Forever Day.

He got out of bed and walked quietly to the sanitary stall. The needle-spray shower felt good. The hot-air blower felt even better. Ron looked at his face in the stall’s mirror. He had never been very happy about his face. The nose was too big and the eyes were too small. Ordinary brown eyes. Brown hair, too. Just ordinary.

He had seen a few guys in New York with long hair, really long and flowing. It looked weird at first. Ron stared at his own short-clipped hair. Nice and trim. Everybody wore it that way at home. Easy to keep clean. Sanitary. Ordinary.

He wondered how it would look if it were long, long enough to flow over his shoulders. Then he pictured what his father would say. Or scream.

There was some dark brown fuzz on his chin, so Ron rubbed in a palmful of shaving powder and rinsed it all off. Now even his mother would agree that he looked clean and sanitary.

Pulling on a t-shirt and shorts, Ron noticed how quiet the house was. The alarm stereo had shut off, of course, as soon as he’d gotten up from the bed. It’s early, he told himself. His mother stayed in bed most of the time; doctor’s orders, she said. Dad didn’t have to leave for his office for another hour. Ron slid his feet into his plastic sandals and went downstairs.

His father was already in the kitchen, sitting at the breakfast counter with a cup of steaming coffee in front of him, watching the morning news on the wall TV.

“You’re up early,” said Ron’s father. “Nervous?”

Nodding, Ron answered, “Guess so.”

Mr. Morgan was nearly fifty years old. His hair was gray and thin, with a bald spot showing no matter how he combed it. Ron had seen photos of his father when he had been much younger—he had been tall and trim and he was grinning happily in those pictures. Now he was heavy, almost fat. And he seldom smiled.

Someday I’ll be just like him, Ron thought. Rich and overweight and old. Unless . . .

The wall TV showed a handful of soldiers walking slowly, painfully, through some jungle growth. They looked all worn out: shoulders sagging, mouths hanging open, shirts dark with sweat, eyes red and puffy. One of them had a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his middle. His arms were draped over the shoulders of two buddies, who were half carrying, half dragging him along. All but two of the soldiers on the screen were black. The only black people Ron had ever seen were on TV.

The TV newscaster was saying: “. . . and only sixteen Americans were lost in this skirmish near the Amazon River delta. Fifty-four enemy dead were counted and verified, and . . .”

He sounded so damned cheerful! Ron stared at the soldiers. He knew they were his own age, or maybe a year older, at most. But they looked like old men—old, old men who had seen death so often and so close that nothing else mattered to them.