Don't Disappoint (Ch. 4)
by Martin van Cooper
Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next ten-ish weeks, we’ll be serializing Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest, back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).
As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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It’s not the sort of thing that you actively return to conversation, having by some means gotten past it, the fact that you and your father on several occasions fought quite viciously, on some occasions leading your mother to call the police. Getting past it is not the same as forgetting or discarding the instincts and animosities that made you seriously attempt mortal injury to a family member. Maybe it was his mother’s cancer when they were in college that brokered a tacit truce, that fueled the new détente. His father was a lifer in the machine and his son discovered, sometime in his early teens, that the old man had maneuvered himself into logistics and support as an officer in Vietnam through some never fully disclosed deal making, only to later, during the 1990’s, when his son was old enough to start asking questions, continue to bang on about the pissing and moaning of the vets from that era and how they didn’t have the patriotism and sense of duty of the Greatest Generation, capital G’s. When the events of 2001 changed ROTC from a wise financial decision and resume padder into a speaking role in the spectacular goatfuck that was the battle of Fallujah a few years later, he had no quarter for the old man’s comments and only contempt for the way he continued to lament Americans’ lack of respect for the military and their foreign adventures. When he was 14, the old man threw him through some drywall in their mother’s sitting room. The room that you never sat in, to the right when you walk in the front door of the house, with ornamental furniture, covered in plastic, where you placed guests’ jackets when they came in during the cold months. When he was 27 and the old man started up…he just left the house. The sorts of banal worries and ultimately inconsequential arguments and slights and considerations are instantly revealed for what they are when you start getting shot at.
Jason visited him when he was home between deployments that time. This one was no longer fun, it never really was that anyways, but there was reward in duty and being needed, which was now totally gone, he said. They walked down the street from his parents’ house, just wandering, Jason didn’t think he could relax in that house, and ended up reaching the end of the suburban Beltway development, with its huge midcentury style colonials on sprawling green green yards and surrounded by tall, new growth forest, American flags on every house, Don’t Tread on Me flags on quite a few. NRA stickers on every Honda, every Toyota. They walked onto a manmade bluff running under the power lines on an area cleared of trees for that purpose, a corridor running over the hills towards the horizon, rising and falling with the mounds of New World earth walked not long ago by terrorists against the British empire. This is what the army does. It fucks you, he said. Jason had some premonition that he wasn’t going to see him again, that this was going to be the tour where his luck ran out and he didn’t come back or came back horribly changed. You said to me once when we were in college, I love my country but I fear my government, he said. And you were fucking right. The fucking army will fuck you, they don’t care. I am done after this. They can go fuck themselves with retirement in 10 years and promotion and hazard pay. They watched Fight Club that night, quoting every other line. There’s no way you can make that movie or write that book after 9/11, he says. There’s no way someone born after 1995 could understand how that book ever made sense. To them it’s just a story about beating people up. Later, during his time back between the first and second tours in the just war in Afghanistan, he came to visit Jason and spent the weekend watching movies and walking around the mall. Doing things that, as a military brat, he grew up loving. Every new city in every new country had malls to cater to the GI’s and their families, imported brands and imported air to breathe, the video arcade, Spencer’s Gifts, Foot Locker, Orange Julius. I got an email from a writer in Kabul last week who is now looking for a position in America, Jason told him. He was a writer and teacher, in his late 30’s but because of all the shit over there is applying to come work here as a PhD student. And so I wrote him back and said I didn’t have a position but I admire your pursuit of knowledge and learning in that terrible, in that awful situation you and your countrymen are living through. And I wished him the best because imagine the strength of his spirit to overcome that terrible lot he was cast and still seek a higher purpose, Jason said.
His friend didn’t say anything, but his back stiffened and his gaze shifted away and the weakly concealed disappointment Jason saw on his face has made him wish, every week or two since then, when his mind returns to the conversation and he thinks about how ultimately he died, torn apart by an IED during a patrol outside the Green Zone around Baghdad in advance of a visit of Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, in 2010, and he wishes he could just tell him that I get it, I understand, not everything, but more, and I’m trying to at least work out the landscape of my ignorance because the hard truth is that the more you read about something, written by people who haven’t lived it, the less you know. The more peacemakers write about war, the more likely another war becomes. It was the year In da Club and spinner rims were the shit. That spring break Jason was in Palm Beach Florida in a night club near the beach with sunburnt shoulders and salt-stiff hair drinking a beer and watching, in night vision footage, men his age jump out of a helicopter somewhere in the Levant, headed for nothing nice.
Those who can, do, his father was wont to admonish. Those who can’t, teach. And so, when Jason went to teach high school English (the county had passed an ordinance, to abate a teacher shortage and flummox the teacher’s union, that anyone with a bachelor’s degree in anything could teach anything) he felt he got the message. There’s a whole complex web of horseshit that you can tell yourself to justify taking public money to do middling work in service of putting food in your belly. Stimulating the economy, mentoring the next generation, creating jobs, my entire lifetime’s salary is less than one armored tank and how many of those do we have. Lead follow or get out of the way, they say in the ROTC and he was doing none of the three which is not ok. It’s ok to fail big his father would tell him when he was in high school, before his father bet big on a new caprice and died weeks later, but it’s never ok to be content with continuing to fail small. And so, he drew a line under it and rolled a decade of small fuck ups into one giant one, deciding to try for something authentic, right around the time he met Jessica and was threatened with permanent tethering to one failure.
Jason was leaving school after completing the following week’s lesson plans when a text came through on his phone.
<Was the whale vindictive>
He laughed silently. Texted back:
<No. He just had to kill him>
<But why. He could just dive deep and peace out, let Ahab get his>
<That’s not the way it works>
<I know>
