Dear Mom & Dad,
I’ll be out of the country tomorrow, hopefully for just an hour or two. But I thought I’d write to tell you I love and miss you and I plan on seeing you in October for Dad’s BD.
I’m sure you’ve seen all of the chaos here on TV. It’s much less focused and contained when you’re in the middle of it: There are National Guard troops everywhere and more coming in every hour, and all the news media are scrambling around looking for someone to talk to, and patients are checking out of Imperial Mercy in droves because they’re afraid it could happen again, and there’s a hundred people at least outside the hospital entrance carrying signs that say “Take Back Jimmy” and “America Stand Up” and “Don’t Tread on Me,” and things like that. There’s half-tracks and troop carriers and light tanks all over Buenavista and nowhere to park them so they pull up onto the old stone sidewalks, which busts them up pretty good. There must be a couple thousand Guardsmen here. They’re billeting them in houses if people will take them, and they’ve set up a headquarters in the desert outside of town but that desert is a hostile place.
I saw Jimmy just a few days before they took him, and he was doing better. I’m fearful for him, though. His body was broken but bodies heal. It’s his mind that worries me. Jimmy’s mind was broken, too, and I don’t know if it can survive more pain. Not an hour goes by that I don’t think about how the Zetas could have kidnapped me instead, or anyone else on the Blowdown team. Because it was Jimmy I respect and thank him. I owe him. Dad, maybe you understand that because you always felt the same way about Anderson. I believe that we the living ride on the shoulders of the sick and the crazy and the dead. That sounds morbid but it isn’t.
Know that I love you. I’ll see you soon.
Charlie