Hemingway

Written in Hemingway's style.

David Hemingway believed himself to be very clever. Descended from the greatest writer who ever lived, he said. I do not know whether this was true. He was the best card player I ever met, and I told him that, and it was a mistake. Every night in the dark barracks after patrol, he lit his cigarettes and looked at me through the side of his eye, nodding at the cards with smugness that said, aren’t you ready to lose again you poor bastard? He never turned the lights on because the first time he had beaten me had been during a power outage. I think he believed that his luck came from the dark.

He had grown up on Long Island in the 1980s, in the middle of the AIDS crisis, and had become a permanently closeted homosexual as a result. His father had told him how stupid and uncontrolled all the gays were. And so Hemingway believed that being smart and controlled and hetero and healthy were all the same. This was why he believed himself to be smart. He did not have AIDS, and he was somewhat smart, and he shared the name of a man who was so. But he was not hetero, and he was sometimes uncontrolled because he looked at me when we showered together. His eyes moved as when he came in wanting to play cards, and I did not begrudge him this. If there were a woman in this desert I would look at her.

Sometimes I looked at him as well for he was brave and true and golden. He was clever in that way of boys who have become men who may now die and who know this. He was clever in his avoiding death but stupid in his risking it. I -I am neither brave nor true nor golden, and when he looked at me, I am sure all he was seeing was my form. In card playing, he was clever because he was not afraid of losing. When he played in the light, his fear was his downfall.

We were braver at night in the barracks, and in the sunlit patrol we were afraid. One day, we were patrolling, and Hemingway stepped on the thing which was his downfall. He was golden and true but not brave. And the sun shone on us and he died.