M*A*S*H
Slash Awards 2004, Third
place (tie):
Outstanding Letter Fic
Remedies"
by Jimaine
A/N: Yeah, I'm back. More or less a reply to the
challenge of Friday,
October 25th.
A couple of months too late, *wry smile* I've been out
of touch with MASH
lately, sailing other seas under quite another
captain's command.
Pairing: none, really, nothing specific
Disclaimer: All belongs to 20th Century Fox, I can't
lay claim to anything
and certainly don't make any money of this.
Feedback to sbrzezinski@a...
Quite unbeta'ed, but that's the way I want it. Raw and
pure.
Dedication: To the list...in case something should
happenŠ
"Oh, what men dare do! What men may do!
What men daily do, not knowing what they do."
‹ Much Ado About Nothing
"Things without all remedy should be without
regard;
What's done is done."
‹ Macbeth
***********
Dear
Someone.
Dear readers. Dear editorŠ
The journalists covering the war (*Police Action*) for
the papers of the
world give it its appearance, the shape and form
visible to the nations, but
it's the letters that instill it with essence. They
are the true chronicles
of three years of bloodshed not the headlines, not the cheerful tones of
the "Washington Post" opening another
Movietone reel. These creased sheets
of paper are filled with tight, frantic script that
will fade with the
years. Quite unlike the memories; those will remain
fresh forever.
Dear Ma
The letters aren't very stylish, but much is expressed
by the simple words
that hide the ugliness of reality behind a veil of
innocence. He tells of
the lives of the people that matter to him, people he
admires. Through his
letters, he involves them in his life, gives back
something he's afraid they
may have lost. It's why his letters are important, not
just to him. They
help preserve a shred of innocence taken from each of
those who know and
care, those who call him Radar and treat him like the
brother they never
had.
Letters full of hope and other things they fear they
have lost.
In his simple words, the writer captures what
everybody is too afraid to
express, not because he believes that the recipient
has a particular
interest in the affairs of perfect strangers, but
because he feels that he
has to. So he just does it. He writes. Late at night,
when his work is done
and his superiors and the rest of the camp have gone
to sleep, he sits on
his cot and writes, slowly, diligently, not leaving
out a single thing.
Nothing is *too trivial*. One might say that taking
care of other people's
feelings is sentimental, just another kind of
administrative duty. Other
people ship home vehicles, furniture and other luxury
items, and he's
mailing home sheets full of second-hand emotions, just
in case somebody
needs them in the years to come.
By the time he returns to the place he's sending them
to, back to peaceful
farm-life under a sky that has never seen the
phosphorescent glare of
artillery fire, the innocence that allowed him to
write the letters is worn
to a frazzle, transparent like a pane of stained
glass. The dominant color
is always some shade of red.
Nobody calls on him to reclaim his lost property,
though. They don't know
where to look, who to turn to. So the feelings,
trapped on paper and hidden
in a cardboard box under a hard-working (innocent no
more!) farmer's bed,
are lost to them. They are aware that they're missing
*something*Šbut they
can't say what it is exactly that causes the
nightmares, the phobias, the
behavior that drives people away and makes
relationships difficult or
outright impossible.
All they know is that it started in that Hell Beyond
the Sea. Korea.
Eventually, some accept it, and others don't. Some can
live with the pain,
others can't. Won't.
His letters are their epitaphs.
Dear Mildred
There are times when he lives in the moment and times
when he prefers the
distant past. Quiet, sun-soaked days between the
fields and the barn,
entropy dictated by the rhythm of the horse beneath
him. Pace, trot, gallop.
Here, he is in control, reins in his hands, and he
throws back his head and
laughs wildly at the sky.
In the present, he feels everything slipping from his
grasp; fingers have
become too old, too brittle, and he has relinquish his
hold on the past and
crash back into the moment.
Memories tinged with blood become intertwinedŠmemories
of nine million dead,
an entire generation, disillusioned and sobered after
their initial
enthusiasm, dying on the battlefield called Europe in
a war (the Great War,
first in a row) that nobody (as they will say later
on) really wanted. The
images merge with sleepless nights in the Pacific, the
heat and anxiety
keeping him awake. And then, almost as a
post-scriptŠKorea.
P.SŠ past sobriety Špast sanityŠ. past savingŠ
At least, here he doesn't have to see torn bodies
hurled up into trees by
the force of the grenades, doesn't have to anticipate
even greater cruelty
once the artillery has finished and the infantry moves
in; here, grenades
and shells are at a not-really-safe distance,
supplying only the many bodies
on the table in front of him.
But slaughter still is an everyday thing, death still
a habit. And habits,
be they old or new, die hard.
Dear Peg
For every letter he sends, he gets three in return.
The elegant lines of the
pen are a magical thread she spins with love, prayer
and bell, book and
candle by the light of new moon. Though it is fragile
as spider-silk and
only can be seen by starlight when eyes and emotions
are dulled with gin, he
works it into a solid rope, a lifeline connecting him
to another reality
that is but a dim fantasy here in this unreality.
Hands need to touch, to connect, and his are never
free. The scalpel is
exchanged for the pen when the deluge subsides and
disgorges four people in
blood-splattered white.
In spite of the company, he stands alone, drenched and
exhausted and
feelingŠlost. The survivor of an international
shipwreck.
No day at the beach, Beej.
Hands hold (touch, explore, caress, comfort, cradle),
desperate to be full
(of some body or thing), and while the object in his
right may vary, he
never lets go of the lifeline in his left. Captain
Truman and his helmsman
MacArthur failed to miss the Korean iceberg. Adrift on
the ocean of his
nightmares, he has his eyes on the fading shore; with
each letter he writes,
every red-tinted lie he tells (yes, he has become
quite the expert at lying
by omission), the distance grows.
In the middle of the night he emerges from those icy
depths, gasping for
air, awake but still only an inch away from drowning.
When he writes to her, he is both author and editor,
censoring the truth
with every desperate stroke of his pen. Filtering out
the dirt, the blood,
the mindless, numbing fear, the individual tragedies
and faces the clear
liquid he pours into her glass is perfectly
transparent. Distilled emotions,
high-proof trivialities.
Finest kind.
Sometimes he doesn't have the time to write.
Sometimes he doesn't know how to write because if he
started, he would keep
on writing and inadvertently tell the truth.
Her letters keep coming, as do the cookies and
photographs, tangible pieces
of something he's desperate not to lose touch with,
and from the magical
thread he spins a cocoon for himself. A shell neither
bullets nor shells can
penetrate; it will protect him from other people's
feelings as well as keep
his own safely locked inside.
With every day, as he watches the people around him
deteriorate, his
determination to make it out of here alive and
relatively sane grows. It
grows in direct proportion to his helplessness at the
sight of his best
friend turning into one of the ghosts haunting him.
Dear Sis
He cannot help it, melancholy and despair creep into
his letters in spite of
his best efforts to sound optimistic.
In a way, he reflects, they are a series of
confessions, the feelings he
leaves out of the private conversations with his God.
Maybe it's because he
feels that even He cannot quite understand the
disillusionment permeating
his every day.
Faith, whatever shape it may take, is still a toolŠand
life is the ultimate
victim.
Bottled up frustration. Responsibility for the souls
entrusted to him.
How to give the very thing one does not have?
How to provide what oneself craves more than anything?
Dearest Honoria
He lets her know that Emily Dickinson put it best:
'Because I could not stop
for Death/ He kindly stopped for me.'
He isn't talking about himself, of course. It's always
the others for whom
Death stops. For all he knows, the Grim Reaper has
taken up permanent
residence at the 4077. Maybe, he reflects, that's why
the fourth bed in the
Swamp remains empty. The symbolic extra setting at the
dinner table for a
deceased family member, the unsent invitation for the
witch at the feast in
honor of Briar Rose's birth.
He tells her of the music he misses. Tells her in
terms of concertos and
poetry how much he suffers, for as much as he prides
himself on his
eloquence, he cannot find words of his own to describe
how the loss of lives
(he's never lost patients before Korea) affects him.
Notes, harmonies and
rhymes have to be his substitutes language.
Smetana's "Moldau" from source to stream, from a trickle to a flood,
that's how it's in the O.RŠfirst it's just a broken
arm and suddenlyŠ
Ravel's "Bolero" same tune, over and over again, and with each repetition,
the horror intensifies, gaining momentum until the
crescendo sweeps him
away.
Mozart's "Requiem" for those who died in spite of his *acclaimed* superior
skills.
Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake", Act II, no. 10,
scène moderato for the
description of the first glimmer of dawn behind the
hills when stepping out
of the O.R. after seventeen hours of surgery.
Vivaldi's "Four Seasons", 'The Spring' to describe the roller-coaster mood
in the camp, especially his chameleon-like tent-mates,
who at the most
unlikely of occasions strike a chord of sympathy, and
even empathy, within
him, not that he'd openly admit to that, not even
under torture.
Only to his sister does he confess that they kindle a
longing, a
long-forgotten impish streak in his soul that craves
this kind of kinship,
wants to connectŠbut he's too afraid to lose what
little is left of the boy
he was never allowed to be to the man he has become.
Dear Dad
The spaces between the words are open wounds of
silence. Not clean cuts like
from a scalpel, no, the scalpel is something he uses
to preserve life. These
wounds are ugly and deep and dirty, wounds made by
lives lost, and the blood
gushing out of them is the blood of others. Slowly but
steadily, he's
bleeding out into the growing hollowness within,
working with a furious
energy that is either entrancing or appalling to those
around him.
He has to admit that the despair and mindless fury
burning him out cannot be
remedied by any words he knows, and even the
dictionary isn't any help at
all. That's when he gets desperate, some may even say
manic.
Unstable.
He notices it, of course, but it is beyond his
control. After fighting,
resisting, *enduring* for as long as he has done, the
red current sweeps him
away. Where it will take him, he doesn't know. Maybe
he'll wash up on
another foreign shore
though he cannot imagine any place more foreign than
where he is now
alone and alive after the tempest (O brave new world that
hath such casualties in it!), or maybe he'll drown.
There's that
possibility. He doesn't have a lifeline, after all;
his has snapped/ was
severed/ ripped/ sent home/ re-drafted/ killed, and
maybe it should worry
him that he no longer cares. The formerly sharp edge
of his tongue has
dulled. He is going up against dragons armed with a
wooden toy sword.
Language cannot defend him anymore, he realizes, and
that moment of suicidal
clarity is the knockout punch that sends him onto the
boards. That's when he
stops writing, too afraid that the lines would turn
out to be red.
And towards the end, when their stay in purgatory has
been extended again,
the edges of the wounds (never enough time or material
to treat them, never
enough time for anythingŠ) have turned necrotic, the
blackened flesh
poisoning his entire body.
*******
Dear God
Letters of that particular kind are returned to
sender.
FINIS