For All Time

By Jackie Black

12 min read

Why does it matter? Because the person you love most might be the reason you finally choose to stop surviving and start living.

Here is a man who died saving people he loved, and here is another man who spent years mourning people he never met. History, in its blunt and indifferent way, drops one into the arms of the other — mud-soaked, gas-burned, a century displaced — and calls it coincidence. Heroes for Ghosts asks a question that sounds impossible until you feel the full weight of it: what if survivor's guilt isn't just a wound to heal, but a compass pointing toward the one person who can make the sacrifice mean something? Stanley Sullivan died so his battalion could live. Devon Foster built his entire interior world around men already buried. When those two gravitational forces collide in a field of white crosses outside a French village, what follows isn't escape from history — it's a reckoning with whether love is strong enough to rewrite what already happened, and costly enough to demand everything in return.

The Gap Between the Poster and the Trench Is Where the Story Begins

Stanley is standing in a trench in 1918, shaking so hard he tells himself it's from the cold. His three friends — Bertie, Isaac, Rex — are dead. A mortar shell did it, and Stanley knows, with the particular cruelty of hindsight, that if he had said something earlier about the radio being too exposed, they might have moved it, and the radio might still work, and maybe his friends would still be breathing. He said nothing. So now Lieutenant Billings is bent over a useless transmitter, coaxing static from a bent wire, while somewhere beyond the trench line the German shells are finding their range. The gap between the recruitment posters of Stanley's youth — the flag rippling, the caption promising righteousness — and the landscape he actually inhabits, mud the color of rust and worse things mixed in, is so complete it barely registers as irony anymore. It just registers as mud.

What steels Stanley for the suicide run he eventually volunteers for isn't courage in any poster sense. It's the blood and tissue from Rex's skull that he finds on his own wool sweater vest. That detail — not a roar of fury, not a speech about duty, just a man looking down at his own chest — tells you exactly what the war has done to the threshold of horror. Stanley doesn't break. He buttons up and runs.

A century later and several miles from where those trenches were, a young American named Devon is lying spreadeagled in wet grass in the rain, arms wide, eyes open to the sky. He has removed his shoes and socks to make the contact more real. He genuinely believes the earth holds memory, and that if he goes still enough, he might absorb it. His friends think he is strange. He knows they think he is strange.

One man is inside the catastrophe, trying to survive. The other is a hundred years downstream, pressing his bare feet into the same mud, trying to reach back through the static. That's where the story begins.

A Museum Piece and a Weapon Walk Into the Same Field

Think of two people standing on opposite sides of a one-way mirror. That's the geometry of the scene when Stanley Sullivan, still coated in the mustard gas that felled him, stumbles across the grass and trips over Devon Foster lying barefoot in the rain — and the central dramatic engine of what follows is already loaded.

Stanley pulls his rifle on Devon. To Stanley it is a Winchester 1912, brand new, issued at the end of basic training, scratched with his own initials so he'd know it from the others in a shell blast. Devon takes it away from him — quickly, competently, with the ease of someone who has handled such things before — and then holds it close to his face and sighs. Museum quality, he says. Did you steal it? The century between them compresses into that single object. To one man it is a tool for survival; to the other it is an artifact of settled history. Both are completely, justifiably certain. The rifle doesn't change. What changes is when you're standing.

Devon's certainty is the more interesting one, because it costs him something. While Stanley showers for the first time since summer, Devon lays the uniform out on the couch and goes through it piece by piece: the sweater vest still warm from Stanley's skin, the bayonet lug that looks fresh from the factory, the canteen water that smells sharply of iodine — the standard battlefield purification against dysentery. None of it adds up to costume. Devon knows this. He knows the smell of iodine, knows the cut of the puttees, knows that American soldiers wore blue denim while this khaki shirt suggests a British regimental supply. He knows because he has spent months absorbing every spreadsheet, every weather chart, every archived photograph of the 44th Battalion's final days. He is, by any measure, the world's foremost expert on the event Stanley just walked out of. And yet the man he has just met knows more than he does about the leather strap the rats ate off a helmet.

When Stanley finally breaks — shouting that he is not crazy, that only this morning he watched the blood and minds of his friends spray across his own chest — Devon goes quiet in a way that is different from before. He stops cataloguing. The mirror flips. Devon has spent years lying down in wet fields trying to absorb the memory of men he loves through the soil. Now one of those men has literally fallen into his arms. Devon sets the uniform aside and stands. He moves toward the kitchen, where a single orange sits on the counter, and the feeling the book captures in that moment is not shock.

It's recognition.

Domesticity Is the Real Time Travel

The real time travel in this book happens in a kitchen, not a battlefield. Before Devon can explain microwaves or laptops or smartphones to Stanley, he offers him an orange — and that single piece of fruit becomes the most honest measurement of the distance between their worlds.

Stanley picks it up with shaking hands. He peels it slowly, then shoves an entire slice into his mouth at once, cheeks full, eyes shut, lashes resting on his cheeks. He chews without embarrassment and without hurry. When he finally opens his eyes, it's the way you surface from a dream you don't want to leave. Devon is watching, and what he sees in that moment does what months of thesis research couldn't: it makes the history personal. No actor hired to play a World War I soldier would think to perform that expression — the involuntary, total relief of a nineteen-year-old who hasn't tasted fresh fruit since enlisting. Devon, who has spent years lying in wet fields trying to absorb the memory of that war through the earth, is now watching it eat an orange across his kitchen table.

Everything Devon offers after that — the coffee with raw sugar, the hot shower where the water stays the same temperature for the full duration, the steaks and wine and pastries from the village — repeats the same test. Stanley compares Devon's bathroom to the open ditch that passed for a latrine in the trench, the cold and the smell of it, and the contrast doesn't read as comedy. It reads as measurement. The gap between those two realities is the gap the book is actually asking you to hold.

Devon understands this intuitively, which is why he calibrates carefully — one bearable domestic thing at a time, constructing a path across a century. By the moment he tears the last pastry in half and holds a piece out to Stanley, the reader understands that care given through ordinary objects is the only currency that actually crosses the gap. The impossible thing brought him here; the orange is what keeps him.

Devon Holds the Map of Stanley's Death and Says Nothing

What does it feel like to know how someone dies before they do? Not in the abstract way we all know death is coming, but with a date, a mechanism, a weather pattern that sealed the outcome? Devon is in that position for almost the entire novel, and it never becomes comfortable.

By the time Stanley is sitting across from Devon eating leftover pastries by lamplight, Devon already knows what the record says: the 44th Battalion was wiped out in the first days of November 1917, outgunned and undersupplied, the roads too flooded to bring in reinforcements, the radio smashed before the retreat order could be confirmed. He has read Stanley's ending. And Stanley is asking him to pass the last half of a pastry.

The retreat code is where this irony draws blood. Devon finds it in a history book — the complete phrase, both halves in the same place for the first time. Stanley's half, which he'd been carrying alone and undeliverable since the radio was destroyed, is the opening: there are penguins on the ice. The recorded completion is: and they skate brilliant figure eights. Seven words. Devon reads them aloud, and what crosses Stanley's face isn't relief. It's the arithmetic of catastrophe — all the names attached to those seven missing words, Isaac and Rex and Bertie and the rest, the specific lives that information could have purchased. Devon watches this happen and knows he caused it by looking, by turning the comfortable project of research into a weapon pointed at the man he loves.

That scene is the hinge the whole novel has been building toward. Devon has treated his expertise as a form of shelter — something he could offer Stanley the way he offered the orange and the hot shower and the borrowed jeans. But knowing the code doesn't rewrite the record; it only measures the distance between what happened and what could have. Devon closes the book and puts his arms around Stanley, and the gesture says what he can't: there are things you cannot fix by knowing them better. He's started leaving the porch light on each night — a small, irrational habit for a man the history books have already buried. Rational certainty lost. Something older and harder to name won.

The Body Unlearns Fear More Slowly Than the Mind Accepts Facts

Stanley has already accepted, on some intellectual level, that his feelings for Isaac were real. Devon told him almost offhandedly that same-sex love is legal now — in France, in England, in the States, even celebrated enough that two men can marry in Iceland — and Stanley went very still. Not relieved. Still. Because the mind can absorb a fact in a sentence, and the body takes considerably longer. What arrived in that stillness wasn't liberation. It was the image of Isaac's face, the small pencil scar on his chin, and the specific shape of what it would have meant to hold him and keep him safe — followed immediately by the knowledge that Isaac is dead beneath a white cross, and that Stanley never said a word.

That is the emotional condition Stanley carries into every physical moment with Devon: a desire that has no prior permission and no surviving referent. Devon understands this well enough to be careful. In Chapter 21, he asks 'Can I?' before every small gesture — before his hands move, before he closes any distance — and Stanley finds the question almost incomprehensible. His only model for intimacy is a wax-tasting kiss at an army send-off dance, and the secondhand stories soldiers traded about the red lamp district in Paris. Devon's vocabulary of explicit consent is a foreign language, and Stanley learns it slowly, one patient question at a time, shaking not from fear but from something that has no name in 1917.

The turn comes in Chapter 25, and it comes from Stanley. Devon has been the instructor, the guide, the man who knows what lube is and how to be gentle — and then Stanley stops him with an observation that lands like a hand on the chest. Some of those soldiers in Paris, he says, actually loved the women they were with. It was their last night on earth, and they gave each other everything they had. Devon goes silent. He has spent years sitting with the grief of those men, carrying their last hours as a kind of private debt, and suddenly Stanley — who was there — is handing him the interior of it. Then Stanley adds, quickly, that they are not like those soldiers. Because it isn't the last night on earth. The war is over, for them.

In that moment the book shifts weight entirely. Stanley steadies Devon, not the other way around. The body's unlearning isn't just slower than the mind's — it sometimes arrives first at the truth the mind has been circling. Devon knew every fact about the war. Stanley knew what it felt like to love someone with the clock running out, and to understand, finally, that the war is over, for them.

Saving Everyone Is the Loneliest Act in the Book

Stanley already has the code. That's the detail the book buries in its most harrowing chapter and then waits for you to sit with. When Lieutenant Billings tells him the first half — there are penguins on the ice — Stanley already knows the completion Devon found in a history book: and they skate brilliant figure eights. He doesn't need to run the gauntlet between the trenches. He doesn't need to flag down a major who may already be dead. He needs only to wait the appropriate amount of time and return as if he'd done the thing. So he crawls behind a blasted howitzer that smells of leaked fuel and mud-soaked bodies, closes his eyes, and counts to a thousand. The thousand counts aren't cowardice. They're the price of not explaining to Lieutenant Billings how a soldier who just watched his friends almost die already has classified military intelligence from a century in the future. Stanley counts and thinks of Devon's face — every specific angle of it, the green eyes, the dark hair, the way Devon looked at him like he was worth something — and waits for the math to work out.

What he does next is what the book means by heroism. He returns with the code. Billings orders the full retreat of the 44th Battalion. Stanley watches Isaac and Rex and Bertie lead the men up and out and away from the gas pooling at the bottom of the trenches. Then he stays behind to check for stragglers, because that's the kind of man he is, and a canister cracks overhead. The mustard gas gets him anyway. Not in spite of his knowledge but almost because of it — he was the last one left to breathe it.

Devon wakes the next morning to a cottage emptied for the second time. This disappearance left evidence: the rifle propped in the corner, the canteen, and hanging from the bayonet blade, Stanley's ID tag. Stanley removed his own good-luck charm and left it for Devon to find — accepting his vulnerability, buying Devon his sanity. Devon pockets the tag and walks out into the rain toward the memorial. Where there had been white crosses stretching in rows across the green, there is now a single column of smooth white marble. One name: Wilifred Sullivan, November 10, 1917. The only record left is this stone, and the one man who remembers both versions of history is a graduate student standing in the rain with a hemp-cord dog tag pressed into his fist.

The loneliness of that position is specific and not recoverable. Stanley's name is on the monument. Devon is the sole witness to what it replaced. The heroism was real, the love was real, the cost was a single marble column and a man who will spend the rest of his life holding two memories where everyone else holds one.

When the Mission Is Truly Done, the Past Stops Pulling

Devon poses Stanley in the center of the cottage living room — full uniform, forty-eight-eyelet boots laced, puttees wrapped in careful layers, dented canteen slung at his hip — and lifts his smartphone. The flash fires. Stanley's eyes sting. Nothing else happens. No transit, no gravitational drag, no trench opening at his back. Stanley tells Devon the sensation is simply different now, emptied of whatever force it once carried. The mission is complete, and the machinery of return has nothing left to pull on.

What follows is the book's most quietly extraordinary image. Devon wraps his arms around Stanley in relief, and the 1917 uniform begins to disintegrate where Devon's hands rest. Not dramatically — it doesn't burst or burn. It crumbles. The wool falls to flakes, the leather of the boots shrinks and turns to grit, the hemp cord around Stanley's neck melts on the warm air from the radiator. When the seams of his trousers split and sigh away to dust, Stanley steps out of a century's worth of obligation and stands in Devon's cottage in nothing but skin. Time has done its housekeeping.

Only three things survive the dissolution: the metal ID tag, the canteen with its dented side, and a small packet of chocolate squares that a soldier named Isaac pressed into Stanley's pocket on the final morning of his first life. Devon handles the packet the way you'd handle something you know you can't replace. Then he opens it, breaks off a square, and hands it across. They eat the last physical artifact of the 44th Battalion together — the chocolate dark and gritty, nothing like anything manufactured in this century.

The heroism cost Stanley everything he wore and every world he knew. What the past left behind when it finally let go was an ID tag, a dented canteen, and something sweet enough to share.

The Only Witness to the World That Was

Devon holds two images at once: the marble column, and the graveyard it replaced. Love doesn't undo the loss. It just means the loss gets witnessed by someone who understood what it was worth.