All we ask is that the Sound Gun be the actual size of a gun? Instead of, like, a whole building?” The size of a hand-held-help me someone-think of something hand-held.” “It’s just bigger than it should be, Sir,” says Danson, a slight, wall-eyed Presbyterian who carries his mother’s dialysis machine with him at all times in a bowling ball bag, just in case. “Bigger than what,” I ask Danson in a fit, having overheard this complaint for the last time. Everything else is smaller than in other wars, but the Sound Gun is unimaginably bigger. The enlisted men go on about the size of the Sound Gun. They come rushing up at us in the night, tossing sticks and VCRs. Now the people who are fighting with us, and who we are pretty sure are still the enemy, are much more dangerous and harder to kill. It was fun to drive around in the Sound Gun until it stopped working. So we continue to plow through the jungle, convinced that, any day now, a dark, backlit man in a business suit will descend from the sky in a clear pod and usher us home. These rings, we believe, must be the fragrant shards of battles occurring elsewhere in secret. Evenings, it will burst suddenly, shedding a thin purple halo of dense mist. Since the mules ate the communications array we have had only the color of the sky to guide us. We are not entirely sure that the war is still happening. Instead, he just looked at me evenly from the other side of the campfire as I debriefed the group, chewing deliberately at his mule. I speculated that he, out of any of them, would champion the cause, shouldering the weapon from behind, barking fiercely at the enlisted men.
No one is happy about this, not even Shaving Gel, who we call Shaving Gel because he always smells like shaving gel, although we should call him Bulk or Keg or Mountain because he is big. We killed the mules and ate them, and now we are dragging the Sound Gun by hand, using the last of the rope and medical gauze. We managed to haul the weapon out of the deep, fecal muck with two stolen mules, which were of no use to us once we ran out of the dried ice cream, which was the only thing that would get them moving. The engine gave out days ago in a ravine two kilometers south of the parallel.
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