Dalton bought a used F150 in Kalamazoo with oil rig money and drove north to a trailer he owned south of Mancelona. It squatted on ten acres that were his along a creek. It was way out in the boonies, very secluded at the end of a long and winding lane behind a tree line. He let two chucklehead brothers, Dace and Lee Morton, live there. They had been a couple years behind him in high school.

The Morton boys sold weed, but Dalton didn’t give a shit. That was their gig and not his. Live and let live. He was just the landlord. They were good about keeping the place up and if they got caught, it had nothing to do with him. He would just point out that he arranged the rental by phone and took his payments by wire down in Florida.

He hadn’t been there in three years. That was back in 75, just after Saigon fell. Some days, Vietnam seemed like a long time ago. Some days, it didn’t. And some days, but not so many anymore, it seemed like yesterday.

Dalton flashed his headlights on and off a few times. It wasn’t some pre-arranged signal, which the two chuckleheads would have forgotten by now, but he knew not to just barrel up the lane and startle them. He figured they kept a few weapons, and they weren’t the brightest bulbs around. And they were perpetually medicated. Drugs and guns — what could possibly go wrong?

He gave them some time to get sorted and then he eased slowly up the lane, flashing his headlights again for good measure. No cop would come up like that. He knew that and knew they would, too.

Dalton pulled on up to the trailer and got out and stood next to the truck for a moment, to let them get a good look. A flashlight beam from one of those big camping lights got switched on him. It lingered on his eyes. He put a hand over them after a few seconds.

“Okay, dickheads—knock off the fucking searchlight shit.”

“Jesus — that you, Dalton?”

“No – it’s fucking Yosemite Sam.”

 “Yeah, that’s Dalton,” a second voice said.

 

 

There were two young, pretty girls inside with Dace and Lee. Both blonds. No surprise there. Barely over eighteen, by the look of them. No surprise there either. They were stoned to the gills. Again — no surprise. Weed dealers always had a pretty girl or two hanging on, mooching weed and speed in exchange for sex. Not quite customers and not quite girlfriends. A sort of entourage born of necessity and practicality.

The trailer reeked of weed, but it was otherwise clean, orderly. An empty pizza carton was on the coffee table. He wondered who delivered this far out. A bong was propped against a sofa. He had been right that the Morton boys would keep the place together. Dace switched the stereo back on. Dalton recognized Zeppelin right off, but it was an older album – Houses of the Holy.

Dalton signaled for Dace to cut the volume some, so he could be heard, and he dialed it back to background music.

 “How are you, Dalton? Long time no see.”

Dalton nodded.

 “That album is, like, five years old,” he said.

“We’re just getting around to it,” Lee said.

The blonds had glassy stares.

Dalton nodded again. Dace passed a joint and Dalton took a hit but declined the second time around. He didn’t mind cutting the edge from the long drive, but he wasn’t interested in getting baked until he had a good lay of the land.

“Lee,” Dace said, “why don’t you fetch old Dalton here a cold brewski.”

Lee smirked and went to the kitchen.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Dalton said.

“Long trip?” Dace smiled.

Dalton leaned back and sighed. Lee came around the corner and handed him a cold Pabst. Dalton took a healthy swig.

“The train up from Florida,” he said and took another swig. “Then the drive from Kalamazoo. Yeah, it’s been a long, strange trip.”

He wondered if they got The Grateful Dead reference.

“New truck?” Lee said.

“A new old one,” Dalton said. “Just bought it in Kalamazoo.”

“Staying long?” Lee said.

“Forever and a year.”

He drained the rest of the beer and Lee got him another.

“You worked up a thirst,” Lee said.

One of the blonds abruptly said, “Can we turn the music up?”

Dace patted her thigh.

“Hold on, baby. We’re having a little talk here with our old pal Dalton.”

“Who’s Dalton?” she said. Dace fired up another joint and handed it to her. The two blonds passed the joint back and forth and giggled.

“I need a place to crash tonight,” Dalton said.

“Well, your casa is your casa,” Lee said, sniggering.

Dalton didn’t like the sound of Lee’s voice. Never had. The boy had always struck him as barely north of retard.

“You come at the right time,” Dace said, a quick frown aimed at Lee.

“Why’s that?”

Dalton leaned forward.

“We’re going on a road trip tomorrow.” Dace grinned. “The four of us.”

“Is his name Dalton?” one of the blonds said. To Dalton, they really did seem interchangeable.

“Where to?” Dalton said.

“Chicago.”

“How long?”

“Four, maybe five days.”

“Pizza at Giordano’s,” Lee said. “Wrigley Field and all that shit. We get to sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Dalton and Dace rolled their eyes. Dalton knew Lee was an idiot. So did Dace. Still just a happy-go-lucky high school kid, really. But he would probably not grow up beyond assistant weed dealer. And he would probably turn up dead in a ditch someday. Dace was the brains of the outfit, but that wasn’t saying much.

“Taking the train down to Chi-Town,” Dace said. “Like real tourists.”

“So, a pleasure trip,” Dalton said.

“Some business, too. There’s a vehicle to drive back.”

“Of course.” Dalton figured Chicago was their source of supply. It made him think of Seymour, of Vietnam, but he managed to shake the images away. “How much product you got on hand now?”

Dalton was mostly just making small talk, but he was curious, too. It was his trailer.

“Just what we need for recreation,” Dace said matter-of-factly. “We never keep any amount here.”

He had a smug look. Dalton figured that was to let him know he knew his business.

“Smart.” Dalton sipped his beer. “You never know who might pull up the lane.”

“You did,” Dace said, grinning.

“Sorry to bust in on you unannounced.”

“Don’t say bust, man,” Lee said, attempting the joke.

Dace glanced at Lee.

“Lee, why don’t you take the ladies outside for a little snipe hunt, so me and Dalton can talk.”

Lee nodded and took them out. They held hands and stumbled, nearly falling to the floor.

“What’s a snipe?” one of the blonds said.

“Bye, Dalton,” the other blond said, waving.

After they were gone, Dace said, “She’ll keep you company, if you like.”

Dalton grinned but shook his head.

“That’s mighty generous of you, Dace. But maybe another time. I’m wrecked from the road.”

“Anything we ought to know?”

“Like what?”

Dace leaned forward.

“Like, why you ain’t on an oil rig in the Gulf, making good bread.”

“I made enough for a while. Three years of it.”

“How much is enough?”

“My needs are simple. And now I have cheap wheels. You ever even seen an oil rig, Dace?”

“Can’t say I have.” He expertly rolled another joint. “But I have bought a few oil filters in my time. Other than Chicago, I ain’t never been farther than Detroit.”

“You ain’t missed much,” Dalton said. He decided he could partake after all. Dace handed it to him and he fired it up. He wasn’t going anywhere. No plans to operate heavy machinery, including his brain. His only tangible plan was to stay off that asshole Seymour’s radar. He didn’t know if that was possible. But it was a theory that needed to be tested. The future—whatever was in it – was limited by Seymour’s radar screen.

After the joint, Dace turned up the music just enough to be heard clearly. Zeppelin was playing “The Song Remains the Same.” Dalton nodded and kept time and thought, yeah, that’s life. It tends to usually stay the same. You had to break out to have a chance at all. Breaking out meant finding a door. If there was one. Life was often just four walls and no door.

“You’re not here for just a joint,” Dace said. “Not after three years.”

Dalton thought a moment, which wasn’t easy because it was primo weed and it cooked inside him pretty well. He could see himself just turn up the knob and groove to Zeppelin rocking the trailer on its foundation.

“I might want to build a little something out here, by the creek,” he said after a long pause. “A cabin, maybe. But livable.”

“You got enough for all that?”

Dalton mulled how much he’d made on oil rigs. And then there was the money from Seymour. The payoff for keeping quiet about something they’d done in Nam involving drugs, which made Dalton indebted to Seymour. Accomplice was a better way to put it, but he was too tired now for that shit.

“Yeah, I reckon I can swing it.”

Dace nodded but looked slightly skeptical.

“How do you figure to make a living? No oil rigs around here.”

Dalton shrugged.

“I could sell a few acres, if I need to. One step at a time.”

“And you don’t need dope dealers as neighbors.”

“It ain’t that.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, Dace, I’m sure. And I’d do you a deal, for taking care of the trailer.”

Dace thought in terms of deals, related best to deals.

“What kind of deal?”

Dalton went to the kitchen and got a beer to buy time, to make sure he knew what he was doing. He brought Dace one, too.

 “To getting evicted,” Dace said, holding up his PBR.

“I’d give you the trailer,” Dalton said abruptly.

“Say again?”

“Just haul her to a new location out in the boonies somewhere. You could be back in business in under twenty-four hours.”

“For real?”

“Sure. We can put a hitch on my truck to do it.”

Dace eased back in his chair and mulled it. He smiled.

“Mighty white of you, Dalton.”

“Well, shit, I’m feeling especially white, I reckon.”

“When do we do it?”

“Not for a while,” Dalton said. “No hurry.”

“Winter’s coming, Dalton. Comes early here in case you forgot that down in sunny Florida.”

Dalton nodded.

“Maybe I break ground first, before a freeze. Get a foundation down for spring.”

“Cool.” Dace passed the joint to him. “So, what’s Florida really like?”

“Hot.”

Dace nodded and waited to hear more, but Dalton just passed the joint back and leaned back into the sofa, glancing at the ceiling a moment, exhaling smoke.

“Sometimes,” Dace said, “me and Lee think about shifting business down to Florida.”

Dalton raised his head and smirked.

“That would be like opening a McDonald’s on a whole block of McDonald’s, my friend.”

Dace nodded and looked disappointed.

“It was just a thought.”

 “Uh-huh.” Dalton knew Dace lacked enough drive to make such a move. And Lee had no drive at all. They would live and die as the weed kings of Antrim County. And probably in a low, short trajectory.

“But, man — thanks on the trailer.” Dace sipped his beer and then offered a hand. They shook vigorously. “You always done right by us, man. I appreciate it.”

“Esta bien,” Dalton said, not immediately aware it came out Spanish.  “No sweat, Dace.”

“You speak much Mexican?” Dace said.

“Spanish, Dace.”

“Pardon my French.”

“Yeah, I know a little. From the rigs.”

Lee and the blonds came back in, and it took a minute for the blonds to get situated on a sofa and fire up a joint. Dalton partook in that one, too. He figured he was now sort of on vacation. Or something close to it. A lull of some kind. A lull away from that fuck Seymour. Calm before the Seymour storm? He couldn’t discount that. But it was okay to get good and baked and let Zeppelin drill a hole in his head.

“Lee said you got a Purple Heart in Vietnam,” one of the blonds abruptly said to Dalton.

“Did he?”

“That’s what the man said.”

“Must be true, then.” Dalton put his hand over his heart. “But it doesn’t feel purple.”

“Did it hurt?” she said.

Dalton looked at Dace and rolled his eyes. Dace chuckled.

“Naw,” Dalton said. He didn’t think a serious war story was the way to go with the blond. It would just be more than she could relate to. But he rolled up his sleeve anyway and showed her the long scar. He didn’t know why.

“Just a bee sting, really,” he said.

She ran her finger along the scar.

“A bullet did that?”

“I guess so.”

 “You’re not sure?”

She was baked even worse than he was.

“Yeah, I’m sure. A bullet. Bob the bee bullet.”

“That’s gnarly,” the other blond said. Dalton hadn’t heard anyone use that word since he rolled through California on the way back from Nam. He’d spent an interesting week in Frisco with some hippies in Haight-Ashbury. He learned right off that the locals hated the name Frisco. Only outsiders used it. Travel was always an education. Florida was where he learned too much about that bastard Seymour.

The other blond leaned closer for a look at the scar.

“Lee says you got a Bronze Star, too.”

“Lee’s quite the encyclopedia,” Dalton said.

“What’s a Bronze Star?” the blond said.

“A medal, for being brave,” Lee said.

“Were you brave?” she said, grinning. She touched his elbow lightly.

“Not at all,” Dalton said. “It’s just bullshit.”

“If it’s bullshit, why’d you get one?”

“They pass them out like candy.”

“But you must have done something,” she said.

Dalton sipped his beer and studied her face a moment. The lighting was dim, just a soft -bulb lamp in a corner and the lights from the stereo, and he couldn’t quite make out her features.

“I guarded the rubbers,” Dalton said.

Dace and Lee laughed. The two blonds looked confused.

“Rubbers?” one of them said. “Somebody had to guard rubbers?”

“Yeah—we had a whole warehouse of them.”

“Bullshit,” one of the blonds said.

“No, it wasn’t. Couldn’t just let the enemy get them, right?”

“And who again was the enemy?” one of the blonds said.

Dalton realized it no longer mattered which one it was. Keeping track was irrelevant. And history? Fuck history. Americans didn’t know history.

“The VC,” Dalton said soberly. “Victor Charles – the Vietcong.”

“That sounds nasty,” a blond said.

“Didn’t they have their own rubbers?” another blond said.

Dalton and Dace laughed loudly. Lee brought beers from the kitchen.

“What’d I miss?” Lee said.

“Alice wanted to know why the VC didn’t have rubbers,” Dace said.

Dalton looked at the two blonds and wondered which one was Alice. He ought to have paid attention at that point but said to himself, fuck it. We are now all baked in an oven and turning brown. Go ahead and spread cinnamon on us.

A blond squeezed Dalton’s knee and he figured it must be Alice. Or one of the other blonds. He nearly laughed at loud at the notion of a room full of stoned blonds.

“Primo weed,” he said to Dace, who nodded confidently.

“I really want to know why there were so many rubbers,” Alice said. “Is that all you guys did over there?”

Dalton chuckled and then got a few, fleeting images from Vietnam, and it all kind of swept over him suddenly and he shivered.

“We put them over the barrels of rifles,” Dalton said calmly, after a pause. The images had slipped away. He had a swig of beer.

“That’s what you called your cocks – rifles?” Alice chuckled. “You guys always think with your dicks.”

“Wow!” Lee said, shaking his head.

“We put them over the rifles to keep water out, to keep them dry,” Dalton said quietly, seriously.

“You mean real guns?” Alice said.

“Yeah.” Dalton finished his beer. “As real as it gets.”

Silence set in among them for a minute, just Zeppelin low in the background. The album had been started over and Dalton again heard “The Song Remains the Same.” There was a lesson in that if he could think well enough to say it. He stood, a little rubbery in the legs.

“I could use a blanket or two, and a pillow,” he said.

“Lee, get the man some blankets and a pillow,” Dace said quietly. Lee came back from the bedroom with them, and Dalton slipped the blankets under an arm and clutched the pillow. He turned toward the door.

“We got a spare room, Dalton,” Dace said. “It’s your trailer, man.”

Dalton glanced back.

“I want to sleep outside. By the creek.”

“Your call,” Dace said.

“What if it rains?” Lee said and Dalton thought of many nights it rained in Vietnam.

“I want to hear the water rush by,” he said. “And see the moon.”

“Okay, man,” Dace said. “Your wish is our command. Lee, help him with that door.”

Dalton stepped out and walked toward the creek. Crickets performed an amazing symphony, and he was so baked he felt he could reach up and touch the moon.

He dumped his bedding under a tree hanging over the water and he propped himself against a boulder and listened to the riffles in the creek. It was a lovely sound that seemed as strong and loud as Niagara Falls.

“Good damn weed,” he told the creek. “You should try some.”

In a few minutes, Alice showed up and handed him a beer. He figured he had room for one more beer. Just one. She didn’t say anything. She played with a curl of hair next to her ear and grinned, looking down at him for a few seconds, and then she sat beside him.

“So,” she said, drawing the word out like it was taffy,” are you all fucked up from that shitty war.”

She was direct. Dalton liked direct.

“Are you asking if I’m crazy?”

“Well, not insane,” she said. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Good to know.”

“There’s all sorts of fucked up,” she said.

“True enough. Are you asking if I’m a violent asshole —shit like that?”

“Well, are you?”

“Make love, not war,” he said, chuckling.

“That’s just a saying.”

He held a hand up, making the peace sign right in front of her face.

“Peace, love, dope,” Dalton said.

“You’re avoiding the subject.”

Dalton drew his knees up under his chin and listened to the water.

“No, I’m not crazy. Or violent. The first couple years back in the world, I had trouble sleeping but that worked itself out.”

“Nightmares?” she said.

“A few. But they finally went away. Just up and went.”

“Why?”

He shrugged.

“One day I just reminded myself they couldn’t send me back to Nam. That door was closed. Locked. Game over. Things perked up some after that.”

“What did you see?” she said.

“In Nam?”

“No, in your nightmares. What were they like?”

Dalton tried to remember one of them clearly, which was hard at first because it had been a while. Only hazy fragments came to him. Jagged pieces of the puzzle.

“I really can’t remember much now. Maybe that’s for the best.”

“But surely you remember something?” she said.

He sighed and looked up at the moon for a moment. It looked the same as in Vietnam. The moon was the moon was the moon.

“I remember little things.”

“Like what?” she said.

“Smells.”

“Just smells?”

“And the fucking heat.”

“Good,” she said. “This is progress. What else?”

“And how birds stopped talking to each other when someone was coming, and the jungle would go as quiet as a graveyard.”

“Good,” she said. “We’re rolling now. What else?”

“I remember the fucking drippy humidity. It was like a steam bath.”

“Like down in Florida?”

“Yeah, but nobody was shooting at me in Florida. And we had AC.”

“And now you’re home, safe and sound.”

“That’s the rumor.”

They watched the water, moonlight kissing the surface, and for a long time, neither of them spoke. The weed and alcohol and fatigue from the road now weighed him down and he felt himself slipping away. A benign darkness descending. He wanted to talk more with Alice. Lovely Alice. But she was now just a dark face in the moonlight as his eyes fluttered. The booze and primo weed did their anesthetic duty and tugged at him, pulling him deeper, and then he smirked before he sank for a while into the peaceful abyss.

Dalton was reasonably sure he wouldn’t dream about Vietnam.

The motto of the U.S. Marine Corps, or USMC, is “Semper Fidelis.” Commonly translated to “always faithful,” the motto—adopted in 1883 upon the urging of Colonel Charles McCawley, 8^th commandant of the Marine Corps—replaced earlier mottos, including “with courage” and “by sea, by land.”

The definition of the motto and what it “means” to be a Marine is different for different people, and almost never exactly what one probably thinks from the outside looking in. Now commonly shortened to “Semper Fi” by Marines, the motto and its history bear testament to the essentially arbitrary way in which rules are enforced not only in and by the USMC, but by and in American society, as well. After all, “Semper Fi” means “always fi,” in Latin—fi means nothing, it’s a nonsensical term. Taken at face value, the reduction of a motto to shorthand underlines the motto’s essential mutability. Faithful… to what? Each other, the constitution, the president? Always… since 1883?

Meaning, as every adult understands, is highly contextual. This essential truth underlines most modernist and all post-modernist art and literature. When one takes the changeable truth of life and runs it through a harsh and dogmatic set of ideals, the resulting psychical energy is sufficiently powerful to drive some people to superhuman acts of discipline, in the name of honor and self-respect, and this is very useful when fighting a dedicated enemy. It drives almost everyone else mad, according to the extent to which they failed to live up to those ideals. Some rationalize their misbehavior, building up elaborate personal philosophies to justify their actions. Others descend into pessimism and become jaded.

Teresa Fazio is a proud former Marine, and her war memoir—Fidelis—grapples with that mutability at the heart of everyday life, and her own efforts to live up to ideals. It is a top rate book about war, and how serving in the Marines requires great reservoirs of emotional energy under normal circumstances, but especially on deployment to Iraq. It will resonate with anyone who has served in the military. Fidelis may even give military leaders something to think about when it comes to setting and enforcing rules.

The story begins with Fazio’s difficult family background—a household broken by infidelity, and an abusive stepfather, the type of situation that breaks many people down and ruins their potential before they have a chance to properly begin their lives. The setting did not break Fazio. Instead, she discovered great reservoirs of personal forbearance that complemented an aptitude for science. She put herself through MIT on a Marine Corps ROTC scholarship. She also learned early to rely on herself to succeed and overcome obstacles in an effort to achieve independence in two worlds dominated by men, first, that of science, then, that of the military.

One of the threads that Fazio follows from her childhood through the military and then afterwards is her complicated relationship with femininity. Growing up, she seems to see in her mother’s adultery a kind of moral hazard specific to women, and this feeling is reinforced by the masculine circles in which she moves. It takes time and great effort for Fazio to overcome this inherent bias against her own identity as a woman, both in her own estimation and from others. The parts of her memoir that deal with this question are unsparingly honest.

Once in the military, Fazio proves herself a competent leader whose attention to detail makes her ideally suited to ensuring that communications for a Battalion-sized fort ran smoothly. The war intrudes in the form of dead bodies from outside the wire, and also mortar attacks, one of which nearly ends her life. Nevertheless, Fazio’s greatest challenge arrives in the form of a man—a much older, and (not incidentally) married man, who seduces her in Iraq, and with whom she sleeps after the deployment. Far more troubling to Fazio than the embarrassment of having fallen for a manipulative adulterer is her violation of two codes: her personal code, which depended on a lifelong repudiation of using femininity to gain any advantage (in this case, the attention of a man), and her violation of her expectations of herself as an officer and a Marine.

Above all, Fidelis is a memoir of endurance; a story about how a person can bear up under the weight of external and internal expectations. The prose is spare and straightforward, assembled carefully, attentively, and in a way that drives the reader forward sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter all the way to the end. Capable of being experienced in a weekend, or even over the course of a single day, at 215 pages, Fidelis is, like Fazio’s deployment, intense.

The story is also filled with moments of understated wit, such as when she describes the midnight runs necessitated by a shift schedule that required her to stay awake at night:

Before midnight, I ran on the rough gravel roads, carrying a flashlight so trucks could spot me. Even with its bouncing beam, I could hardly see five feet ahead, and I tripped over concrete chunks, bruising my knees through OCS-issued sweats. I got up and kept running. Head- lights higher than my head screamed toward me, and I scrambled off-road to avoid them. Trucks roared past, carrying water or sewage to or away from this place; I couldn’t tell. I turned around and jogged back for a freezing shower.

Of a rebound relationship, “if I squinted, it looked like love.” Of the internet and cell phones, technology made it easier to talk, but not to connect.”

According to Fazio, and the strict rules of the Corps, in helping a married man cheat, Fazio failed to live up to its standards of behavior. But she was surrounded by people who were skirting the system—drinking on deployment, cutting corners, focused on their own happiness and well-being first, before that of the corps. Not, in other words, being Semper Fidelis.

This is one of Fazio’s greatest accomplishments: she remains essentially optimistic, loyal to the Corps and to her memory of the military. In spite of the failure of various Marines to live up to the ideals of the Corps, in spite of her own inability to reach perfection, Fazio carries out her assigned duties faithfully. Making an error, even one that consumes a substantial portion of one’s energy and attention, does not define an individual, and although Fazio’s error was apparent to her at the time and since, this aspect of her life does not capture her essence any more than it captures the essence of any human. The experience could easily have ruined her as an officer and a human, embittering her and turning her toward cynicism — but she must have been a competent and caring officer, and earning a PhD at Columbia after leaving the military establishes her bona fides as an intelligent and steadfast worker.

In writing Fidelis, Fazio more than makes up for her in retrospect understandable transgressions, by offering aspiring young men and women a realistic and expertly-written account of what it’s like to go to war. Her unprepossessing prose, dry humor, and faithful rendition of the trials and temptations faced by deploying women should be read by anyone curious about what it was like to be a woman in the Marine Corps.

The following excerpt is from Teresa Fazio’s Fidelis: A Memoir, reprinted with permission from Potomac Books. 

A week before leaving Iraq, I shuffled through my post-deployment health assessment, a quiz to divine if we were crazy or sick or prone to shooting our loved ones. I gave the pasty Navy doc the answers he wanted: Yeah, I’m fine. No, I haven’t seen anyone killed—lifting that transport case doesn’t count. Yes, of course I was exposed to sand. No, no nightmares, not lately. Shit blows up, whatever. No anxiety, just stress. I’m an officer; I can handle it. Let me go.

I was impatient with anyone who hadn’t also been in Iraq for seven months, laying cable like my wire platoon. Our replacements’ questions—where did this cable lead, when was chow, was there really a shot-up mural of Saddam Hussein—disrupted my precious workaholic routine, the one for which Marla, another female lieutenant, had nicknamed me Rain Man. With the new troops swelling our numbers, we spent the next several weeks laying as much cable as possible. The Marines bore down, digging what trenches they could with a motorized Ditch Witch, then pickaxing the more sensitive areas bordered by concertina wire. They laid cables straight into sandy trenches, zip-tying them every few feet and burying them under fine grains. Their knees shone white, and they washed grit from their hands and necks before meals. It sucked, but it was celebratory for the Marines leaving country: a last hurrah, the old guys willing to do anything to get out of there, the new guys excited to do anything at all. Even if it meant pulling cable hand over hand, fingers pruning with sweat in canvas gloves. As they tipped blue strands of Ethernet, bits of plastic tumbled to the ground, until everything was wired in. I watched Marla help dig, her slim figure bent at the waist, forearms dirty, red bun over delicate features. Though half the company comprised new troops, I didn’t overhear anyone hit on her.

Fortunately, a squared-away comm-school classmate named Torres took over my wire platoon. Major Davis tossed me the keys to our battalion’s SUV, so Torres and I could inspect the cable line. Airfield to the left, headquarters to the right, the rest of Camp Taqaddum a desert plateau. The Euphrates winked below us if we craned our necks just right. Though I hadn’t driven in seven months, the potholed roads felt familiar. Torres’ clean uniform stood out against dusty upholstery.

I pulled over within sight of some junked Soviet planes, where I’d once gone on a long run with Jack and one of his sergeants.

Torres asked if mortars hit around TQ a lot. I told him that in the past month, most of the danger had stayed outside the wire. Except down that road—I pointed toward the gate where insurgents had crashed a vehicle full of explosives. And, I continued, when the mortars got close to regiment, peppered that empty tent—that was bad. Cut our fiber optics. Fucked up like a football bat. I climbed out of the car and kicked a toe in the sand, unearthing zombie cable. Torres didn’t ask any more questions.

A few afternoons later, hopped up on caffeine with nothing to do, I called Jack from the Systems Control hut. He couldn’t hang out; he had an angel coming in, he said, a mortar victim from Fallujah. All of the other times I’d been in his room, he’d shooed me away when the calls had come. This time, I asked to watch him work. I wanted to finally witness the cause of his sleepless nights.

“Major Davis would crucify me if I let you see this without him knowing,” Jack said. But when I asked the major if I could watch Jack work, he just braced a hand on the two-by-four door frame and said, “Yup.”

In his bunker, Jack pressed play on James Taylor’s Greatest Hits. It calmed him, he said. Two Marines lay a stretcher on sawhorses and unzipped a body bag: an ashen Navy Seabee with a fresh haircut. Blood sluiced to the sawdusted floor. One Marine held the clipboard; several more circled the body. They marked the locations of wounds and tattoos, crossing the Seabee’s stiff arms over his chest for balance. Jack donned nitrile gloves and pulled a brand-new pack of Camels from the Seabee’s pocket. A fist-sized hole bled where a heart had once beaten. Fire and Rain kept time.

I shifted from foot to foot as Jack counted dog tags, ID card, wallet, and photographs into a manila envelope. He motioned me back with an outstretched arm and a frown.

The whole process took only fifteen minutes. Soon the chaplain thumbed a cross on the Seabee’s brow. The Marines put him in a fresh body bag, strapped it into a flag-draped transport case, and tied it tight with twine.

After, Jack wadded his nitrile gloves into the trash and led me to his room. We shut the door, no matter his Marines cleaning up in the outer bay. He pulled me in, kneading my back; I pressed my nose into his T-shirt and inhaled. Together, we breathed.

• • •

The next night, there were no casualties. I stayed long enough after midnight to hear Jack say my name and “I love it when you touch me” and his son’s name and “I love you.” He saw the dead when he slept. He thought of them constantly, he said, except when he was with me. We dozed an hour. Then I pressed my lips to his forehead, found my glasses, and slipped away. Six more days left in Iraq.

The next morning, on my walk to stand watch, I ran into Sanchez exiting the chow hall. I teased him about the samurai pads snapped to his flak vest: floppy hip guards, shoulder pads, a flat, triangular groin protector. Each piece sported a different pattern: digital desert, analog woodlands, Desert Storm chocolate chips. He was a Marine Corps fashion nightmare.

When I got to work, I found out the reason for all that gear. A vehicle-borne IED had hit a convoy northwest of Fallujah, killing seven Marines and wounding six. A “mass casualty” event. Jack, Sanchez, and others rode out on a convoy to recover the bodies.

I couldn’t sit still, so I walked into the TechCon van. Maybe the sergeants could offer distraction, whether with work, or with Nip/Tuck, their latest binge-watching addiction featuring plastic surgeons in compromising relationships. We watched for three hours, until we hit an episode where the plot revolved around infidelity.

I remembered that Jack was on the convoy.

This “other woman” had terminal cancer. Her adulterous lover helped her commit suicide before the cancer took her. The woman penned letters and sipped milk to coat her stomach while swallowing handfuls of pills. As she watched a lakeside sunset and the soundtrack played Elton John’s Rocketman, I felt a wash of fear.

Jack was still on a convoy.

While watching the show, I wondered, Will that be my punishment, too? I’d become increasingly anxious about our imminent return to the States. Even more than getting caught, I feared losing what I thought was my only chance at love. Jack’s wife in California loomed far larger than any bomb threat. A thick sludge of guilt coated my powdered-egg breakfast. I controlled my breathing.

He was still on a convoy.

After the episode ended, I stumbled out of TechCon into sunlight, blinking back lethargy from hours of TV. I had to do something good, something officer-like: inspect the cable. Check on my troops. I controlled my breathing and swallowed the lump in my throat.

At the far end of the flight line, my Marines were deepening a trench in a spot plagued by heavy truck traffic. I walked the fiber optic lines along the airfield’s edge, checking them for bald spots, kinks, and cuts. The air reeked of diesel. Helicopter rotor blades blended into a buttery hum. Sparrows flitted along eight-foot-tall Hesco barriers. After fifty yards or so, I stopped and peered down the flight line. Maybe a hundred yards left. Hot, boring work. I figured I could get to my Marines more quickly on the other side of the barriers, where there was a concrete path. I ducked behind them at the next opportunity.

• • •

WHUMP. Seconds later, a mortar landed on the airfield. I felt the blast wave in my chest and teeth. I took a few steps forward, thinking of my troops digging near the flight line entrance.

WHUMP. Another mortar round, a little farther away. A small rock kicked up by the blast flew over my head, or was it shrapnel? I had the urge to reach for it, to catch it, but I did not. Instead I turned around to head back to our company’s headquarters. As my Marines fast-walked past me, carrying ammo cans full of tools, I thought only of counting their heads.

In the following months and years, I would wish I had been on the exposed airfield side of the Hesco barriers when the mortars hit, that I had sprinted full-tilt toward my Marines digging that trench, instead of taking a few steps forward before retreating. I would even wish I’d been hit by shrapnel, like a vigilant lieutenant. Was that the most fitting consequence of what I’d been doing with Jack? If he returned from his convoy to find me lifeless, would caring for my body have made him love me, made him stay?

In any case, he returned. Late that night, I lingered outside Comm Company’s compound under a hard pearl moon. A hundred yards away, Jack’s Marines unloaded one, two, three, four, five, six, seven body bags from their refrigerated truck. Then they hefted still more.

Under the floodlights, I made out Hoss’s lanky silhouette, spotted Mullins’s round shoulders and rolling gait, almost heard his Southern drawl. Two more darted around the truck, its tailgate the height of their heads, shepherding paperwork. Sanchez stood straight and musclebound, lifting tirelessly. Sergeant Jonas barked orders.

Soon they all moved inside; they must have been grabbing clipboards and unzipping body bags. I stared at the bunker doors, wishing I could enter. If I had tried, Jack would have shouted me away, and Mullins and Jonas would have shaken their heads. I would like to say decorum held me back from going over there. Really, it was shame. The most honorable thing I could do was stay away. Wait to go home.

Fazio, Teresa. Fidelis: A Memoir (Potomac Books, September 2020).

As Patrick Hicks’s novel In the Shadow of Dora opens, it is July 1969 in bright-and-sunny Cape Canaveral, Florida. In just a few days the United States will send astronauts to the moon for the first time, hopefully with success, and, because of this, Dr. Wernher Von Braun is all over American television. Dr. Von Braun has been a familiar face, to some extent, for years – on a popular Walt Disney space series, for example, in which he held up model rockets and enthusiastically explained them to children between lively cartoon segments; and, now, on an evening talk show, filling in the fawning host on the big upcoming event. Von Braun is all winning smile, salt-and-pepper hair, double-breasted suit. He has become a celebrity, the “Columbus of Space”: explorer, educator, friendly tour guide to the majestic world of the stars.

At least one viewer, however, is not buying it. Watching from his couch after a day of work is NASA engineer Eli Hessel, nursing a beer and a sore back and considering the man on the screen. He has known this man, or known of him, for decades, longer than have most Americans. Von Braun was not always an American science celebrity. In Germany he had been chief developer of the V-2 rockets – precursors of the ones powering Apollo 11 — built secretly underground, using concentration-camp labor, at the site called Dora-Mittelbau.

Von Braun’s V-2 design was a last-ditch attempt at victory for an already slowing Third Reich, but its development injected the Nazis with new, if short-lived, energy. If it did turn out to be the game changer they hoped, V-2s might soon rain down on New York, Chicago, and more.

Eli knows all of this very well because, long before his NASA engineering career, he survived Auschwitz and later the tunnels of Dora-Mittelbau, where he was forced to work on Von Braun’s V-2 rockets. When he could, he sabotaged them. Most of the time he just tried to stay alive. And now here’s Von Braun himself, all over the television; the next day he and some of his former cohort will show up at Eli’s workplace where he will be forced to see them, like startling visions from the past, made Technicolor.

The very sight of them makes Eli’s blood run cold. But, of course, they’d never remember Eli.

Why hasn’t someone shot one of them? One of us survivors? he wonders, thinking of his own gun in the hallway closet, which he has purchased – when? Why? Perhaps be owns it out of some persistent inner fear. He is not a violent man, but suddenly he can hardly believe the simple fact that no one has tried it. Those criminals are out in the open, just walking around! If someone were to assassinate a big name like Von Braun, Americans would have to wonder why, and the media might investigate, and then maybe the truth about him would finally wash out from beneath this absurd scrubbed-clean façade. Some former prisoner like me, he thinks – why haven’t they just done it already? It seems, suddenly, like a question that requires an answer.

“Whoever was tortured, stays tortured,” writes Jean Améry in his superb essay collection, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities. Améry examines what happens when the human intellect is placed against such unthinkable entities as death camps, de-humanization, torture. “The intellect nullified itself,” he writes, of his time in Auschwitz, “when at every step it ran into uncrossable borders. The axes of its traditional frames of reference then shattered.” What do we do when our former frames of reference no longer work? How can we make sense of the fact that the Third Reich lasted twelve years, that millions of people were active participants or quiet bystanders in mass extermination?

And on a smaller scale, how can we transmit, or translate, unthinkable personal experiences to a listener, even a sympathetic one? An experience like Auschwitz, like torture, can be described, Améry says, but never clarified: “All the attempts at clarification, most of which stressed a single cause, failed ridiculously.” Eli has a similar thought when he recalls being asked by an American what “lessons” he might have learned from surviving Auschwitz and Dora. Lessons? he thinks, blankly. How could there have been lessons? How does one take a lesson from sadism?

For that’s what it was, according to Jean Améry: sadism. “National Socialism in its totality,” he writes, “was stamped less with the seal of a hardly definable ‘totalitarianism’ than with that of sadism…[which is, according to Georges Bataille] the radical negation of the other.” He goes on:

A world in which torture, destruction and death triumph obviously cannot exist. But the sadist does not care about the continued existence of the world. On the contrary: he wants to nullify this world, and by negating his fellow man, who also in an entirely specific sense is ‘hell’ for him, he wants to realize his own total sovereignty.

The act of being tortured, Améry says, is to have the human social contract breached in every way, so that the victim feels themselves negated by the other. Améry calls it an “astonishment” – “astonishment at the existence of the other, as he boundlessly asserts himself through torture…That one’s fellow man was experienced as the anti-man remains in the tortured person as an accumulated horror…

Torture becomes the total inversion of the social world, in which we [normally] can live only if we grant our fellow man life, ease his suffering, bridle the desire of our ego to expand. But in the world of torture man exists only by ruining the other person who stands before him. A slight pressure by the tool-wielding hand is enough to turn the other – along with his head, in which are perhaps stored Kant and Hegel, and all nine symphonies, and The World as Will and Representation – into a shrill piglet squealing at slaughter.

This “horrible and perverted togetherness” between torturer and tortured is what follows Eli in the decades after his “liberation,” all the way to Kennedy Space Center when he sees his former tormentors strutting along metal walkways. Hicks takes the psychological links described in Améry and, in a smart novelistic twist, makes them physical.

“It is impossible for me to accept,” Améry writes, “a parallelism that would have my path run beside that of the fellows who flogged me with a horsewhip.” But, when Von Braun and his cohorts show up in Eli’s very place of work, that is exactly what is happening to him.

Would we expect Eli not to think about his past? The people around him seem to either suggest that he ruminate on “lessons,” or forget his torment entirely. In fact, he has done very well for himself, considering. He has a wife, a grown daughter at Berkeley, a job to be proud of. In the evenings he assembles jigsaw puzzles of classic paintings (he’s on Vermeer now). All is well, he tells himself. All is well. Still, when he looks in the mirror, he is startled by how quickly he’s aged. “One ages badly in exile,” Jean Améry notes.

Améry might say that Eli is suffering from resentment – suffering in resentment, perhaps, because he describes it as a state, one which he both apologizes for and defends. Resentment is “an unnatural but also a logically inconsistent condition. It nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past. Absurdly, it demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone. Resentment blocks the exit to the genuine human dimension, the future.”

The burden of resentment seems, in this way, nearly as cruel as the original harm itself. Like torture, Eli did not choose it, but here it is. How could he not want “the event” to be undone? Eli Hessel endured the complete negation of his own humanity as the price of enlarging another’s, and here those others are now, still, somehow, enlarging themselves. (Hicks painfully, but effectively, re-creates this complete negation, often through the SS guards’ dialogue at Dora, where the novel opens. “You pieces of SHIT!” one guard screams – in fact, the prisoners are called “pieces of shit” at least three times in the opening pages – while another refers to them as “my assholes.” An unnamed guard beats a prisoner with a pipe – possibly to death – for dropping one of the materials, all the while bellowing at him, “Be gentle with that! Gentle! Gentle! Gentle!” The bodies of the dead prisoners are referred to as “rags.”)

The Second World War is all around Eli in commemorative magazines and TV shows – Hogan’s Heroes, The Great Escape – but represented in a triumphant manner he can hardly recognize. After all, we won! The Third Reich lasted “just” twelve years (Eli would not have had Wikipedia, but that’s what today’s entry says). The cultural amnesia that both Améry and Hicks point out in modern society can feel staggeringly glib (for Hicks’s writing definitely points fingers, subtly, at disturbing current trends). Are we collectively glad that a despot was allowed to rise to power, slaughter millions, incite a world war, and continue to inspire copycats with perhaps rising influence even today, because Hitler was killed after “just” twelve years?

(When I look at my son, I think: twelve years has been his whole lifetime.)

In any case, Eli is the one with the conscience, not his tormentors. Their actions occurred out of the context of any morality, turning them into (Améry): “facts within a physical system, not deeds within a moral system.” “The monster…who is not chained by conscience to his deed sees it from his viewpoint only as an objectification of his will, not as a moral event.”

It is a deep unfairness that Eli’s conscience, his role as victim in a massive cultural and personal crime, continues to mark him with guilt throughout his life. When CIA agents descend on Kennedy Space Center in a Communist witch-hunt (how the Soviets would love to sabotage Apollo!, they think), they single Eli out immediately. Was he with political prisoners at Auschwitz and Dora? Communists? Maybe they gave him ideas? What happened to him there, anyway? Maybe he’s not trustworthy. He makes some other people uncomfortable. He is not “clear”; he is an insoluble dilemma. Eli is thrown into a surreal second tunnel where the victim has become the blamed. “He embodied something…dangerous,” he realizes, with a new, dawning grief, “something that needed to be buried.”

“I am burdened with collective guilt,” Jean Améry writes. “The world, which forgives and forgets, has sentenced me, not those who murdered or allowed the murder to occur.”

The question, for Hicks as a novelist, is now what Eli will do with his resentment.

It’s true that much of Hicks’s In the Shadow of Dora is a literary account of crimes against body and memory, and that they are hard to read. They are things that happened. They are not the only things. Hicks is very careful to hold Eli apart from the sort of feel-good, “wow-this-guy-really-overcame!” narrative that lines bookshelves, probably because you can tell that he cares so much about the character he’s created. The morality of Hicks’s novel is a carefully considered one: realistic, fundamentally opposed to cruelty and to use of force, and dedicated to exposing these but not letting them block out all light.

As far as the book itself, it manages admirably to balance the dark and the light. His use of language is cinematic and rich. Hicks’s description throughout – perhaps keeping in mind that when something is beyond the intellect, all we can do is describe – keeps the reading riveting: the SS guards hold their rifles “lazily at their sides, like baguettes.” An air raid is “blossoms of fire” and “a steeple [sinking] sideways into the ground.” Then there’s this apocalyptic image: “An SS guard stood on top of a truck and fired a machine gun at the approaching bombs. Huge orange asterisks erupted from the end of his weapon.”

The novel is exquisitely researched; Hicks has visited ten concentration camps including the tunnels at Dora, which he detailed in an earlier Wrath-Bearing Tree interview. Those who are fascinated by WWII and Cold War history will find much to learn. As for period details, Hicks could probably tell you the ratio of metals in the rocket pipe, and the brand of TV dinner Eli’s eating in 1969. Television shows (and only three TV channels!), clothing, even smells (of course the work area smells like hairspray and pomade – all the ladies were wearing beehives!) add texture without showing off or overwhelming the heart of the book, which is its story: Eli’s life.

Initially, when he arrives at Dora, any scrap of mental energy Eli may have left is devoted to food: imagining the look, the smell, the taste of lamb chops, green beans, bread. Later, small snippets of his family show through. These are too hurtful to dwell on, but he can’t keep them all away. They are wedded inexplicably to his sense of self, of potential. (He is only twenty-one years old: sometimes that is hard to remember.) In one brief, pleasant memory, Eli recalls doing calculus at his parents’ table. “He thought about his hand unspooling an equation of stars. Yes. His little life did have meaning.”

Somehow, amazingly, in 1949 his daughter is born. He will hold her, and later his granddaughter, so that they cover the blue tattoo on his forearm. “We are who we love,” he whispers into his daughter’s newborn ear. “Do you hear me, little one? We are who we love.”

And, last, the moon. In “Secrets,” one of the most unique chapters in Hicks’ novel (or partial-chapters, more accurately), the author decides to tell the history of the moon. I have never in my life read a book that included a chapter on the history of the moon, and I found the notion delightful and the chapter itself charming. It opens in 1969, and Eli is out looking at the night sky, as he often does. The moon is perhaps the one thing that’s been with him throughout all of his trials – in Dora, it often seemed to reflect his state of mind — and now here he is, part of the engineering team that’s sending the first astronaut to walk it.

Five billion years ago, Eli muses, we didn’t have a moon at all. Then, it was created when a planetoid the size of Mars hit Earth.

The cores of these two planets were wrenched apart and the molten debris twisted around each other, caught in an unbalanced dance of gravity. Over millions of years, the cooling matter created a larger and a smaller orb. We may not think of the moon as a companion planet, but it is one. It came from us, and we came from it.

The moon is our closest neighbor at 240,000 miles away, and reaching it, Eli believes, is “the biggest adventure mankind has ever undertaken.” He plays with words, thinking about honeymoon, lunacy, moonstruck. This brief, sweet flight of fancy is a fun inroad into Eli’s mind. He is a quiet, self-protective man out of necessity, but he still has his beautiful mind. And what could be more self-contained, more silent than the moon? Lonelier than the moon?  “The experience of persecution,” Améry has written, “was, at the very bottom, that of an extreme loneliness.”

As a reader, it’s odd to think of the moon having a “history” – or maybe I’m just a typical human who simply can’t imagine history without or before us – but the moon has one, or at least it has a past, if there is a difference. And this past, still, in 1969, untouched by man, must be appealing to Eli, though the moon has obviously been a touched thing. It’s full of craters and dry pools, it’s been bombarded — but not by humans. It’s been touched only by blameless things. Perhaps there is no “lesson” in that, either, but there is also no lasting pain.

And in a few days, men will land there. Eli is in awe, but not exactly jealous. Surely, though, it’s not lost on him the immense effort that’s going toward getting these three men to his favorite satellite and back again in eight quick days. The whole world is watching. Over 25 billion dollars (about 152 billion, by today’s standards) were dedicated to ensure that, no matter what, these men – the bravest men in the entire world — come home safe.

In the camp, Eli often wondered if anyone was coming to save them. Six million dead. Would anyone come for them? Here is Améry:

In almost all situations in life where there is bodily injury there is also the expectation of help; the former is compensated by the latter. But with the first blow…against which there can be no defense and which no helping hand will ward off, a part of our life ends and it can never again be revived.

The men headed out on Apollo 11 can rest assured that mountains will be moved to get them back again. No obstacle is too physical, no amount of care is too much. Hell, America knows their vital signs. Should one man’s heart rate drop, the highest-level experts in the world will scramble. These astronauts have an expectation of help unmatched in history.

Eli doesn’t begrudge them. He wants, deeply, for the mission to be a success.

Later, in 1972, Eli’s one regret will be that the American moon program ended so soon. Only six manned visits? How much can we know, from that? And this may be our clue into what memory is, for Eli, as well as love: they are knowledge. Eli is a man of the mind and his knowledge is his own. Perhaps the men who hurt him thought they knew him, or knew something of him, but they didn’t know anything at all. No Nazi thug who put a boot in his back will ever get to see the curl of his newborn daughter’s ear. They will never have his particular view of the moon. They cannot know what his father and mother said to him as they sat around that kitchen table, joking, and while he did his homework. Love is an incalculable knowledge. And so that is why he feels just a little indignant about the idea, in 1969, that one moon landing could tell us so much.

How much can we learn from such brief contact?, he wonders. We put our boots on it once, and we think we know a thing.

*

Hicks, Patrick. In the Shadow of Dora: A Novel of the Holocaust and the Apollo Program, (Steven F. Austin State University Press, 2020).

Amery, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities (Indiana University Press, 1966).

The following excerpt of The Knockout Queen by Rufi Thorpe is reprinted with permission by A.A. Knopf.

When I was eleven years old, I moved in with my aunt after my mother was sent to prison.

That was 2004, which was incidentally the same year the pictures of Abu Ghraib were published, the same year we reached the conclusion there were no weapons of mass destruction after all. What a whoopsie. Mistakes were made, clearly, but the blame for these mistakes was impossible to allocate as no one person could be deemed responsible. What was responsibility even? Guilt was a transcendental riddle that baffled our sweet Pollyannaish president. How had it happened? Certainly he had not wanted it to happen. In a way, President Bush was a victim in all this too. Perplexingly, the jury had no difficulty in assigning guilt to my own mother as she sat silently, looking down, tears running and running down her face at what seemed to me at the time an impossible rate. Slow down, Mom, you’ll get dehydrated! If you have never been in a criminal courtroom, it is disgusting. You have seen them so often on TV that seeing an actual one is grotesque: the real live lawyers, all sweaty, their dark mouths venting coffee breath directly into your face, the judge who has a cold and keeps blowing his nose, the defendants who are crying or visibly shaking, whose moms are watching or whose kids are trying to sit still in the back. It’s a lot to take in when you’re eleven and even just a few months prior you were making an argument that not receiving a particular video game for your birthday would be “unfair.”

The town to which my little sister and I were relocated after a brief stint in foster care was a suburban utopia a la Norman Rockwell, updated with a fancy coffee shop and yoga studio. We moved in just before the Fourth of July, and I remember being shooed into a town fair, where there were bounce houses and hot dogs being sold to benefit the Kiwanis club. What the fuck was the Kiwanis club? I was given a wristband and ten dollars and told to go play. A woman painted a soccer ball on my face. (All the boys got soccer balls, and all the girls got butterflies; those were the options.)

Bordered on the west by the sea, on the north by a massive airport, on the east by a freeway, and on the south by a sprawling, smoke-belching oil refinery, North Shore was a tiny rectangle. Originally built as a factory town for the oil refinery, it was a perfect simulacrum of a small town anywhere in America, with a main street and cute post office, a stately brick high school, a police department with predictably brutalist architecture; but instead of fading into rural sprawl at its edges, this fairy-tale town was wedged inside the greater body of Los Angeles.

My aunt’s place was one of those small stucco houses that look immediately like a face, the door forming a kind of nose, and the windows on either side two dark, square eyes. She had a cypress bush in the front that had turned yellow on one side, and many pinwheels planted on the border of her lawn, the bright colored plastic sun-bleached to a ghostly white as they spun in the wind. North Shore was a windy place with many hills, and I was shocked that people could live in such a wonderful climate without smiling all the time. The air pollution from the airport and oil refinery were pushed inland by the sea breezes. Even our trash cans did not smell, so clean was the air there. Sometimes I would stick my head into them and breathe deeply, just to reassure myself that trash was still trash.

On either side, my aunt’s house was flanked by mansions, as was the case on almost every street of the town. Poor house, mansion, poor house, mansion, made a chessboard pattern along the street. And the longer I came to live there, the more clearly I understood that the chessboard was not native but invasive, a symptom of massive flux. The poor houses would, one by one, be mounted by gleaming for sale signs, the realtor’s face smiling toothily as the sign swayed in the wind, and then the for sale sign would go away, and the house would be torn down and a mansion would be built in its place.

If there were people living in the mansion to the right of our house, I never saw them. Their trash cans did not go out, no cars parked in their drive, except a gardener who came like clockwork every Tuesday, who always gave me a nervous but friendly wave. In the mansion to the left of our house, there lived a girl and her father, a girl who, though I would never have guessed it from looking at her, so young and unsullied did she seem, was my own age, and with whom I would go to school for the next seven years. Her name was Bunny Lampert, and she was the princess of North Shore, and somehow, almost against my will, I became her friend.

One thing that Bunny and I had in common, besides being next-door neighbors, was an unusual lack of adult supervision. North Shore being the paradisiacal bubble that it was, many children walked to school or rode their bikes. But I noticed that Bunny and I were never scooted out the door by parents who rushed to remind us of lunches or fetch lost backpacks, but instead climbed out of houses empty and untended, checking our belongings ourselves, distracted as adults about to set out on the morning’s commute. Perhaps it would have been natural for us to walk to school together, but this did not occur. I was invisible to Bunny, and so I came to know a great deal about her before she learned anything about me.

The first year I was in North Shore, we were in sixth grade, but even then Bunny was tall, the tallest girl in our year, but also taller than the tallest boy. I’m sure there are people who would tell you who the most beautiful girls in our school were, and Bunny would not have been found on any of their lists, and yet I loved to look at her. Not for any arrangement of features or gifts of figure, but because she was terribly alive. Like a rabbit or a fox. She was just right there. You could see her breathing, almost feel the blood prickling in her skin, her cells gobbling the sunlight.

I think, as we headed into middle school, it was this vital, translucent quality that kept boys her age from having crushes on her, crushes that required a more opaque surface that they could project onto, that evoked different things than life itself. They were interested in girls who reminded them of movies, or who seemed older, or who seemed innocent, or who seemed smart. Bunny didn’t seem. She didn’t remind me of anyone. I liked to walk behind her for the cute way she would pull a wedgie from her butt, the way she would sing to herself, always a little sharp, the way she ate an Eggo waffle from a paper towel as she went, careful to throw the paper towel away in a trash can when she got to school.

Her father, though I hardly ever saw him, I saw everywhere. It was his wolfish grin on almost every dangling for sale sign in the town, his arms crossed over his chest, his white teeth showing in a friendly laugh. He was on for sale signs, but he was also on banners at our school, where he sponsored a seemingly endless number of fund-raising events. He was on the city council and so his name was further attached to every fair, carnival, rally, or Christmas parade. Ray Lampert was inescapable.

I had seen him at that first Fourth of July fair, a huge sign with his headshot on it at a booth where a pretty blond woman gave out picnic blankets with his company’s logo stitched on one side. Two Palms Realty. I was afraid to take one of the blankets, even though the pretty blond woman manning the booth told me they were free. In my child gut, I believed they were sewn with some kind of voodoo that would ensnare anyone who touched them.

I often passed by his office, which was on Main Street. He was never in there, though I grew used to seeing the blond woman I had met at the fair, wearing her headset, tapping keys on a space-age-looking computer with a monitor bigger than our TV at home.

Because our houses were next door to each other and on rather narrow plots, the bedroom windows were directly across from one another on the second story, and so I had a literal window into Bunny’s life, although I could not see her without being seen myself. When she was home, I kept my blinds carefully closed, but when she was not at home, I would look into her room and examine its contents. In fact, I looked in all the windows of their home, which was decorated with a lavish ’80s decadence: gilt dining chairs and a gleaming glass-topped table, white sofas and white rugs over dark, almost black, mahogany floors. The kitchen, which I had to enter their backyard in order to properly examine, was a Grecian temple of white marble, though they never seemed to cook and what was obviously supposed to be a fruit bowl was filled instead with junk, papers, and pens and keys.

They had no dogs or cats, no hamsters, not even plants. Nothing lived in that house except for Bunny, and presumably her father, though he was never at home. As to what had happened to Bunny’s mother, I knew only that she had died and that there had been some air of tragedy about it, a suddenness, not a prolonged illness, and I was in high school before I learned that it was a car accident. I found this explanation disappointingly mundane. Why had a simple car accident been so whispered about, so difficult to confirm? My informant, a glossy, sleazy little imp named Ann Marie, the kind of girl who is incessantly eating a sucker or popsicle in hopes of being seen as sexual, giggled. “That wasn’t the scandal,” she said. “The scandal was that her mother was fucking a day-care worker at the Catholic preschool. Mr. Brandon. And he was only like twenty at the time.” Where was Mr. Brandon now? He had moved, had left town, no more was known.

I often walked by that little preschool, attached to the Catholic church, which was a lovely white stucco building on a corner lot with a playground and red sandbox, and wondered about Bunny’s mother and Mr. Brandon. No one could tell me what he looked like, but for my own reasons I pictured sad eyes, too-low jeans, ice-cream abs begging to be licked. Perhaps I imagined him so only as a foil to Bunny’s father, whose salt-and-pepper chest hair exploded from the collar of his dress shirt in that ubiquitous head-shot. Everything else about Ray Lampert was clean, sterilized, the bleached teeth, the rehearsed smile, the expensive clothes, but that chest hair belonged to an animal.

The gossip about Bunny’s father was that he drank too much, and specifically that he was a regular at the Blue Lagoon, a tiki bar tucked a few blocks off Main Street, though he was what was referred to as “a good drunk,” beloved for his willingness to spring for pizza at two in the morning and listen to the tragic stories of other sad adult men. There was further supposition that his incredible success as a real estate agent was due to his habit of frequenting drinking holes, making friends with anybody and everybody. Having spent many years observing their recycling bin, I can attest that such a justification would be a bit economical with the truth. Ray Lampert was turning his birthday into a lifestyle, to quote Drake. Each week there would be two or three large gin bottles, and then seven or eight wine bottles, all of the same make, a mid-shelf Cabernet. Perhaps he bought them in bulk. It was difficult to imagine him shopping, wheeling a cart filled with nothing but Cabernet and gin through the Costco. How did someone with such an obvious drinking problem go about keeping themselves supplied? Or rather, how did a rich person go about it?

In my experience, addiction was messy. A pastiche of what you bought on payday as a treat, and what you bought on other days, convinced you wouldn’t buy anything, then suddenly finding yourself at the liquor store, smiling bravely, like it was all okay. What did the cashier at the 7-Eleven make of my own father? Did he note on what days my father bought two tall boys and on what days he bought the fifth of cheap bourbon as well, and did he keep a mental tally of whether he was getting better or worse, like I did? Or did everyone buy that kind of thing at 7-Eleven? Perhaps my father was so unremarkable in his predilections as to avoid detection at all. And what was happening to the children of all those other men? Buyers of beef jerky and vodka, peanuts and wine? What did a 7-Eleven even sell that wasn’t designed to kill you one way or another?

Most scandalous to me, and yet so alluring, so seductive, was the possibility that Ray Lampert felt no shame at all. That a rich man could stroll through the Costco, his cart clinking with glass bottles, and greet the cashier smiling, because she would just assume he threw lavish parties, or that he was stocking his wine cellar, that these dark bottles were just like shirts for Gatsby, talismans of opulence, but whatever it was, even if it was weird, because he was rich, it was fine.

The first time I met Bunny, or what I consider to be our first meeting, because we did encounter each other at school from time to time (in fact we had been in the same homeroom for all of seventh grade, and yet never had a single conversation), we were in tenth grade, and I was discovered in her side yard. I had taken to smoking cigarettes there, and I kept a small bottle of Febreze hidden behind a piece of plywood that was leaning against their fence. The side yard itself was sheltered from the street by a high plank gate, and then was gated again before it led to their back yard, and because it ran along the side of their garage, there were no windows, making it a perfect hiding place. Bunny and her father kept their bikes there, but neither of them seemed to ever ride, and I had been smoking in this part of their property for years now without having been detected, so I was startled when she opened the gate, already wearing her bike helmet, which was pink.

She was surprised to see me and she jumped, but did not yelp, and swiftly closed the gate behind her. She tipped her head, made comically large by the helmet, and looked at me. “What are you doing here?” she whispered.

“I smoke here,” I said, bringing my cigarette out from behind my back.

“Oh,” she said, looking around at the fence, and the side of her garage. “Can’t people see the smoke as it rises above the fence?” Her first concern seemed to be abetting me in my secret habit.

She was neither offended nor concerned that I had been breaking into their property and hiding in their side yard.

“So far as I know,” I said, “no one has. But usually I kind of crouch with the hope that it dissipates. And I always figured people would think it was you.”

“Your name is Michael,” she said with concentration, dragging my name up through the folds of her memory.

I nodded.

“My name is Bunny,” she said.

“I know.”

“I’m just getting my bike.” She started to walk toward her bike, which was just to my right.

“The tires are flat,” I told her, looking down at them. They had been flat for almost a year now, and I wondered what had possessed her today of all days to take a ride. There was a gust of wind then, and the fence groaned a bit, and we could hear, rather than feel, the wind rushing over the top of the fence, making a sound like scissors cutting through paper.

“Oh.”

“Where were you going to go?” I asked.

“To the beach.”

“By yourself?”

She nodded. “You know, I could put a chair out here for you. Like a camp chair.”

“That’s all right,” I said.

She put her hands on her hips then, and twisted her torso with such strength that I could hear every vertebrae in her spine crack. She was perhaps five inches taller than me. “Do you want to come in?” she asked.

“To your house?”

She took off her helmet. “No one’s home.” There was a babyish quality to Bunny’s voice, perhaps because it seemed too small for the size of her body, and she spoke as though her nose was always a little stuffed. Of course, I wanted desperately to see inside her house up close, and so I put out my cigarette and hid it in the Altoids tin that I also kept behind the plywood, and she watched as I spritzed myself with Febreze, and then we let ourselves out the back gate and into her yard.

“This is our yard,” she said. “There’s a pool.”

I said, “Oh wow,” though I had swum in her pool several times when she and her father had been on vacation. I had climbed the fence from my aunt’s yard and dropped down into hers, which was dark, since no one was home and the outside lights seemed to be on a timer, and the pool, instead of being a lit rectangle of blue, was a black mass of reflected stars, and, shaking, I had taken off my clothes and slipped naked into the warm water and swum until I felt erased.

She opened one of the French doors that led onto the patio, and we entered the hushed cathedral of her living room. She closed the door behind us, as though it could never be left open. The outside, with its scent of grass and sway of water, its gauzy light and chafing winds, would destroy the interior, the careful, expensive furniture, a pretend world that had to be exactingly maintained.

She gave me a tour of the house, showing me her father’s office, with its many bookshelves filled with leather-bound books I doubted he had ever read, and the marble kitchen. She offered me a Pop-Tart, which I declined. She opened one of the crinkly metallic packages for herself, and then, to my horror, spread the two Pop-Tarts with butter and slicked them together as a sandwich. She led me upstairs, taking bites of her Pop-Tart sandwich along the way, and showed me the spare room, decorated in an Oriental style with a disturbing red satin bedspread embroidered with cranes, and the connected bathroom, which had a shiny black vanity and sink, a black toilet, and black floors. They were ready for Madame Butterfly to commit suicide in there at any time. While the house was uncluttered, I noticed that it was also not exactly clean. Gray trails marked the highest traffic routes on the white carpet, and the sink in the all-black bathroom was spangled with little explosions of white toothpaste.

She gestured at a closed door and said, “That’s my dad’s room,” and then took me into her own bedroom, which was done up, as I already well knew, like a much younger girl’s bedroom, with a white canopy bed and a white dresser that had been plastered with My Little Pony stickers. There was a small white mirrored dressing table with a pink brocade bench. Where there should have been makeup and bottles of fancy perfume, Bunny had arranged her schoolbooks and papers. There was a bookshelf that contained not books but trophies and medals and ribbons, all so cheap and garish and crammed together that it looked more like installation art than a proper display. On one wall, there was a bulletin board that I had not been able to see before as it was on the same wall as the window. At first, it appeared to be a Hydra of female body parts, but as I looked closer I could see that they were all women playing volleyball, and then, as I looked yet closer, I could see that they were all the same woman playing volleyball, carefully trimmed from newspapers and magazines.

“That’s my Misty May-Treanor altar,” she said. “She’s a volleyball player.”

“Not creepy at all,” I said. I would have asked her why she had invited me in, or why she had shown me around with the thoroughness of a realtor, except that I already knew, for her loneliness was so palpable as to be a taste in the air. I had been many places in my life. Apartment buildings where babies free-ranged, waddling down the halls with dirty hair and diapers needing to be changed; houses like my aunt’s, where everything was stained and reaching between the couch cushions to find the remote left your fingers sticky. Bus stations, and prison waiting rooms, and foster-care homes, and men’s cars, and men’s houses or apartments where there was sometimes only a mattress on the floor, and none of them had scared me quite as much as being in Bunny’s silent, beautiful house.

“I’ve never had a boy in my bedroom before,” she said, a little apologetically, and she sat on the bed, as though she expected that I would fuck her right there on her white eyelet duvet.

“I’m gay,” I said, my affect as flat and casual as I could manage. I had never spoken those words to anyone before, not in that way.

“Well, I’ve never had a gay boy in my bedroom either,” she said, and flopped backward, finishing the last of her Pop-Tart sandwich, licking the butter off her fingers. She contemplated the ceiling and I began to wonder if I could simply leave. I was fascinated by Bunny and I liked her, but I was beginning to realize I liked her more from a distance than I did close up. It was too much, being in her room, smelling her smells, hearing her breathe. “You probably think my room is stupid,” she said, still staring  up at the ceiling, her legs, in their athletic shorts, agape on her bed in such a casual way that it was almost lewd, even though technically nothing was showing.

“It’s a room,” I said. “I’m not the room judge sent to adjudicate your decor or whatever.”

“It is stupid,” she said. “My dad keeps saying we should redo it. But I like it. I like it just like this.”

“Well, thank you for showing me around,” I said, trying to indicate that I would like to leave, when we both heard a door slam downstairs. Bunny sat upright on the bed, and I froze as we listened to the thumping of feet on the carpeted stairs. And then there he was, a man I had only ever seen in photographs, his giant head wedged between her door and the wall. “You’re home!” Ray Lampert cried, giddy. “And you have a friend! I thought we could get Chinese—do you feel like Chinese?”

“Ugh, I’m starved,” Bunny said. I, who by fifteen was already a neurotic counter of calories, almost gasped at this statement, having witnessed the 700-calorie Pop-Tart sandwich.

“And you’ll join us, obviously,” Ray Lampert said, turning to me. He was substantially fatter than in his picture, and whilethere were dark puffy bags under his eyes, the rest of his skin tone was so peculiarly even that I could have sworn he was wearing makeup. His blue dress shirt was unbuttoned a scandalous three buttons, and he was wearing a ratty red baseball cap. It occurred to me that I had probably seen him dozens of times and had just never realized  that it was the same man as in the photograph.

“This is Michael,” she said. “Were you thinking Bamboo Forest?”

“No, I want good, really good, egg drop soup. Bamboo Forest is so watery.” He turned to me. “Don’t you think it’s watery?”

What I thought was that I didn’t know anyone was such a connoisseur of egg drop soup. To me it just came, like napkins and forks. “I should probably get home,” I said.

“You don’t really have to go, do you?” Bunny said with sudden, cloying desperation. “Say you’ll come with us!”

Ray reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “He’s got nothing better to do, right, son? Don’t tell me you’re one of these overscheduled kids that’s got back-to-back tutoring and chess club right before you off yourself because you didn’t get into Harvard.” He had found me unattended in his daughter’s bedroom; I stank of cigarettes and was wearing a Nirvana T-shirt and eyeliner, and I had a septum piercing. My hair was loose and went halfway down my back. It was unclear to me if his remarks were meant ironically or if he was actually blind. “Let’s make it a party!” he said, slapped me on the back, and headed downstairs, shouting that he would meet us at the car.

Bunny turned to me and said in a low voice, “My dad’s kind of weird, but I promise it will be fun.”

And I thought: If Ray Lampert was one of the men I met on Craigslist, I would be too scared to ever get in his car, because he was the kind who would lock you in a closet or put a gun in your mouth and then cry about his ex-wife. Bunny took my hand and twined her fingers through my own. And she looked at me with eyes so hopeful that I nodded.

Honestly, I probably would have let her take me anywhere.

*

Thorpe, Rufi. The Knockout Queen (Knopf, April 2020).

Author photo by Nina Subin.