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“If you can’t say what it is,” his therapist drones on and Billy hates her because he doesn’t know her, doesn’t know anything, but maybe she could be useful, Billy has always had a knack for using people, especially people who listen to him, and right now she is the only person that does, “maybe you can say what it’s like?”
It takes Billy half a minute to realize she wants an answer to that.
The thing is, Billy always liked reading, but this is middle school literature level of metaphors and he only indulges her because he senses it makes her feel important, makes her feel like she’s of use.
So Billy’s fucked up mess of a mind is like a jigsaw puzzle and Billy’s scabby-bloody pulp bruise of a face is like a theatrical mask and Billy's nightmares in all their disorienting aching terror are like being trapped in a hamster wheel that’s made entirely out of sawblades.
He can see she doesn’t like the last one, but she lets it slide.
And then she asks what Frank is like and Billy-
blanches.
Later, Billy will sit in a dark warehouse, knowing Frank is on his way with a sawed-off shotgun and no other possible outcome than both of them dead and his chest feels so tight and hot and empty, he almost throws up.
But this hasn’t happened yet, he’s still in the hospital and says, “I love Frank, Frank is my brother.”
The therapist doesn’t insist on any stupid comparison, so he guesses her sixth-grade reading level includes the story of Cain and Abel at least.
They’re not Cain and Abel though, the same way they weren’t Cain and Abel in Afghanistan, all that shit about “brothers in arms” thrown out of the window with Frank’s hard, twitching thigh pressing between Billy’s legs, his steady hands pushing Billy against the walls of some hangar or another, they weren’t Samson and Delilah either, or those fags from that Cowboy movie they both pretended they hadn’t watched.
They were just Frank and Billy, but in Afghanistan, Frank always wore his dog tags and never his wedding ring.
Frank had known this as much as Billy.
He’ll deny it. But he did.
Billy could always make people think he loves them and this therapist is no different, she makes him describe people in his life and he says she is like a candle, warm and bright, and she makes him list things that make him feel safe and he says people who listen and the bottom line is, everything he’s ever said about love is a lie.
The other bottom line is, she does what he wants anyway.
Frank had shot him, Billy remembers, remembers his fingers digging through his own intestines for Frank’s bullet, and yeah, if you want a metaphor for what they are, this probably comes closest, and Billy had pulled out the bullet and grunted and thrown it away.
And Billy had killed Frank’s family, all his stupid fake all-American life, they’d been lying in that grass like roadkill, Billy doesn’t remember this part, but he imagines it, and Frank must have looked at him like it was the first time he realized that Billy was real.
Billy had always had a mouth on him, and he’d just sucked Frank’s dick, this was shortly before Kandahar out behind some supply barracks in their camp.
“Damn Billy, that was good,” Frank had grunted, almost involuntarily, normally he made it a point to keep quiet with this.
“Yeah? Better than your wife?” and Billy hadn’t meant to let that slip, or maybe he had but he’d been aiming for a sarcastic rile-up remark but it had come out strangely desperate instead.
“Shut the fuck up,” was Frank’s reply and then he’d left and Billy hadn’t, that’s the thing, he’d stood there and spit out and still tasted Frank in his mouth.
Or maybe they are in the warehouse, maybe they’ve always been in the warehouse, maybe that’s all that’s ever existed and everything else was just a figment of Billy’s crazy broken mind-
but no, it couldn’t-
Billy tries to calm himself, tries counting (there are no blue things in the room), tries breathing and suddenly, there’s Frank, and yeah, maybe it is.
I fucking love you, Billy thinks, I bullets-in-my-gut love you, I dog-tags-around-our-necks love you, I-
And Frank, with the clinical precision that is reserved for people following their one obsession, shoots out his knee caps, his shoulder, his thigh.
You had your mouth there, Frankie, Billy thinks or maybe he gurgles it, around the blood that’s streaming out of his mouth. Remember how you put your mouth on me, even though we were both sweaty, dirty barely-people out in the desert during the war, because I remember and you were into it.
Frank is tired and broken and he looks exactly the same as he always did.
The thing is, Frank remembers this as much as Billy.
He’ll deny it. But he does.
Then he marches over to shoot Billy for good, to finally end it and all Billy can think about are the fucking IED’s in Afghanistan, that’s the first thing you learn over there, because they’re so deadly and so easy to build, they can blow up a truck and kill everyone inside and the truth is, Billy had always thought of himself like that, a bundle of trash and explosives, left by the side of the road-
and Frank, too-
and only now does it occur to him, they’re not the bomb here, (Frank looks so familiar, like everything’s already over but they’re both here, they’re both still here), they’re the Humvee that’s barreling down a shitty dirt road going sixty miles an hour with two guys laughing inside
and that ugly dusty meaningless thing for which they are headed - that they don’t recognize and that’s going to rip them apart,
that’s the closest the two of them will ever have come to loving somebody.