A dead soldier’s little world fits in a tin box. What a shrunken world it is: a tin around its cube of air that in a few years no one will disturb. My brother’s amulet! I thought it was made of wishbones and delicate bones from inside fish-heads, but when I looked close they were the cochleae of a child he’d shot through the eyes. We killed anything that spoke no English. Woman, child, dog, no matter. The woman who stole at night to the river to lather herself in starlit soapwort…we shot her as well. Anything that fluoresces in the night and is not English, you must doubly kill.

“And you sent that sad little box to his mother?”

“I did what you’d do for any mother. You get rid of the macabre amulet. You replace it with his dog tag, his phone, his memory stick. You write the tender note proclaiming her younger son, the younger of all fairy-tales, an honest and good lad who lived very well and always discharged his duties with cheerfulness: He lived and died as a son of yours should—all his friends miss him, and our Colonel made me promise that I’d assure you of his particular concern. Elwyn was an excellent soldier, and if I ever appear to laugh again, or to have a good time in my life, it is because time—a traitor—always lessens the degree to which a bereaved heart swells in sorrow….”

“I see…” Harold pauses and clicks his needles as if in some curious deliberation. “I thought you said your brother’s name was Ned.”

“It was.”

“And some of these things in the box of Elwyn…they were Elwyn’s things, not Ned’s, am I right?” Harold puts his knitting down and touches my tattoo. His hand is warm and I wonder if his continual knitting has permanently heated it. “Elwyn’s things aren’t from your old battlefield, are they? They aren’t from Scotland and they aren’t from Quebec…they’re things a soldier might leave behind in modern warfare.”

Harold resumes knitting. He knows as well as I do that past, present and future are contained in a single length of yarn.

My tattoo is coloured like his wool, but duller, since ink fades and Harold’s wool is new, or is perhaps not wool at all, but something from a dollar store, made in China out of petroleum.

“Modern warfare” is such a contradiction in terms. All warriors descend from a single, ancient Council of War forged at the dawn of manhood, when standing stones mimicked the thrust of our sex and we coated ourselves in vestments so insubstantial they became symbols. Our true garb has always been the tattoo, and mine’s a beauty, bearing my warrior-name and pierced by a sabre that will forever stand straight even if my body should crumple.

19 Nobody

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10.

NIGHT.

Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec