They were staying under false pretenses in a fort built by the Dutch in 1675 and designed for people much smaller than he. The doorways were more like cupboards and he nearly split his head several times before he resolved to walk hunch backed and crooked to avoid them altogether.
Both sentries and the cook thought they were active duty military officers. _____ had been out for two months and the he’d made it halfway to a single bar in a different army and that was five years before… but his protests about impersonation and fears of jail in a third world country were buried under ____’s arguments what the sentries didn’t know wouldn’t hurt anyone and then they were at the checkpoint so it was all business anway and in the end no one lied and they were through past the sandbags and the machine gun and the RPG’s, ____ laughing while he cursed and swore that after Diyatalawa they had to draw a line and this was it, god damn it!
The fort was stone, old stone, laidout in the star-type-shape you visited on field trips and backpacking tours, built to give muskets and cannons interlocking fields of fire… but now it was garrisoned now by a battalion of SL infantry and a herd of deer. The guest quarters were in a bastion overlooking the sea and they drank whiskey and ate fresh white fish from the sea while the pale cut of the Milky Way burned and turned above them.
He was thinking how impossibly peculiar Life was that it should bring the two friends and the witless privates and the ever-prompt cook and the fearless deer and the fresh salty fish and the dark arrak together in this old Dutch fort on a remote tropical island beneath the shivering arm of the galaxy… still and alive as ever, even after so much death and distance, and yet.. here they were, a sum of untold countless variables dancing as one in the infinite shimmering night.
