. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. He kept his head down and shoulders tight, a white-out semi placed in delicate hands, wrapped in a prayer scarf, inscribed Exodus 15:3 into the barrel. The weight of a familiar, loved curse against his collarbone. War, he decided, was the forge in which boys died and men were extracted. At the end you’re remade, hammered and skin quenching in the river water. Beneath the barking sirens, full of anger and stupidity and bravery as a dog. The elevator-pitch pounding of his heart. What kind of man is he wanting to be? He hated the stallion-stamped chaos, the pulse of raw animal terror at sundown. Should’ve been a clean shot. He had passionate bullets for each of his fallen brothers. Every debt would one day come due. He pissed in the dirt and watched the creek of steam rise from the heat. The Bisonbound braced in the plain, engine steaming from its jaw vents as it slammed against mortal chassis. He covered his mouth with the crook of his left arm. Blown-out windows, a curtain whipping angrily in one, half a satellite dish still bolted to the rock. For a man so obsessed with fumbled prayers and intimacy - the warmth of thighs, the press of a neck, the honeyed slip between fingers when gutting a fish, the speed of bullets felt obscene. Even as a storm chaser, that day his hands shook hard. The wind was nothing but a kiss on his face. Yet he had grown used to it. The validation, the quick dopamine rush, then the aftertaste: bitter and metallic, lodged in his nerves. He watched heat-shimmers bend the ridgeline into beautiful arcs as her coyote eyes only grunted. She’d taught him how to break open the guard on an IED with a camping knife and a story about home, and how to leverage the soft tissue of a negotiation as ruthlessly as you would a pressure plate. She was the first person he’d ever met who called his bluff and then didn’t use it against him. She hated the stink of diesel and sun-baked plastic. Her voice, crackling through the comms net, said, Every time my nose tells me to turn north, I think of my mother in the kitchen. He wondered if she knew she said things like that, dropping a hush into the yellow smokescreen haze.

Overhead, the reconnaissance birds stitched pale seams through the ion-clouds into a rupture: greyish blue, clean, unyielding, nothing at all like what lay below. Burning insulation gnawed at his nostrils. Yesterday he had orders. Brick-voiced, in the briefing: a lullaby of what victory should look like: He went head-first into the steppe. There was no blood. It was surgery. Precise. They’d said, take and reinforce the tower, you’ll be back before noon, but the sun was already a fist-width past peak. The coil of camo netting he wrestled over his shoulder was slick with engine oil, but protocol said it had to go up, so now protocol got to hear his boots thudding up the exposed rebar rungs all the way to the tower’s first platform. The air tasted like leaking batteries hitting the back of his throat. Missiles of a thousand screaming stars tore past. Behind, the valley lay gutted in the aftereffects: grid squares marked with shrapnel, the mountains blown flat, a haze of midges blurring anything not already double vision. The day before, a drone had lazily doubled back and sliced a sheep in half on the main road. The farmer’s kid was still trailing bits of it into camp, looking for someone to say sorry. His wrath stuck to skin like guilt, but detonations shaved away everything soft in him. She doesn’t know what he’s done with his hands. He clipped the net to a twisted bracket and shimmied the first length over a crossbeam. The wind picked up, loading the mesh like a parachute. He had to clench his teeth to keep from cursing out loud. A voice crackled in his comms, something about a sortie and the likelihood of incoming, and he took a moment to dig his palm into his temple to grind down the pressing headache. A deep, wet settling, like a rib breaking in a chest cavity. He found himself tumbling, inside-out, his body wrapped in wire and net and the fake leaves of the camouflage kit, the air splintering white. He heard the signal sing to him, faint and high, a fork scraping a plate.

By the second day, her face, in the sensory wash of an iPhone flashlight, looked like bone and nerve stripped down. The sharp flare of her cheekbones, the slope of her back, the faint, permanent crease at the corner of her mouth, earned from years of mistranslation. In the blue of the night he realised he loved her: they were on the roof, sweltering and sleepless, passing a flask she claimed she’d traded for a pack of Marlboros and her tube of lip gloss. She said that this place was paradise, if you believed in such things. She said it then, about the basement under the metro, and she’d said it before, about her cut-rate apartment back home, too, after the first cruise missile cleaved the avenue. The metro then slammed past with a howl so loud it drowned out his heartbeat, pinched his eyelids shut for half a second, catching the blur of subway headlights through the slits in his headscarf. His ruck jammed into his vertebrae, sharper with each step. Up ahead, he was as a scarecrow, nodding his head at every junction as if possessed by the green-and-orange arrows blinking above the rails. A grenade launcher in his grasp, and Red Bull-flavoured bile trickled behind his teeth. He squeezed his finger against the cold steel of his trigger, just for contact. At the switchback, the world shuddered again, its lurches moving up through their backs, rattling off the fillings in their molars. Later, she reached for him, beckoned him close enough to smell the sun-warmed residue of rosewater on her arms, his thumb finding the chip of bone above her wrist. Right there, pulse running frantic, fragile as moth wings, he’d hold her pressed in tight until the world stopped ringing inside her feverish skull, counted off shell-to-impact, and he cradled her head and hummed some half-remembered prayer, voice so low she felt it before she heard it. The next morning opened raw. The old woman who owned the building, she’d boiled up a tin of jam and called it breakfast, spooning it into plastic caps because the artillery had eaten the cutlery.

By the fifth day, the shell dropped out of the sky like a thrown horseshoe, nearer than the last, tearing a plug from the concrete parapet and leaving a syrupy whine behind. He ducked, skull tucked to collarbone, and felt the sand of impact in his back teeth. Mirage of heat, the road gone white with sun, the very air distilling with every step - until the sound. A noise like God scraping the sky, followed by a pause so pure that for a flicker he wished it would stretch and stretch until all the seconds between now and the end of his shift ballooned and snapped. He looked up. She had been crossing the field with a sack balanced on her hip, playing at domesticity in the war’s afterbirth, when the rail-lances opened the air above her in white mechanical bloom. He ran. Or thought he did. The space between them telescoped, his body elastic with adrenaline and June heat. He dropped to his knees. His mind, which had grown used to slow-motion, could not process how quickly this churn of smoke and dirt had replaced the banal rectangle of exposed wilderness. Grainy red spread over the stones, almost elegant, almost calligraphy. His own voice came out too thin. He tried again, and it sounded like a growl, but not enough to compete with the ringing in his ears. Our bodies are only given once.

Battle angel. He had seen his share of shared battlefield trauma, healing wounds and sorting bandages and the systems of triage, but he had nothing here. On the map, she’d traced the blue line south of the cordon, knowing that the enemy, clever and liquid, had begun using improvised artillery positions hidden among the eastern hills. Another shell moaned somewhere overhead. But knowing was one brand of terror; watching it surge with the insouciance of a muscle twitch was another. He could still hear the small, satisfied exhale that followed, the one she always gave herself if she judged her point to be made. A few hours later, she breathed nothing at all. In the severing of life, she is in God’s hands, and so is he.