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The Wall

James Hanna

    You were large-boned, ruddy-faced, blond—blondest of the cadets, perhaps because you brush-cut your hair, squaring it on top so that it barely hid the baby pinkness of your scalp. You were blue-eyed, hawkish, almost striking at a glance, but your nose was too blunt for handsomeness and your jaw, thick and square, afforded your face an exaggerated symmetry. Even your chin was symmetrical—a pussy chin we called it; it was deeply cleft, vaguely suggestive, and somehow a complement to the prominent ridges of your knuckles. Your hands, big and chapped, were a laborer’s hands, competent only when polishing brass or performing the ritual manuals of rifle and blade. Your rifle, at these times, would pause in midflight, cracking your palm before whirling like a baton twice windmilled in the gleaming black mirrors of your shoes. And your sword, won only halfway through your second year, would leap with a life independent of your fingers, a slicing streak that hummed like a bullet in flight yet somehow captured fleetingly the shimmer of the sun.
    That second and final year, when we roomed together, I was slow to ease the too persistent rumors that you waxed the soles of your shoes, slept at attention, and stuffed the rosary into your bore. We did laugh at you frequently, but not in the manner in which we laughed at witless Wippleman, legs apart on his bed as he farted flame over a lighter, or at fat pimply Hopper who howled like a puppy whenever we pink-bellied him after taps with drumming palms and stinging cans of deodorant. The chuckles were tighter when you were the target and the nicknames were mirthless, waspish—lingering jibes like Super Mick, Burr Head, Mickey Military. Still, I felt little guilt when I failed to defend you; your ears did not seem attuned to our comments. You were your own clown, after all, and not ours.
    Were you too estimable for a clown?—for I did admire you occasionally, even when you stayed up until one in the morning making guilty my sleep while you fussed over your sword in preparation for the Saturday parade inspection. You even cleaned my rifle when there was time. You were convinced I could one day pass a Saturday inspection, though I never passed a Saturday inspection in my entire two years at Washburn. You were my platoon sergeant that second year, and it could only have embarrassed you when I accumulated the inevitable company demerits. Even so, you were the first to laugh whenever I lost step with the rest of the platoon or found myself marching alone after a sudden flank movement. Was it your poverty of reserve that was so disaffecting? I was not at all impressed by you the first day we met—when you approached me in the mess hall, asked me if I would be on the wrestling team. Your gaze was too candid, your forehead too bald, and a hint of stutter hung trippingly on your tongue. You were so without mystery I could see there would be no getting to know you. This happened too quickly, in almost an instant—the first bland moment of meeting you and perhaps the only one. Because in the months that followed, even the years, my impression of you changed hardly at all. As it turned out, you were not even much of a wrestler, unsurprising since the sport does require a modicum of guile. And clearly you were no opportunist; you were better inclined towards secondary spoils—the tiresome gratuities of a lackey.
    For this I always despised you a little myself.

*

     We had come to Washburn for different reasons, both of which were atypical since the small Virginia prep school—despite an Appalachian nesting and ivy-strewn walls—impressed me as little more than a reform school for middle-class boys. As a general’s son, you had taken seriously its brochures of military schooling and manicured parade fields while I was an airier dreamer, indifferent to structure of any sort but destined, by having failed the eleventh grade, to complete my high school education in an institution of last resort.
    We were issued M-1s on our day of arrival—World War Two relics inappropriate for the enduring war in Southeast Asia, but not too timeworn to carry about on the parade field or perform the nineteen-count manual, which most of us had perfected by our third month. Though we cleaned these antiques constantly, we were never allowed to fire them. We used .22 rifles for actual target practice—an exercise we performed in a bunker range beneath the school foyer. Since the guns crackled feebly, we shot without earplugs and so I was always surprised when the sandbags tore and the small paper squares, once reeled in by pulleys, were peppered with clusters of miniature holes. I had too few opportunities to narrow my rather sporadic clusters and suspected the school, depleted of federal grant money during those war years, regarded this outlay of ammunition as an inordinate expense. For the most part, we marched about incessantly, mixed shoe polish with spit, and stood numerous parade inspections, a prerequisite for every meal. Given this emphasis on cosmetic soldiering, I could not always resist the impression that an army’s worth lay less in its field effectiveness than in the glitter and pomp with which it presented itself in ranks. Such a fetish, I suppose, had its compensations since I grew complacent with the ceremonies of war and did not consider our jaunty battalion a real tributary to the messier ordeal in Vietnam.
    At night, before taps, I would ream a single patch through my rifle bore, blow the lint from my belt buckle, and drape a handkerchief protectively over my dully glazed shoes. I had no serious illusions that these efforts would protect me from the morrow’s scrutiny, but I accumulated the demerits cheerfully, considering them a wise alternative to the hassle of endless polishing.

*

     I met you on a Sunday. There was no drill scheduled that afternoon so I invited you to the gym to wrestle. I did not take you seriously as a rival for my weight class, but I wanted your measure as a wrestler as well as an opportunity to practice my takedowns.
    We wrestled on a dusty peeling mat spread out on a stage above the basketball court. You opened my nose with an awkward jerk of your elbow before I stacked you with a cradle, holding you on your shoulders for the two-second count. I pinned you twice more in the course of a minute and then deigned to notice the rather severe mat burn developing on your forehead. Blood stains, my own, were drying on your cheeks and browning spots dotted the fatigues you had not bothered to change out of.
    You were matter-of-fact in accepting the loss—you had not really expected to beat me—and you did not challenge my dominion when we had wrestle-offs for the varsity lineup. You did make the lineup, but only at the urging of the coach since you had to drop twelve pounds in order to fit into the weight class below mine. I remember you padding around and around the gym during practice, a yellow plastic suit plastered to your body, then groaning in the steam of the showers, patting your stomach—“Nothing in there, T-Tom, nothing at all”—then hopping hopefully upon the scales. You would sit over a trash bucket after tipping the scales, spitting away the excess ounces, even pushing a finger down your throat. When nothing came up, you would pull your sweatsuit over the clinging plastic and return to circling the gym.
    You were ashen from weight loss when we had our first meet and you were stacked rather neatly by a drowsy looking farm boy from Culpeper. You even cost us a sportsmanship point when you punched the mat in anger or embarrassment after relinquishing the match so quickly. I don’t really know why you had expected to win; wrestling was never your first priority and you spent most of our practice time running off weight. I was irritated for other reasons as well; you had preceded me to the mat and your instant loss had deprived me of my warm-up. Still, I won my match easily enough, a first period pin, and condescended to accepting your handshake when the bout was over.
    I won all my matches our junior year—a testament less to my prowess as a grappler than to the struggling athletic programs of the small academies and factory town high schools that made up our opposition. We sucked as a team—two and twelve for the year—but our record did not diminish my small gem of accomplishment nor offer you much consolation in your rather unprecedented string of defeats. At least you lost quickly—usually in the first period of your matches—but you continued to cost us hard won points when, red-faced and muttering, you would fling your headgear upon leaving the mat or kick over your chair instead of sitting on it. Considering the overall point total, we would have been no worse off forfeiting your matches outright than retaining you as a member of the lineup.
    You did win once—a total surprise since you looked so pale surrounded by the target-shaped mat, waiting for the whistle to blow. Perhaps you rebelled finally at the hollowness of your sacrifice—you had been starving for three days to make the weight—or maybe you were provoked by a mocking word or glance from your opponent, the same hayseed from Culpeper who had beaten you so easily in our first meet. In any case you dropped him to the mat, using the fireman’s carry I had taught you, and somehow you remained on top of him when he attempted a clumsy roll and landed himself flat on his back. I think he simply collapsed before you did because you did not realize you had triumphed, not even afterwards when you were helped to your feet and awarded the match.
    You fainted shortly after stepping from the mat and you were taken to the school infirmary where the nurse gave you pills and an extra blanket for your bed. You were chastised of course for losing so much weight, but it was still unconvincing to see you eating again at dinner that night. You poked cautiously at your spaghetti, pinching the handle of your fork, as if trying to corral a plateful of worms. You may just as well have skipped the meal; as it turned out you were too weakened from weight loss and dehydration to hold down any solids. You were confined to your room for a week, bedridden with the flu, and we were forced to finish up our few remaining meets without the benefit of a 154-pound wrestler. Your class remained empty.

*

    What made us such friends? I had no use for your shallow obsessions, your pedestrian mind, your childish tantrums whenever you failed to make the honor roll or even when you missed questions on your military science quizzes. And you did disappoint me.
    You have forgotten, I’m sure, a parade Saturday. The usual hurrying and scurrying—shoe-dusting, sling-tightening. More competition to begin for the best company flag. The usual bullshit. Except that we started late that Saturday since the weather report was uncertain and the school Commandant kept changing the dyke on us. At first overcoats and barracks hats were announced as the dress of the day, then it was blouses with white cross belting, and finally it was field jackets with caps. These changes, all of them ordered by the Commandant, were relayed by a cadet captain to the surrounding stoops and punctuated by definitive clangs of the archway bell. The irresolution of our parade orders—a rare waver in an otherwise formidable ostentation—awoke in me finally a compulsion to rebel. But it was you who lent me your white dress belting, giggling as you knelt before me to pin it to the dirty fatigues I had put on. “Cute, Tom, cute,” you said.
    How many others must have laughed when I slipped from our room and waltzed along the first balcony stoop as though hurrying to the formation. It must have been everyone but our Commandant; I saw him actually leap from the guard shack when he grew aware of our prank. How quickly he hurried across the quadrangle and flew up the stairs, bursting into our room only seconds after I had darted back through the door, a portly faculty sergeant waddling behind him.
    Back and forth he strutted, huffing as he glared about him, a leathery old man who smelled often of gin. “From this idiot I would have expected it. Oh yes indeed I would have, I most certainly would have. But from you, Max, you!” Turning away from you, he ordered me to brace, his scowl now focused, his pinched nostrils flaring; it was only his eyes, swimming frantically behind thick bifocals, that continued to nurture my seizure of power. I tucked my chin charitably, flattening the skin beneath my jaw, a useless tension—“You think it’s still funny, son?”—because I couldn’t arrest my smile, not even when he marched me down to the quadrangle and ordered me to do pushups while he barked out the cadence like a seal. I pumped methodically, enjoying the workout, and listened to the clusters of cadets collecting along the stoops above me. By the count of thirty, the hooting began. At fifty my arms gave out so I began on squat jumps, holding high my sweaty rifle while I pranced up and down in the manner of a performing bear.
    It was surely the din from the stoops—the expectancy of an encore—that kept us so long on the grass of the quadrangle. I felt buoyed by the jumps, as though riding a horse, yet I knew the performance, spontaneous at first, was evolving into a stale and exhausting pose. My leaps grew lower as the minutes dragged on while the Commandant’s voice, thin, cracking, was finally unable to rise convincingly above the hoots and cheers. But I think I would have enjoyed myself still if I could have seen you watching us. Your absence was too conspicuous when I looked for you to appear along the rail. You didn’t bother to show—not even later when the performance was over and the Commandant left me in order to attend to the grander rituals of the day.
    I remained kneeling on the grass for several minutes more; your belting had come loose from my shoulders and it took me that long to disentangle myself from the drooping bands. I had barely removed the pins when the bell in the archway resounded once more, announcing the final call for the formation. Since I was still slick with perspiration, it surprised me somewhat that the dyke would be overcoats after all. I rose too slowly, my legs beginning to cramp, and did not pretend to hurry as I made my way across the quadrangle. The belting, untangled at last, draped loosely from my shoulder as slowly, wearily, I mounted the stairs to change dress and return it to you.

*

    I have almost forgotten the fire. This lapse is forgivable, I’m sure, since the fire was only one of about two dozen blazes that occurred with depressing regularity during my two year tenure at Washburn. These fires, set by some of our less ingenious mavericks, struck me as too ill-plotted to pose much danger and I did not take them very seriously once I had accepted them as commonplace events. I grew so accustomed to them, in fact, that I would often continue about my business when the usual outbreak of shouts from distant stoops announced that another room was ablaze.
    It was not until my senior year that this chaos drew near enough to merit more than a passing glance. Though my desk was closer to the window, it was you who first noticed the caustic scent leaking from an adjacent two-man room. You sniffed the air eagerly, hound-like, then slammed shut your book. “Jesus!” you blurted—an outburst I at first attributed to your obvious frustration with the language in Beowulf, the epic we were studying for a literature and composition course. It was only when you dashed to the door of our room, a blanket in hand, that I realized you were referring to a more imminent turmoil.
    I followed you into a burning room, clutching dutifully a blanket of my own, and it was not until I’d been stung by the blistering heat that I realized the arrogance of your lead, that it was simply a coarseness of imagination—that same dearth of intellect that so often frustrated your studies—that illuminated you in the fluttering glare of the room. Standing dimly before the swirl, slapping the blanket against a wall, you seemed incapable of respecting the leap and crackle that had already disintegrated the beds and filled the air with shriveling bits of cloth. Given the impotency of your efforts, you seemed more comical than heroic and I was glad to lose sight of you as I stepped backwards through the thickening haze and eased myself out the door.
    There were others answering the call by then so I got out of the way as hands, by now well experienced, directed the nozzles of the fire extinguishers. The bell in the archway leapt and clamored—a timely alarm since the frail whoosh from the extinguishers seemed only to enliven the dark cloud. I called your name twice but the room, now aroar, relinquished only smoke.
    When the bucket brigade had formed, I helped pass the dripping waste cans towards the inferno. These efforts seemed inconsequential since more extinguishers were on the way, but my labor ceased only when I noticed you at last, your hand still gripping the steamy blanket as you leaned coughing over the stoop railing. You were sheepish when I scolded you, embarrassed by your belated response to my cries, and you thanked me for my superior foresight.
    Can you see what your blindness has made me do to you—even with your eyebrows singed, your hands pimpled with welts, your lungs scorched, retching? But your maladies did not excuse you the formation either—after the fire was out—when the bugle sounded everyone out onto the parade field. Along with the rest of us you came for four hours of rifle manual in the cold night while Leather Face kept popping out of the guard shack to tell us what idiots we all were for protecting the firebug. Suspects were taken to the guard room, one or two at a time, and held for long minutes of questioning before being sent back out. Everyone was to be spoken for.
    And meanwhile, under the dim moonlight, our rifles went Clap! Clap| Clap! responding to the sharp commands of the cadet captains. “Right shoul-der harms!... Left shoul-der harms!... Po-o-rt harms!” This diminished our shivering but not the slow numbing of our feet. I broke count twice, letting my rifle clatter to the ground, so I would be made to run laps around the field.
    Finally, when the cadet officers grew restless, names were picked randomly from the school roster and called out at one-minute intervals; then the same questions, voiced by Childers, our fox-faced cadet commander, would illicit the same stiff replies.
    “Gillespie!”
    “Yes, Suh!”
    “Did you set the fire?”
    “No, Suh!”
    “Do you know who did?”
    “No, Suh!”
    “Wippleman!”
    “Suh!”
    “Did you set the fire?”
    “No, Suh!”
    “Can you tell us who did?”
    “No, Suh!”
    And finally my name.
    “Hemmings!”
    “Participating, Suh!”
    “Smart, Hemmings. That’ll cost you another lap. Do you know who set the fire?”
    “No idea, Suh!”
    “Double-time it, Hemmings, if that’s all you’re good for. And don’t step on your pecker again tonight.”
    Grateful, I circled the field yet again, my rifle held high above my head, but I would have appreciated the jog even more had I known it would be my last concession to Childers. It would only be a matter of weeks, in fact, until he and four other cadets would be indicted and then expelled for gang-banging Theresa Scrud. This shoddy adventure, announced to us at chapel assembly the morning after the indictments were served, impressed me as a rather typical operational overkill since Theresa, a local girl of loose associations, was renowned for giving hand jobs to cadets in the town movie theater. This incident, however, had not yet become news the evening of the fire formation, so we answered to Childers throughout the night, disclaiming ourselves of a stealthier mischief as he put us through our paces.
    Half the roster by three a.m. The names, by then, were harder to hear, muffled by the low tones of complaining cadets and the angry thumps with which we walloped the stocks of our rifles. Our ears, unprotected by our slim field caps, grew brittle in the cold and our fingers, though gloved, became tingly and remote. We stood as though shackled, awaiting the dawn, and looked forward to our turn in the guard shack where we knew it would be warm.
    We were mustered in together, you and I. It seemed strange at that moment to be walking between guards or to be walking at all since the ground felt foreign beneath my feet. Our rifles were taken from us at the door of the shack. New rules, we were told.
    As we stepped inside the shack, the weary brown wrinkles of the Commandant appeared to perk up. The old man even gave me a wolfish lear as he leaned back in his chair—You again!—and the detective sitting beside him turned on a tape recorder. The Commandant did speak gently, however, sensing perhaps some limits to my depravity, and he seemed to be savoring a small charity as he circled our names on the roster.
    “Rite of passage, boys, a mere rite of passage. Tell us the truth, simple and pure, and just maybe I’ll scratch two more clowns off the suspect list.”
    Through tobacco stained fingers, the tips forming a steeple, he addressed his next question to me alone. “Now just where were you, son, when all this began?”
    I shuffled my feet, prolonging the moment, as I had been saving my answer for a long time. “Rescuing Max,” I finally replied.
    The leer survived the relaxing wrinkles as the Commandant lowered his chair to the floor.
    And you smiled too quickly when I spoke; I’m sure you must have, although I was watching the Commandant and could not see your face. Because afterwards, when the formation finally broke up, he made you share the first fire watch with me. To make sure I didn’t fall asleep, he said.
    We assumed our vigil on the windy top stoop of the school. We were the only two awake at the time and we had full view of most of the rooms. It was cold on the stoop, but peaceful at least with heated bathrooms for us to duck into every hour or so. A few faint sparrows were beginning to sing, and we waited for the pale ash of daybreak.
    We didn’t watch for the firebug, though, who must have been snoring snugly. Our attention instead went to a room opposite our watch on the ground floor of the school—a locale where we hoped to spot the spirit of a deceased cadet. The apparition, known throughout the school as Hensley’s ghost, was believed to belong to Paul Hensley, a fellow who had died in the room during our junior year. Quiet and unnoticed in life—I had not even known his name before he passed—he was now popping up unannounced and scaring the wits out of people with his soul’s shadow. The room, I’m sure, would have been empty had not the Headmaster assured its reluctant occupants that Hensley had been a very nice cadet and would doubtlessly have a very nice spook. You weren’t convinced either, but still we looked for it—you shivering and sucking the welts on your knuckles, me just shivering. The moon was now setting, the shadows were thick, and the birds were beginning to riot.
    You told me again of your dream—a chimera more faithful than the one for which we watched. The smoke in your dream was ethereal, not dirty; cloud-like and thin, it rolled slowly from the small swampy hollow exposing first your hands, for some reason clutching a tin of ham and beans, and then your face, relaxed in the winking lights. You lay still in the trembling water, as though you’d been carved out of wood, and your form dimmed and woke with dull regularity, a bold recurring fixture in the mutable shadows cast by the signal flares. The scarves, still curling about in the dirty water, were frail, suggesting a shallow wound, and your face wore a sulpher stain like a birthmark as it studied you, noncommittally, through the veil. You were older even as you spoke to me, your voice clear, without stutter, and you spoke as though describing a past event, a matter long over with and no longer disturbing to you. It was clear that the dream, through the monotony of repetition, had attained for you finally the familiarity of an old movie.
    I made no reply when your story was done. Your vision seemed brazen, voyeuristic, and we had a less intimate revelation to watch for from our stoop. I dropped my gaze, holding my breath, as a door opened on the stoop below us, but it was only Wippleman, a compulsive masturbator, tucking in his robe as he shuffled eagerly towards a bathroom. I was skeptical of his avowed record—six times in an hour—but I did not doubt the rumor that he displayed his prowess for those interested enough to pay him a dollar. His business, in any case, was instantly consummated and he waved to us triumphantly as he stepped from the bathroom and wandered on back to his room. I acknowledged the feat with a concessive nod and glanced wearily at my watch as he once more disappeared from our sight. I was surprised to discover that the birds were early, that it was only four o’clock and three hours still remained before the reveille would sound. I turned up my collar, resigned to the cold, since I knew we would not be relieved of this watch.
    The stoops were still empty an hour later when I noticed that the specter had indeed appeared. It looked shiny but frail, earthbound rather than macabre, a small incidental presence standing alone by the doorway of the darkened room. It did momentarily return my gaze, but its manner was incurious, self-absorbed, and it showed no particular gratitude that I was aware of its isolation. I woke you up—it was you who slept—although not quickly enough as an instant later it was gone, even before your eyes had opened. But there hadn’t been very much to catch. Only a pale little shroud, like fine blue flame, for a moment only.

*

    Our rites of passage had not been reserved for the fortress-like walls of Washburn. Yours came after your graduation from Virginia Military Institute—at My Tho, Ben Tre, Soc Trang, where you served first as an airborne ranger and later as a supply officer once a cracked kneecap had disqualified you from jump duty. Mine came during the first descent on Washington D.C., a relatively controlled peace demonstration where I nevertheless succeeded in acquiring a head gash requiring sixteen stitches. This blow was not delivered by any of the marshals or frightened reservists guarding the Pentagon, but by a member of the American Nazi Party, a fellow arrestee whom I encountered at the work house in Occoquan, Virginia, after I was taken into custody for crossing into the roped area. I had made no effort to provoke him and am not really sure what prompted him to blindside me with a chair, but probably he had simply mistaken me for some other subversive who had berated him on the transport bus. The wound, in any case, expedited my processing from the work house and I was turned loose after only an hour in order to receive medical attention.
    My rites continued on Birdstone Cattle Station, of all places, a small dust pocket in the vast Northern Territory of Australia. I had not gone there specifically to defy the draft—I was bored enough with college by then to attempt almost any deliverance—but the notice to report seemed especially presumptuous when it reached me in that huge and consoling emptyness; the parched mud flats and paperbark scrubs at least offered me adventures of my own choosing. You wrote me even then from the delta villages and fire bases, your letters scrawled hastily in handwriting too large for the lines. You were sunburned in the photos you sent me at first, not yet accustomed to the heat as you posed barechested in front of grimy ammunition cases or sat in the small folding chair you often took with you on patrol. You looked leaner in later snapshots, weary but detached, no longer sweat-soaked, and as dark in color as the jungle itself.
    I remained too long in Australia—almost seven years—but the cattle stations, coastal mines, and opal digging towns allowed me at least the promise of continued space, a dry and beckoning wilderness for which I could discard the vestiges of civilization at any given time. I grew sinewy as well, perhaps more hardened than you when I executed cattle, dying by the hundreds in the black adhesive mud of the billabongs, or shot wild pig for a diverting thrill and the small bounties their noses would fetch. I competed with you still in these harsh but relevant ways, and my gaze, steady and unattached, grew finally as distant as yours.
    They did not know what to make of me when I chose to return stateside in 1973. The country, already long depleted by the Tet Offensive, the siege of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the still unremitting flow of body bags, clearly had no use for another superfluous martyr. I had spent only a day in the Los Angeles County Jail, in fact, when my court-appointed attorney, himself a draft avoider, assured me that all charges would be dropped if I agreed to accept a peacetime enlistment in the Army. I rebuffed this offer at first—I owed you more than that—and spent several token months in county lockup before conceding that there were other ways, perhaps no less empty, in which I could squander my time. The post-war ravages in Cambodia’s killing fields had already begun when, bored and overfed, I followed a federal marshal from the holding tank and rode with him to a recruitment station to begin the swearing-in process. Were these distant fields—more corpse littered than even the plains of the Outback—a sad and final tribute to my rebellion?
    After my induction, I was assimilated with discouraging ease into one of the eight-week training cycles at Fort Knox, Kentucky—an ingestion I attribute not to allegiance but to the durability of habit. The lessons of Washburn had remained with me all too well: I was appointed guide of my training platoon, taught hands less sullied than my own how to disassemble and clean a rifle, and succeeded in picking up a sharpshooter’s medal when our platoon took its turn qualifying on the pop-up target ranges. I was even nominated by my company sergeant for the American Spirit Medal, a training bauble which thankfully I did not win when interviewed by an officers’ board at battalion level. I completed the rest of my two-year stint without attracting further undue notice and accepted an honorable discharge from the medical company to which I had been assigned long after the last of our retreating helicopters had crashed and sunk in the South China Sea.
    I had been back in the country for over ten years before I found myself standing at The Wall. My belated visit to the D.C. Memorial, prompted by my stubborn illusion of closure, took place on a day in late November. It was overcast that afternoon, a fine but persistent drizzle was falling, and the three bronze servicemen, ever frozen in their attitude of bewilderment, looked sweaty and alive. The directory book had been vandalized or accidentally torn where your name would have been so I had to search hopefully along the polished black granite of the Memorial’s western wing, using only your approximate dates of service as a guide. The droplets, though tiny, clung tenaciously to the slick dark mirror, muddling the dim reflections and distracting my glance when they skidded finally over the multitude of names. It was by accident, I’m sure, that I spotted you finally—John M. McNaughton—an inscription as innocuous as the rest chiseled neatly into one of the outer panels. You were hard to locate.

 

    “The Wall” was originally published in The Edge City Review, which is no longer in print, and is included in the James Hanna story anthology, A Second, Less-Capable Head and Other Rogue Stories.

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