Fiction

The Gull

‘What's that?’
The question lodged itself in Lee's mind, its context lost within a Rorschach image of white and grey. A vehicle, a building and a group of men, all viewed from above and reduced to a collection of monochrome shapes. Orders are given, repeated and carried out. Then comes the question — ‘What's that?’ — and the shapes are gone.
On the flight back to New York he continued to replay the operation in his head, but tens of similar, half-forgotten scenarios blurred into one another, white shapes shifting and changing, running together. The only image that stood out in the mess was that of his colleague's face. No matter how well an operation had gone, Joel would always be wearing the same calm expression: no praise for a job well done, but no condemnation when things went sideways either. This time, he had seemed shocked, even haunted. By the time the plane touched down, the only other memory he'd recovered was of the sudden tug at his gut when all those shapes had disappeared.

When Lee was finally back in the familiar surroundings of his home and the comfort of his own bed, he started having the dream. In it, he lies on his back gazing up at the blazing sun, sand hot against his bare skin, between his toes and fingers. Dunes surround him, waving like ocean tides, blown by winds he can't feel or hear. Nothing happens for a long time. Eventually, a white gull appears, flying low overhead until it blots out the sun. Then he wakes up. That's it.
There are variations. Sometimes he wakes before the gull comes into view, the knowledge that it will eventually arrive having the same effect as its actual appearance, a dread he can't put into words. Sometimes he starts to dream something completely different, only for his surroundings to crumble around him until he is once more lying in sand and staring up at the sun.
Lee spent many hours thinking about this dream, but to rob it of meaning rather than to ascribe it: to dissect it, break it down into its constituent parts and identify them. He thought that if he did this, maybe he could break the spell, stop waking with a start in the small hours of the morning and disturbing his wife, Samantha, with a loud gasp. After much deliberation, he decided that the vivid feeling of hot sand might come from days spent lazing on the beach on childhood vacations. Perhaps that one year they flew to Santa Barbara when he was fifteen, and he had gone to watch girls playing volleyball, only to fall asleep on the sand and wake up burnt, lobster pink. But Lee knew that he was only fooling himself, stretching for the wrong answers, and he soon gave up on all attempts at analysis.
Instead, in an effort to distract himself, he has taken to reading more. Usually he takes one of Samantha's volumes on history or architecture, but sometimes he stops off at a book store, browsing the shelves until something catches his eye — the search for a distraction being an equally effective distraction in itself. If he should happen to find himself without a book to hand, he will read whatever is lying around  — pamphlets, magazines, it doesn't matter. He reads until his eyes become hooked on a line or paragraph, skipping like a stuck record, the words becoming indecipherable marks on the page. Today Lee is reading one of his wife's books: a drawn-out analysis of Brutalist architecture in Europe by a J. Blackstock. He closes it and rubs his eyes to wipe away the few words that remain, swimming in his vision.

The old television set in the corner flickers with washed-out images. A bearded man in a life vest is talking about trout but his gruff voice is reduced to a tinny whine by the speakers. Lee's father sits in a threadbare armchair, eyes fixed on the screen. He hasn't said a word for hours. That's all right, though: Lee isn't here for the conversation, he's here for the white noise. He's here because the place is filled with enough light distractions that he can't fall into the well of his own thoughts. He's here because everything in this building is at the halfway mark. Everything is either ‘not quite’ or ‘slightly’. The walls are not quite white. The rooms smell slightly of disinfectant. At lunchtime, he watched one of the carers bring in a tray of something halfway between baby food and a steak dinner and place it on the table by his father.
At first, the choice of retirement home had been the source of many bitter arguments between Lee and his sister, Janice. She had made the arrangements while Lee was on the other side of the globe, placing their father in a small facility just outside of Berwick, Pennsylvania. He insisted that their father always wanted to remain in New York City, but his protests fell on deaf ears, and besides, it was done: contracts had been signed and money had changed hands. Four years older than Lee, she claimed that she knew better than her baby brother, and that it was the best they could afford, though how she could come up with the money working as a receptionist at JFK was a mystery to him.
It was despite himself, then, that Lee found that he enjoyed, even anticipated, the long drive west along the interstate. Once out of New York's traffic tangle, there was nothing but rolling green for miles and the steady sound of forward motion. This chance to switch off everything but autopilot had become half the reason his visits to his father had been increasing. It had been after this discovery that Lee had written himself the schedule: a list of distractions which he followed to the letter. Despite having memorised the whole list, he keeps it in his pocket, just in case he is ever without something to read. Today is Wednesday.

until 0700: read
0700 – 0715: breakfast
0715 – 0745: newspaper
0745 – 0800: small chores
0800 – 1100: Berwick
1100 – 1800: dad, lunch
1800 – 2100: home
2100 – 2200: dinner, read

Today, though, it hadn't worked. His mind had been racing since the moment he woke, a relentless spinning newsreel that outpaced the car along the interstate. The book hadn't helped either. He hadn't even read it, just stared at its contents until a meaningless black scrawl was emblazoned on his aching eyeballs. The white noise and the beige middle-ground of the nursing home had lost their magic. Last night, the gull never came.

That morning, he had woken slowly, naturally, and to bright sunlight rather than the dim opening act of a new day. The clock's glowing screen read 8:23am. Yet there had been no comfort in this, the first truly restful sleep he'd had in weeks, nor had there been any comfort to be found in his morning routine, performed automatically, something he usually relied on to wipe away whatever ghosts of the dream remained. That there had been no dream was the least comforting thing of all.
Downstairs, Samantha was waiting, breakfast on the table — a job that, up until then, Lee had been taking care of in his attempt to accumulate as many small distractions as possible.
‘Good morning,’ she said with a smile, and poured him a cup of coffee. ‘Those sessions must be having an effect. I haven't seen you looking so rested in a long time.’
‘Yeah,’ Lee replied, returning what he hoped was a convincing smile. ‘I guess Hopper really is as good as he claims.’
After many nights of disturbed sleep, Samantha had tried to persuade Lee to see a therapist. Eventually he acquiesced and made an appointment with a military psychologist, despite the fear that he would get sucked back into another cycle of trying and failing to remember, and end up breaking the routine of distractions that had started to serve him so well.
The office was a drab, government funded box, and the psychologist, a Sergeant John Hopper, looked uncomfortable in his fatigues, like a highschool geography teacher longing for a knitted sweater. Despite Lee's initial misgivings, and after being told, in no uncertain terms, that he should have been to see him sooner, Hopper seemed friendly and understanding. He talked at length about the importance of giving voice and order to the events that troubled Lee, encouraging him to start from the beginning and continue at his own pace. Lee had tried to do as the psychologist requested, giving an account of an operation he was increasingly convinced was jumbled up with tens of similar jobs, and attempting to put words to the gap in his memory, but each attempt fell short.
Each time, either the account would ring false, the jigsaw pieces of the operation never quite fitting together, or he would fail to convey how heavily those absent details weighed on his mind. It didn't help that he felt the need to edit everything he said, so as to not look incompetent or unstable, just in case any of the notes Hopper was constantly taking should make it into some job suitability assessment or other. After a second session, during which Lee continued to trip over his own thoughts and words, he was beginning to think therapy was a waste of time.
He never kept his third appointment. His doubts and misgivings had stopped him in his tracks as he stared at Hopper's name, sitting in its brown plastic sheath on the plain, grey-painted door, his hand hovering over the handle. Instead, he turned around, marched back through the small waiting room and read in a coffee bar until an appropriate amount of time had passed, at which point he went home. That night, he gave Samantha a vague but believable summary of the session and let her think he would keep attending them regularly. He even wrote the appointments into his schedules for Monday and Friday, should she happen to find them folded up in his jacket pocket.
Lee had been surprised at how easy the deception had been to maintain, how naturally he could apply the careful limiting of information that his job required of him to all the non-classified goings on of his daily life. It didn't stop him feeling terrible whenever vagueness wouldn't do and outright lies were required though. At least Samantha didn't seem too bothered by his frequent absences. Sometimes he thought she didn't notice, guessing her job as an architect kept her busy. She was always scrutinizing some blueprint or other by the time he was out the door, and usually still working by the time he returned. With the Air Force sending him across the globe for months at a time, it probably wasn't much of an adjustment for her to make. That was the way their lives seemed to be structured.

‘What's that?’
The question floats back as Lee stares at the television. The man in the life vest has finished talking about trout and is now riding in the back of a truck laden with fishing tackle, the whine of his voice barely audible over the engine; a noise that the TV's old speakers translate as newspaper being crumpled. There had been a truck, back then, on the other screen. A battered heap covered in a sheet, dents and patches of rust obvious even through thermal imaging. It had driven for miles along dirt roads until it had entered the frame of Lee's monitor and pulled up outside the compound. Men disembarked and others exited the building, bright white shapes shuffling around in a monochrome world. There was an exchange of acknowledgements. He rattled off coordinates, targets, confirmations into his headset and to Joel, sitting beside him, whose eyes were fixed on his own screen, finger hovering over the trigger.
This sudden burst of images, at last in some kind of logical order, prompts Lee to pull the Wednesday list out of his pocket and snatch up a pencil that had been discarded by an untouched book of cross-word puzzles — left there, he suspects, by his sister. On the back of the list, he begins to draw. A rectangle for the compound. Another for the truck. Soon he is looking at a series of angles and perimeters, a crude set of blueprints. Nothing that would impress Samantha, but it will suffice. Next he draws the men, pencilling in circles where their white shapes would have been. Two by the south entrance, another by the east. Three to unload the truck. The driver and two passengers. There were more, but the memory is degrading again, the monitor's contents lost to a tide of static.

Lee scrunches the piece of paper into a ball, letting it drop noiselessly onto the beige carpet, and rubs his eyes once more. When he looks up again, his father is studying him, the fishing lecture from the man in the life vest no longer able to hold his attention. Lee picks up the balled-up note and returns it to his pocket.
‘Just work stuff,’ he says. His father looks him up and down with a critical eye.
‘I always said you should never have joined the force.’
‘I don't remember you ever saying that.’
Lee has sat with his father for many hours over the course of several weeks, but this is the first time he's heard anything out of him that wasn't a complaint about the food or the staff.
‘Janice says so too. She says they messed you up.’
‘Does she now,’ says Lee.
Samantha had invited Janice over for dinner one night, just before he started seeing Hopper, despite knowing that Lee and his sister don't get along. Lee had found the night strange — how the two women had seemed to conspire together, steering the conversation as if trying to get something out of him without actually asking. He had gone to bed early with a headache, leaving them in the dining room and his meal half finished.
Lee thinks of Joel, as he had done many times before — times when he had reached for his phone, hoping for some reassurance from his colleague, only to remember his face after that last operation. But today that memory isn't enough to make him pause and reconsider. He pulls the phone from his pocket to find it switched off, its black screen dead, and when it blinks into life he discovers there is very little charge left in the battery — just enough to scroll through a long list of missed calls and messages. Samantha, Joel, and even Janice appear on the list, each of their names flashing past multiple times. Of the numbers with no names attached, Lee recognises several belonging to the Air Force. Confused, Lee turns it off before the charge drains completely. He opens the door, the plainness of which reminds him of Sergeant Hopper's, and mumbles that he'll be back in a minute. His father's questioning stare follows him until he's out of sight.

The corridor is a length of mundane drabness that promises the same around the corner, and the next, zigzagging off into a beige, vaguely hospital- like infinity. Lee walks, wondering how such oppressively sanitised nothingness could ever have distracted him from the unfinished black-and- white movie now playing on a loop in his head. He walks until he finds his way through the beige labyrinth and reaches the entrance, with its row of payphones.
Lee empties his pockets of change, pushes some into the coin slot of the nearest phone and dials Joel's number. As he waits, he notices the plastic surfaces of the phones, their grime standing out against the stiflingly immaculate surroundings. There's a click.
‘Hello?’
‘Joel?’
‘Is that you, Lee?’
‘Yeah, I'm — ’
‘Where the hell have you been?’ asks Joel, his voice raised in a stifled half-shout. ‘Haven't you been getting the messages?’
‘I only just switched my phone on.’
‘You can't just stop showing up, you have to report in. Your leave ended days ago.’
‘What?’
‘Look, Lee, a psychologist, Hopper, phoned yesterday,’ says Joel, his voice softening. ‘I know the last one was difficult. If something is wrong, you're not going to get into trouble over this, just as long as you come in.’
The more Joel speaks, the more Lee involuntarily draws back his hand, so that, by the time he pauses to think, he finds the handset several inches from his ear, with Joel's voice becoming much like that of the man in the life vest. The words are going in, but they aren't making any sense. It's true that he hasn't been keeping track of time beyond the daily lists of tasks he has written for himself, but surely not so much that he would forget to report for duty.
‘What happened?’ asks Lee.
‘I just told you, they need you to report in.’
‘No, the last operation.’
‘I don't know, you said you saw something. You stared at that monitor for ages. I had to take you out of the room myself.’ Joel sighs. ‘We really shouldn't be speaking about this on the phone.’
The words continue to sound hollow. He would have remembered something like that.
‘What did I see?’
‘Come on, Lee.’
‘Please.’
There is a long pause. Lee can hear Joel's feet, shuffling in place, followed by another sigh.
‘You said there was a kid in the back of the truck.’ Another pause. ‘But I didn't see anything, and they let me view the recording. It's not in any of the reports.’
Lee isn't listening anymore. He's staring at the receiver and the men are leaving the truck, white shapes moving to the back, unloading boxes. They are soon joined by more, moving out of the compound, guns slung over their shoulders. One remains motionless, another white shape visible through the truck's sheet covering. As the men move towards the compound with their cargo, Lee advises the strike. The confirmation comes over his headset. A nod to Joel and the warhead is away. Only then, in those dead seconds between launch and impact, before thirteen pounds of explosives puts an end to the scene playing out on Lee's monitor, does the white shape in the back of the truck stir. A smaller shape breaks away from the larger, like a cell dividing under a microscope. Lee watches the way it moves. It's not like the other shapes.
‘What's that?’

Light slanted through the vast hangar doors, rendering the white of the outstretched wings even whiter. It was the first time Lee had seen a drone up close. Before they started generating a mass of negative press, the Air Force had been inundated with applications from the lower ranks, a great deal of whom saw it as a safer career path than many the service had to offer. Lee was no different. He had a wife to think about, after all. And what if they started a family? At least sitting at a monitor would ensure he came home in one piece.
A bunch of those who made it past the aptitude test crowded around the gleaming Predator and listened to the Sergeant list its specifications. Lee didn't think the name fitting. It didn't look much like a ‘predator’, but more like a seagull, or perhaps an albatross.

Peter S Dorey