Figures solidified through the mist, emerging as shadows of cloud would pass over the ground. They drifted slow and uncertain. The first faces to emerge were translucent and eerily insubstantial, white, ghostlike. Tentative but otherwise impassive.
Brett clutched a candle in his pocket. It was small and crooked and lumpy, the color of dry oatmeal. It smelled like sulfur, not a pleasant smell. He kept it close. Now and then, when the rain slopped into the trenches and sloshed the dirt floors to mud, Brett would pull out the candle and inhale. His nose forgot how to work sometimes. When colors started to run together and the elements impeded his vision, he’d end up feeling senseless. The sharp, acrid scent of the unlit candle — a clumsy hunk of wax, but still intact — helped him to remember how he worked.
A man, whose oval face was bright and almost too clean, pulled two bars of chocolate from his right pocket.
“Ja?” Brett shook his head. Oval-Face had dark, thick eyebrows that trailed downwards and outwards in arcs, establishing his facial expression as perpetually sympathetic.
“More ‘n’ two,” said Brett. The candle was perfectly preserved. He’d kept it in a clean handkerchief, although he didn’t remember where it had come from. Like other tangible things, it had appeared, perhaps in a package, and later on lived in the moist thin pockets of his uniform, pressed against his skin like a solid leech. The packages arrived neatly wrapped, containing chocolate, candles, pencils, pads, bandages. Men snatched and stowed away chocolate and nuts as if they were gemstones. If you left even a walnut in the package wrappings, the rats would be on it in minutes.
Oval-Face muttered something, blinking. He had a tic of some sort. His eyes kept moving westwards, to something invisible.
The men around them huddled in little groups, exchanging trinkets, sweets, cans of beans and peas. No one offered money; the few coins they had were buried in their packs, their clinking muffled by the pounds of fabric and metal that concealed them. One man, Jerry, pulled a small, discolored apple from his pack, and several men flocked around him. The taste of fruit was so desirable, even that of a bruised, overripe apple. The minute its flesh touched a parched tongue, the muddy trenches would transform themselves into grassy hills, and sun would fall upon their dirt-caked necks, the smell of furnished wood and perfume would replace the stench of rotting bodies thrown into shallow trench-graves. For a few bites.
Brett clutched the waxy stub and swiveled his neck from side to side. He’d planned to drive a hard bargain of no less than five bars of chocolate.
As the mist pressed in further, it was impossible to pinpoint the sun’s location. No-Man’s Land was so obscured by gray drizzle that it was as if they were walking through the very clouds themselves. The ground felt lighter than normal, up out of the trenches, walking on battered ground—battered, but at least your boots didn’t sink into sludge. The soldiers, half-dressed in uniform, helmets left in the trenches, jackets hanging off shoulders, boots unlaced, appeared hazy in the mist, almost like Cloud Men. And what, exactly, did Cloud Men do? They drifted meaninglessly, weaving in and out of blurry sprays of cloud, dropping a rainbow down to Earth every now and then.
Brett’s hair was thinning. His face, he knew, had a scar running down its right cheek. His hands were encrusted with mire, his uniform smelled of gunpowder and oil. The pathetic little stump of wax, drooping in his palm, had the potential to light up his entire face in the dusk. Lit by the glow of a candle, he could recall the days around the campfire when he used to entertain his brothers with tales of spooks and ax-murderers.
Oval-Face had strayed to the left, and was speaking to Jerry, whose apple was long gone. Jerry had a stub of lead, which Oval-Face wanted. He gesticulated with thin, delicate fingers, which whirled through the air like nervous birds. They fluttered, landed on his pristine face and the collar of his uniform and returned to the pocket where he’d stowed his chocolate.
Someone blew through a dented harmonica, and the weak, wavering notes of a Christmas carol hung in the air, seeming to last interminably. Brett couldn’t quite remember the song. Its words were just on the edge of his mind.
“Next Christmas I’ll be eating a roast,” said Jerry. He’d bestowed Oval-Face with the stub of lead — “in the spirit of the ‘olidays,” he explained — free of charge. Brett peered to the left and could just make out Oval-Face stuffing the lead into his bulging pockets. He wondered why Oval-Face wanted the stub. Maybe they didn’t have pencils on the other side.
As the mist intensified, he thought of the real Cloud-Men, and wondered how they made rainbows. Perhaps they peed those colors, and that was what made those streaks across the sky. Urinating the color spectrum. He grinned a side-grin.
“Me too,” said Brett. “I hope.”