The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued

Page 364

luminous. He didn’t reach out. Some memories are best left unthawed.

Tommy Greaves: The Boy Who Didn’t Come Back

Tommy’s draft number came up in early ’68. He wrote Harold a letter from boot camp; half jokes, half dread. Then one from Da Nang, full of sand and silence. Then nothing.

Harold kept those letters in a shoebox under his bed. Tommy never returned. Officially, he was listed MIA, but Harold always believed Tommy had slipped into the jungle and kept walking, shedding names and uniforms until he became something else entirely. A myth. A whisper.

The Echo

In Harold’s later years, he sometimes imagined Judy and Tommy meeting in some parallel timeline; Judy reading poetry in a smoky bar, Tommy tending bar under an alias, both unaware of the boy who once danced beside them in a trembling gym.