"You completely skipped the part about your brothers."
He turned away. There was a twitching in his hands first, then a neck roll, throat clear, a rupture in the mist but not enough to lift it. We couldn't see beyond ten feet out there. Even with uniform, smeared with blood, mud of opponents natural, unnatural, and unnamed, I saw the first ripples of a happening so delicate and rare: like the rainbow it only happens in certain special conditions, a sparse shower, gloom with a side of glory, the cement-smoke clouds advance and retreat hazarding a return to storm. That's what it was like seeing a man cry. Seeing him unburden himself of helpless fate, watching death over his shoulder, facing the floor, and having your hurt multiply with his. It's a child at the height of an AK-47, out of place and cruel, and heartbreaking to watch. Have you ever seen that? There's a brutality in bearing witness to it. And you just want to take it away, whatever it is that harmed him, do shameless violence to it, especially if you love him. Unless the source of his hurt is you. I thought that in the moment: what if it's me? How do I take myself away? But if you're sure, you don't go away. You do what you can to wrap him in protective dignity with whatever you can find. Because if you leave him alone he just may do something, what men do: yank the problem out at the root, solve the issue, obsess himself to bodily breakdown to the answer, end the pain. So I used my renewed vitality to hold him hard and give him heat in that cold place. When he squeezed back making me gasp, I knew I'd done the right thing.
—Keith Hayden
Cereus & Limnic: Escape From Okinawa
Behind-the-scene
There's an old 90s song by Tony Terry called "When A Man Cries."
I heard it when I was young and thought about it as I wrote this scene today.
The chorus stays at the top of my mind often:
‘Cause when a man cries, he’s giving you his soul He’s giving you his love and his emotions And when the tears fall And he’s reaching out his hands There’s nothing more tender Than the woman loving tears of a man (Tears)
It's a great song
That's what I wanted to channel here.
Last time I cried as of this writing was two weeks ago. It surprised me. But the circumstances surrounding it were serious and seemed insurmountable.
It's that moment when you've hit a wall. When no amount of physical effort, strategy, or support will solve the issue. You can only sit and give up (at least for that moment). A wholly image disrupting place to be.
For this scene, the goal was to take that feeling and ponder the question: what's it like watching this? What's it like when it's a man that you're used to seeing solve problems and walk the road of mastery daily? How do you help him without making it worse or denying your own emotions in the process?
This is my attempted answer to that question.
Given the circumstances of the novel, in the middle of an active (fictional) hot war between three major powers, the character (who is a genetically enhanced soldier) feels even more out of place.
That's the horror of the scene. No blood or monster necessary, just a justified expression of emotion from an unlikely source.
