Approaching the officers’ quarters, that was when he first felt it. A fine-grained fizzing sensation as he jogged up the barracks steps. A vague feeling of unease somewhere in the bottom of his brain.
As he walked down the hall, opened the door to his quarters, and stepped inside, it flared into a jittery feeling, a quadruple espresso on an empty stomach. Unpacking his ruck, he felt the muscles in his shoulders and back begin to cramp up. He thought he might be getting the flu.
He showered and changed his clothes, sat at the little desk to do paperwork, but the sparks in his head were rising with a panicky feeling that was impossible to ignore. He couldn’t stay in the chair, and he couldn’t focus on the pages in front of him. His shirt felt too close at the neck.
Then his chest began to tighten. He had trouble catching his breath. The walls got closer, the ceiling lower. His heart a sledgehammer in his chest.
He didn’t even bother to put on his socks and boots, just carried them down the hall and out the main door into the open air, where he could begin to breathe. He told himself he needed some exercise, and walked around the base for a few hours. It helped.
When he went to the mess for supper, it happened again. The mess hall was too loud, too crowded, and the fluorescent lights flickered like those in a horror movie. He cut in line, grabbed a burger, and fled. He ate outside, walking around, wondering what was wrong with him.
When he went back to his quarters, the pressure in his head grew faster than ever. He knew after five minutes he’d never manage to sleep in there. So he pulled a blanket from the bed and found an empty hilltop out in the scrubland that made up most of the base.
How he survived through the final days of mustering out he didn’t know. Drinking helped, but it wasn’t a long-term solution.
He called it the white static. His very own war souvenir.
Which was why he came up with the experiment.
The hypothesis was simple. If the white static came when he went inside a building or in a crowd of people, Peter would spend a year outside, alone. Living out of a backpack, up above the tree line when possible, with only the mountains for company.
Maybe give the static a chance to get used to civilian life and fade out completely.
The first days were fine, hiking steeply up through the ancient evergreen forest. As he got tired of listening to nothing but his own thoughts, it got harder. He had no phone, no music player. But after two weeks, his head felt transparent to the world, his thoughts blown from his mind. The static was replaced by the sound of the wind. It occurred to him that he might never go down to the so-called civilized world.
After what he’d seen, he wasn’t that impressed with humanity, anyway.
Up in the high country, he lived mostly on lentils and rice, wild greens, and trout caught with his fly rod. Gourmet living. Coffee and hot chocolate were his luxuries. He started with several big caches of food hung from trees in bear-proof cans. He thrived up in the granite and heather for four months without needing to resupply. He walked a vast loop through the North Cascades, keeping off the marked trails. Usually off any trail at all. It made him feel wild and pure and clean. He thought it might cure him.
He made those first supplies last as long as he could before going back to the populated world. Roads and houses. Commerce and government. He hitched a ride on the tailgate of a logger’s pickup and, at the outskirts of town, found a small grocery store.
It was the first test of his hypothesis.
But walking through the parking lot, he already knew. The closer he got to the door, the louder the static sounded in his head. He still needed supplies, so he clenched his teeth in the narrow, crowded aisles under the fluorescent lights, trying to get what he needed and into the open air before the white static turned to sparks and began to rise up inside him.
He climbed up into the empty mountains again, where the wind washed him clean. South for the winter, north for the summer. Every time he came down for supplies, the static was still there. After a year, he extended the experiment. Give it another four months. Or forever.
Then Jimmy killed himself.
Peter was deep in the backcountry of the Klamath Mountains in northern California when Manny Martinez heard about Jimmy’s suicide and got on the horn. The informal sergeants’ network had a long reach. Four days later, an off-duty fireman from Klamath Falls walked up to Peter’s campsite with a sorrowful look on his face, and that was the end of that.
—
From his perch on Dinah’s back steps, he saw headlights in the alley, then heard her garage door rolling up. So he was prepared when he saw her. He stood as she walked the cracked concrete path from the garage. The motion light came on, brightening the yard only a little.