It was difficult to call him a man after what had happened. After all, the word “man” carries a few connotations, some pleasant, some not. He was certainly missing the pleasant ones. His body was a mesh of feeding tubes and diagnostic wires that weaved in and out of places only medical students could imagine. The lack of legs and much of the nether regions had more than halved him. Some of the damage had been by the explosives, the other, more potent bits by enterprising surgeons. His face had all but melted away, but the restless work of duct tape and spoiled gauze kept the essential parts molded together. I was told I could have a conversation with him. Most of the time they kept such high-trauma patients in medically induced comas. It wasn’t the case here. He clearly wasn’t going to be around long enough for it to be an issue.

            I took off my cap like a proper gentleman and cleared my throat. “You wanted to speak to me sir, Mister….” I racked my head for his name.

            “Gemash,” the nurse said while cleaning the blood-stricken, stale refuse from the adjacent patient’s bedpan. “Corporal William Gemash.”

            I nodded thank you and turned away as soon as possible. The fewer interactions with lay people, the better, I always thought. Of course, had I adhered to that policy I wouldn’t had been touring the field hospital now, but these were extra-ordinary circumstances. Who was I kidding; there always were extra-ordinary circumstances. A person can’t remain wrapped up in their beliefs forever. Even regular blankets start to fray with overuse.

            “Mister Gemash,” I said a little louder this time, not entirely certain I was being received. It appeared to me that his eyes were floating in a sea of blood and milky, yellow fluids, although whatever was drowning his mind was of more concern to me. These hospitals had a terrible reputation of producing the next generation of society’s forgotten addicts.

“Corporal?”

            Like a high strong catapult, his face shot up from the pillow. I suppose a sense of duty can never really be stripped from a soldier. At least the bomb blast had left that intact.

            “Lorraine?” he asked, his voice some sort of mechanical concoction of screech and windless whir.

            “No,” I replied, not the least bit willing to subject myself to the heroine-induced fantasies of a dying soldier, “it’s Manning, Thomas Manning. I was told you wanted to speak to me?”

            Either his eyes had leaked puss into the back of his retinas, or he was beaming. The change was instantaneous. His pathetically scathed arms started desperately clawing the table beside him for something.

            “Yes, yes, yes, Thomas Manning,” he stopped between each syllable, tasting the letters as if it were his last meal. “I just, I just, I just,” his words were getting in his throat, either by excitement or stupidity, I couldn’t be certain. “I’ve never ever met such a great writer before.”

            His measly hand found the corner of a time worn book and he carried it to with all the steadiness of a tornado, though his face betrayed an aura of reverence. I had unwittingly become part of some holy ceremony. Finally, the book was placed in my hands. I tried not to rip it in half when I saw the cover. It was the latest filth my publishers had agreed to paste my name on. A wartime romance half plagiarized from Fifty Shades of Grey and Flags of Our Fathers.

            “You write with such passion, such depth, such emotion. It’s as if I were given the front seat in a car ride through humanity.”

            I pretended to be impressed, although I had read the same line from a reviewer in the Globe and Mail. I probably spent more time reading reviews of my books than reports from the war, though at times they were equally depressing.

            He was starting to get carried away, reciting some speech he had been rehearsing in the back of his head for years that been glued back into him with a few pieces in the wrong order after the accident. “You’re a… you’re like a… you’re um… you’re a visionary. Yeah, a true visionary. With everything ya write there’s a statement about each and every one of us.”

            He might as well have been speaking about somebody else. I had just mastered the formula of sex over violence equals money. But, there were always worse ways of misinterpreting my work. He wasn’t stuffing my book in his coat pocket and shooting rock stars. I may not have been a real people person, but I wasn’t entirely ready to live alone in a cabin like J. D. Salinger quite yet.

            “Ya know,” he was starting to cry now, pitiful little tears that mixed with the mystery liquids in his eyes and formed jaundice streams down his charred face. “They all said you weren’t gonna come. Lorraine especially. She said I was just crazy calling you up, that a guy like you ain’t ever gonna to find the time to talk to a hunk a fried meat like me. She said-.”

            “She called you that?”

            “What? ‘A hunk of fried meat’?”

            “Yeah, she actually, legitimately called you that?”

            “Sure she did. She called me plenty of other stuff too. That was before Brian though. No sir, since Brian there’s not many calls at all, not kind or otherwise.”

            “Christ.”

            “You said it, partner.” There was a pause for a moment as he smiled, his shattered teeth clumping together in a clumsy grin. “Anyways, you want to know what I told her?”

            “What did you tell her?”

            He was giving a look only pure vindication can bring. “I said, ‘Oh no, mam. You are surely mistaken. That man, Manning, he knows what it’s like to be a soldier. He ain’t ever done a tour or nothing, but he sure knows, don’t he? Just look right here, right in this book here. It says… it says it all don’t it… don’t it? Uhm hum, that’s right, yes mam. That guy has a warrior’s spirit. He must have been a general in his past life and all.’ I’m kind of into all that voodoo and stuff. But anyways, then she’s all like, ‘Honey, you crazy!’ and I’m still, ‘you just read that there book, and she keeps yelling, ‘you crazy, Bill. You a crazy sunnovagun!’”

            “You two said all that about me?”

            I could detect maybe a hint of embarrassment on his wretched face. “Well maybe not verbatim.” He waited, as if he had made some sort of unforgiveable faux pas and was waiting to see if I’d catch it.

            “What?” I asked.

            “You don’t mind if I use fancy words like ‘verbatim’. ‘Cause there was this one time that I used a snazzy word like that, and I got in big trouble ‘cause I used it wrong and all.”

            “To tell the truth, I’m not familiar with too many ‘fancy’ words myself.”

            “I knew it,” he yelled, his voice rasping to unimagined heights, “I knew you was just like us. Us normal people, I mean. That’s why you write like us so well, eh?”

            Well, in actuality I sat at table with a dozen ghost writers and spat out a few, dirty-minded scenes coupled with some generic ideas of plot and setting and they churned out a novel like a factory of Bangladeshi slaves shoots out t-shirts. I hadn’t personally written anything since that fecal rubbish filled to the brim with forbidden erotica and empty sentiment that I’d penned on a bored day in college that had been picked from the pile of refuse because of my last name.

            “Ya know,” he began, relaxing his head against the stained pillow, “I always wondered how you write so good.”

            “Well,” I said, unable to help myself.

            “Well?” He was confused.

            “Good is an adjective; it can’t be used to describe a verb. You need an adverb to do that, such as ‘well’.”

            Gemash palmed himself with a tremendous force nearly capable of banishing his eyeballs from their sockets. “That’s what I mean about fancy words and stuff.”

            “It’s fine, just a simple mistake.”

            “Nah, I never could be a writer with all them rules and all. Not like you anyways. You don’t make mistakes like that, and yet, I don’t know… you just… you just seem to know how it feels.” He waved his arm around the room. “You know how much of a waste this is. I get that from you. You know what I’m saying? There’s something there, something in your past, man. I always wanted to know. That’s why I asked you here, see? To know I’m not alone in this. That somewhere out there is that good old boy, Mister Thomas Manning who gets me. He really does.” His eyes unfocussed from the rest of the world, contemplating. “He really does.”

            Gemash’s head rolled back onto his pillow, his face unable to make an impression in the brick layered sweat stains and blood splatter. For a moment, I wondered if he had gone back to sleep, but from the corner of his mouth came the first real human noise he had made all day, the sound of an infant’s last breath before a much needed rest.

            “How do you do it, Thomas Manning?” He asked. “How do you write like that?”

            And how could I possibly tell such a man the truth? How could I, in his last moments, explain how everything he had ever believed in was a lie, that he had been abandoned by all he loved and that his courageous battle had been against an imaginary foe? What comfort was there in the truth?

            I was a storyteller, a raconteur. Maybe I hadn’t written anything since before the pharaohs ruled Egypt and Moses sketched his hallucinations on the tablets, but it was the only thing I had ever really been good at. I couldn’t care less if the family back in Alberta wanted me to dust off the ancient titles and forget my gift of smut; I had been born a writer and would die a writer. And so, I looked Corporal William Gemash in the eye, not really knowing if he was memorizing every word or if his heart had suddenly stopped and the cables just hadn’t picked it up yet, and I told him a story.

            “We had a normal, little house in the north end of Calgary. It was before the first boom when a home was worth more than the land it sat on, in the good old days when the newspaper was delivered to your door every morning by a little kid on a bike, and mom could stay home to look after the kids, and dad could still take you out to the park on Sundays to play ball, and all the houses had that pretty little red trim, and your parents didn’t argue about money all the time, and nobody knew what drug abuse or mortgage defaults or national debt ceilings even were. We weren’t rich, far from it. Dad worked harder than any man alive to pay the bills and make sure we had a good future, but he was still always there for us. We did all right.

            “And then suddenly we weren’t doing all right. Dad went over to fight in Afghanistan. Mom picked up a few shifts in a broken down coffee shop at the wrong end of town. The boom came and with it a flood of new neighbours buying up land and pushing the rest of us, the leftovers, into a tighter and tighter circle of the inner city. But not all the newcomers had bags of money. Some had packed up with stolen cigarettes, experimental pharmaceuticals, switch blades and American handguns. All of a sudden the houses didn’t have that pretty red trim anymore. Well, I guess they still did; only it wasn’t paint underneath the windows. And every July, while the city filled like a water balloon hooked on a fire hose, I stayed and counted off the days until my daddy would come back to me. Canada Day, 2004, that was when he was supposed to come home. And he did. At least, some man carrying my dad’s passport came home that day on July 1st, 2007. Whether it was him or not, only time would tell.

            “We could tell something was wrong the instant he came home that first night. The war had taken my dad like he was a piece of moist clay and molded him into a grotesque caricature of the man he had once been. He screamed in his sleep. He beat his fists against the wall. He belted my whole family as a carriage driver whips his horses. The war had taken every bit of love and serenity that once defined his soul and replaced it with bottomless rage. And that was before the money ran out.

            “He struck an officer and was dishonourably discharged. He got a severance package, but the pension was lost, his uniform tossed in the trash and his pride with it. He didn’t have access to any a counselor and his sickness got worse. He couldn’t go on another tour and our finances got worse. He kept beating us and our welts and bruises got worse. He stopped seeing his war buddies, decided he could drink on his own. And drink he did. The nightmares became more frequent, his screams louder, my mother tears more caked to her face, our lives more fragmented.

            “Finally, we had enough. My mom moved away and we lived with her side of the family. But she had no skills; she had always relied on my father. There were four kids by then, and only one mother who tried desperately to feed us by working three jobs: making coffee in the morning, bagging groceries in the afternoon and serving drinks in the evening. Then the recession hit and she lost everything but bagging groceries. She tried to sneak a few packages of food from the bags and she lost that too.

            “I joined a gang, a bunch of underprivileged white boys united by poverty and racism and a slightly older white boy willing to exploit both of them. I started down the same path my father had gone down. I was consumed with hatred. I beat in faces. I crushed noses. I caved in skulls. I spat and jeered and screamed, and still nothing got better. And then, I got a call one night that my dad had hung himself with the belt he used to beat me with on a lamppost on Memorial Drive.

            “I knew what I was heading towards. I realized where my life was bound to end up, and I tried so hard, William. I tried so damn hard. But I thought that, no I knew that nothing ever changes. Well, maybe it does, but it just gets worse. And then, I met her, William. I met the one person in the world who was willing to fix me, the one person who knew who I was, who understood me, who saw past the first seven layers of grit and despair and blind fury into the real me. My wife Sarah, it was all her. She saved me, William. And now, look at me. Love saved me, it really did.”

            I went over to his dead side and I held his hand as tight as I ever had held anything in my life. “So I guess,” I started again, “the moral of the story is, no matter how lost you think you are, or how dark the world may appear, you are not alone. No one is alone, William. Not I, not you, not anyone. You understand me, Bill? We’re in this together.”

            I was worried I had wasted my entire speech on someone who was no longer capable of listening, but as I looked closer I could see the tiny movements a person makes when they are trying to hold back their tears. With an effort that could have moved mountains were he not chained to a hospital bed, Gemash rolled over to face me.

            “I knew it,” he said, his voice taking on its gruesome, cacophonous tone. “I knew it.” He started crying again, the sobs choking up his throat like a mouthful of marbles. “God dammit! What ever happened to the world, Thomas Manning! What the hell happened?” He beat his miserable fists against the solidified pillow. “We used buy a loaf of bread without going bankrupt. We used to help people when they were in trouble instead just filming it and putting the video on Youtube. We used to be able to breathe the air without gagging. We used to live in a house that didn’t flood every spring and freeze solid every winter.” He buried his head back into his decrepit cushion. “We used to go to war for a reason.” He shook his head, the tears floating ceaselessly in the air around him. “What the hell happened?”

            “I don’t know,” I said. “But it will be better. One day.”

            “One day,” he agreed. “One day.”

            He laid back down a final time and I was just ready to leave when he put his hand on my leg and pleaded, “wait.”

            I stopped, dead in my tracks.

            “I heard on the radio that you’re running for parliament soon, that the government wants you because you’re the only Canadian icon that hasn’t moved to Hollywood and all. I heard that you’ve been touring these hospitals to get support for your campaign and that’s why you came. That isn’t it true, is it? Tell me that isn’t true.”

            I leaned back towards him, put his hand in mine and said, “I came for one reason and one reason alone, Corporal William Gemash. I get you. I understand you. You are not alone.”