After the war he came back and he was all twitching fingers through ruined glittergold car parts, machinery laid to waste between rustling bonebleached strands of corn like hair, like the scalp of a sleeping-dead giant. After the war he came back and he was all static playing on the radio day after day after day, static where there was once noise and songs and pepsi-cola commercials and between that frantic desperate shouts for help woven between bursts of black-white silence.

He remembered violins and silence and it was almost like there was no silence now, no glimmer of white peace but just static, that same buzzing static playing in his ears. It was like he was laid to waste as well, like the car filled with skeletons and guts leaking out, machine guts still dripping oilblood, it was like he was laid to waste like the carcass he found the first day back that was of some exotic animal from some far-away place, like a deer but much bigger and with fragile magnificent horns curling around and around. When he found the body he chewed back his headache and held his breath and walked around and around like the horns like a spiral until he was close enough to touch it and it was boiling with maggots, just boiling, eyesockets bursting forth unto new life, unto a new civilization erupting from the blindness of the old.

He talked like that to himself sometimes, talked like a god and then he would laugh but it would barely arrive to his own ears amidst the static, amidst the buzz-buzz-buzz, and crying was useless he found because crying did not bring back his brother or the dead animal he found once, did not start up the car again and did not have the bombs un-explode and zoom up into the sky like a movie reel played backwards. Crying did not bring back silence or skeletons, crying did not zap life into vertabrae so a person could stand up again.

After the war he came back and he was all static, but at that point it did not matter much anyway.