“YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND,” said Owen Meany—his voice breaking a little. I assumed it was the telephone; I thought we had a bad connection.
That was the day they made desecrating the U.S. flag a federal crime. Owen Meany spent the night of July 5, 1968, in Oakland, California, where he was given a billet in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters; on the morning of July 6, Owen left quarters at the Oakland Army Depot—noting, in his diary, “THE ENLISTED MEN ON FAR EAST LEVY ARE REQUIRED TO LINE UP AT A NUMBERED DOOR, WHERE THEY ARE ISSUED JUNGLE FATIGUES, AND OTHER CRAP. THE RECRUITS ARE GIVEN STEAK DINNERS BEFORE BEGINNING THEIR FLIGHT TO VIETNAM. I’VE SEEN THIS PLACE TOO MANY TIMES: THE SPARS AND CRANES AND THE TIN WAREHOUSE ROOFS, AND THE GULLS GLIDING OVER THE AIRPLANE HANGARS—AND ALL THE NEW RECRUITS, ON THEIR WAY OVER THERE, AND THE BODIES COMING HOME. SO MANY GREEN DUFFEL BAGS ON THE SIDEWALKS. DO THE RECRUITS KNOW THE CONTENTS OF THOSE GRAY PLYWOOD BOXES?”
Owen noted in his diary that he was issued, as usual, the t
riangular cardboard box, in which the correctly prefolded flag was packaged—“WHO THINKS UP THESE THINGS? DOES THE PERSON WHO MAKES THE CARDBOARD BOX KNOW WHAT IT’S FOR?” He was issued the usual funeral forms and the usual black armband—he lied to a clerk about dropping his armband in a urinal, in order to be issued another one; he wanted me to have a black armband, too, so that I would look ACCEPTABLY OFFICIAL. About the time my plane left Boston, Owen Meany was identifying a plywood container in the baggage area of the San Francisco airport.
From the air, flying over Phoenix, you notice the nothingness first of all. It resembles a tan- and cocoa-colored moon, except that there are vast splotches of green—golf courses and the other pampered land where irrigation systems have been installed. From my Geology course, I knew that everything below me had once been a shallow ocean; and at dusk, when I flew into Phoenix, the shadows on the rocks were a tropical-sea purple, and the tumbleweeds were aquamarine—so that I could actually imagine the ocean that once was there. In truth, Phoenix still resembled a shallow sea, marred by the fake greens and blues of swimming pools. Some ten or twenty miles in the distance, a jagged ridge of reddish, tea-colored mountains were here and there capped with waxy deposits of limestone—to a New Englander, they looked like dirty snow. But it was far too hot for snow.
Although, at dusk, the sun had lost its intensity, the dry heat shimmered above the tarmac; despite a breeze, the heat persisted with furnacelike generation. After the heat, I noticed the palm trees—all the beautiful, towering palm trees.
Owen’s plane, like the body he was escorting home, was late.
I waited with the men in their guayabera shirts and huaraches, and their cowboy boots; the women, from petite to massive, appeared immodestly content in short shorts and halter tops, their rubber thongs slapping the hard floors of the Phoenix airport, which was optimistically called the Sky Harbor. Both the men and women were irrepressibly fond of the local silver-and-turquoise jewelry.
There was a game room, where a young, sunburned soldier was tilting a pinball machine with a kind of steadfast resentment. The first men’s room I found was locked and labeled “Temporarily Out of Order”; but the paper sign was so yellowed, it looked like an old announcement. After a search that transported me through widely varying degrees of air-conditioned coolness, I found a makeshift men’s room, which was labeled “Men’s Temporary Facilities.”
At first, I wasn’t sure I was in a men’s room; it was a dark, subterranean room with a huge industrial sink—I wondered if it was a urinal for a giant. The actual urinal was hidden by a barrier of mops and pails, and a single toilet stall had been erected in the middle of the room from such fresh plywood that the carpentry odor almost effectively combated the gagging quality of the disinfectant. There was a long mirror, leaned against a wall rather than hung. It was about as “temporary” a men’s room as I ever hoped to see. The room—which was in its former life, I guessed, a storage closet; but with a sink so mysteriously vast I couldn’t imagine what was washed or soaked in it—was absurdly high-ceilinged for such a small space; it was like a long, thin room that an earthquake or an explosion had turned on its end. And the one small window was so high, it was almost touching the ceiling, as if the room were so deeply underground that the window had to be that high in order to reach ground-level light—scant little of which could ever penetrate to the faraway floor of the room. It was a transom-type window, but without a door under it; as to how it was hinged, it was the casement-type, with such a deep window ledge in front of it that a man could comfortably have sat there—except that his head and shoulders would be scrunched by the ceiling. The lip of the window ledge was far above the floor—maybe ten feet or more. It was that kind of unreachable window that one opened and closed by the use of a hook attached to a long pole—if one opened and closed this window, at all; it certainly looked as if no one had ever washed it.
I peed in the small, cramped urinal; I kicked a mop in a pail; I rattled the flimsy plywood of the “temporary” toilet stall. The men’s room was so makeshift, I wondered if anyone had bothered to hook up the plumbing to the urinal or the toilet. The intimidating sink was so dirty I chose not to touch the faucets—so I couldn’t wash my hands. Besides: there was no towel. Some “Sky Harbor,” I thought—and wandered off, composing a traveler’s letter of complaint in my mind. It never occurred to me that there might have been a perfectly clean and functioning men’s room elsewhere in the airport; maybe there was. Maybe where I had been was one of those sad places for “Employees Only.”
I wandered in the air-conditioned coolness of the airport; occasionally, I stepped outside—just to feel the amazing, stifling heat that was so unknown in New Hampshire. The insistent breeze must have been coming off the desert, for it was not a wind I’d ever felt before, and I’ve never felt it since. It was a dry, hot wind that caused the men’s loose-fitting guayabera shirts to flap like flags.
I was standing outside the airport, in the hot wind, when I saw the family of the dead warrant officer; they were also waiting for Owen Meany’s plane. Because I was a Wheelwright—and, therefore, a New England snob—I’d assumed that Phoenix was largely composed of Mormons and Baptists and Republicans; but the warrant officer’s kinfolk were not what I’d expected. The first thing that I thought was wrong with this family was that they didn’t appear to belong together, or even to be related to each other. About a half dozen of them were standing in the desert wind beside a silver-gray hearse; and although they were grouped fairly close together, they did not resemble a family portrait so much as they appeared to be the hastily assembled employees of a small, disorderly company.
An Army officer was standing with them—he would have been the major Owen said he’d done business with before, the ROTC professor from Arizona State University. He was a compact, fit-looking man whose athletic restlessness reminded me of Randy White; and he wore sunglasses of the goggle style that pilots favor. His indeterminate age—he could have been thirty or forty-five—was, in part, the result of the muscular rigidity of his body; and his bristling skull was so closely shaved, the stubble of his hair could have been either a whitish blond or a whitish gray.
I tried to identify the others. I thought I spotted the director of the funeral home—the mortician, or his delegate. He was a tall, thin, pasty presence in a starched, white shirt with long, pointed collars—and the only member of the odd group who wore a dark suit and tie. Then there was a bulky man in a chauffeur’s uniform, who stood outside the group, and smoked incessantly. The family itself was inscrutable—except for the clear possession of a shared but unequal rage, which appeared to manifest itself the least in a slope-shouldered, slow-looking man in a short-sleeved shirt with a string tie. I took him for the father. His wife—the presumed mother of the deceased—twitched and trembled beside this man, who appeared to me to be both unmovable and unmoved. In contrast, the woman could not relax; her fingers picked at her clothes, and she poked at her hair—which was piled mountainously high and was as sticky-looking as a cone of cotton candy. And in the desert sunset, the woman’s hair was nearly as pink as cotton candy, too. Perhaps it was the third day of the “picnic wake” that had wrecked her face and left her with only minimal consciousness and control of her hands. From time to time, she would clench her fists and utter an oath that the desert wind, and my considerable distance from the family gathering, did not permit me to hear; yet the effect of the oath was instantaneous upon the boy and girl whom I guessed were the surviving siblings.
The daughter flinched at the mother’s violent outbursts—as if the mother had made these utterances directly to her, which I thought was not the case; or as if in tandem with the oaths she uttered, the mother had managed to lash the daughter with a whip I couldn’t see. At each oath, the daughter shook and cringed—once or twice, she even covered her ears. Because she wore a wrinkled cotton dress that was too small for her, when the wind pressed hard against her, I could see that she was pregnant—although she looked barely old enough to be pregnant, and she was not with any man I would have guessed was the father of her unborn child. I took the boy who stood beside her to be her brother—and a younger brother to both the dead warrant officer and his pregnant sister.
He was a gawky-tall, bony-faced boy, who was scary-looking because of what loomed as his potential size. I thought he could not have been older than fourteen or fifteen; but although he was thin, he carried great, broad bones upon his gangling frame—he had such strong-looking hands and such an oversized head that I thought he could have put on a hundred pounds without even slightly altering his exterior dimensions. With an additional hundred pounds, he would have been huge and frightening; in some way, I thought, he looked like a man who had recently lost a hundred pounds—and, at the same time, he appeared to have within him the capacity to gain it all back overnight.
The overgrown boy towered over everyone else—he sawed in the wind like the vastly tall palms that lined the entrance to the Phoenix Sky Harbor terminal—and his rage was the most manifest, his anger (like his body) appeared to be a monster that had lots of room to grow. When his mother spoke, the boy tipped his head back and spat—a sizable and mud-colored trajectory. It shocked me that, at his age, his parents allowed him to chew tobacco! Then he turned and stared at the mother, head-on, until she turned away from him, still fidgeting with her hands.
The boy wore a greasy pair of what looked to me (from my distant perspective) to be workmen’s overalls, and some serious tools hung in loops from something like a carpenter’s belt—only the tools more closely resembled the hardware of a car mechanic or a telephone repairman; perhaps the boy had an after-school job, and he’d come directly from this job to meet his brother’s body at the airport.
If this was the most intimate welcoming party from the warrant officer’s family, it gave me the shivers to think of the even less presentable members of kin who might still be making merry at the three-day-long “picnic wake
.” When I looked at this tribe, I thought that I wouldn’t have wanted Owen Meany’s job—not for a million dollars.
No one seemed to know in which direction to look for the plane. I trusted the major and the mortician; they were the only two people who stared off in the same direction, and I knew that this wasn’t the first body they had been on hand to welcome home. And so I looked in the direction they looked. Although the sun had set, vivid streaks of vermilion-colored light traced the enormous sky, and through one of these streaks of light I saw Owen’s plane descending—as if, wherever Owen Meany went, some kind of light always attended him.
All the way from San Francisco to Phoenix, Owen was writing in his diary; he wrote pages and pages—he knew he didn’t have much time.
“THERE’S SO MUCH I KNOW,” he wrote, “BUT I DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING. ONLY GOD KNOWS EVERYTHING. THERE ISN’T TIME FOR ME TO GET TO VIETNAM. I THOUGHT I KNEW I WAS GOING THERE. I THOUGHT I KNEW THE DATE, TOO. BUT IF I’M RIGHT ABOUT THE DATE, THEN I’M WRONG ABOUT IT HAPPENING IN VIETNAM. AND IF I’M RIGHT ABOUT VIETNAM, THEN I’M WRONG ABOUT THE DATE. IT’S POSSIBLE THAT IT REALLY IS ‘JUST A DREAM’—BUT IT SEEMS SO REAL! THE DATE LOOKED THE MOST REAL, BUT I DON’T KNOW—I DON’T KNOW ANYMORE.
“I’M NOT AFRAID, BUT I’M VERY NERVOUS. AT FIRST, I DIDN’T LIKE KNOWING—NOW I DON’T LIKE NOT KNOWING! GOD IS TESTING ME,” wrote Owen Meany.
There was much more; he was confused. He’d cut off my finger to keep me out of Vietnam; in his view, he’d attempted to physically remove me from his dream. But although he’d kept me out of the war, it was apparent—from his diary—that I’d remained in the dream. He could keep me out of Vietnam, he could cut off my finger; but he couldn’t get me out of his dream, and that worried him. If he was going to die, he knew I had to be there—he didn’t know why. But if he’d cut off my finger to save my life, it was a contradiction that he’d invited me to Arizona. God had promised him that nothing bad would happen to me; Owen Meany clung to that belief.
“MAYBE IT REALLY IS ‘JUST A DREAM’!” he repeated. “MAYBE THE DATE IS JUST A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION! BUT IT WAS WRITTEN IN STONE—IT IS ‘WRITTEN IN STONE’!” he added; he meant, of course, that he’d already carved the date of his death on his own gravestone. But now he was confused; now he wasn’t so sure.
“HOW COULD THERE BE VIETNAMESE CHILDREN IN ARIZONA?” Owen asked himself; he even asked God a question. “MY GOD—IF I DON’T SAVE ALL THOSE CHILDREN, HOW COULD YOU HAVE PUT ME THROUGH ALL THIS?” Later, he added: “I MUST TRUST IN THE LORD.”
And just before the plane touched down in Phoenix, he made this hasty observation from the air: “HERE I AM AGAIN—I’M ABOVE EVERYTHING. THE PALM TREES ARE VERY STRAIGHT AND TALL—I’M HIGH ABOVE THE PALM TREES. THE SKY AND THE PALM TREES ARE SO BEAUTIFUL.”
He was the first off the plane, his uniform a startlingly crisp challenge to the heat, his black armband identifying his mission, his green duffel bag in one hand—the triangular cardboard box in the other. He walked straight to the baggage compartment of the plane; although I couldn’t hear his voice, I could see he was giving orders to the baggage handlers and the forklift operator—I’m sure he was telling them to keep the head of the body higher than the feet, so that fluid would not escape through the orifices. Owen rendered a salute as the body in the plywood box was lowered from the plane. When the forklift driver had the crate secured, Owen hopped on one of the tines of the fork—he rode thus, the short distance across the runway to the waiting hearse, like the figurehead on the prow of a ship.