On Monday I wore a cowboy hat to work—just to see if I could.

Employees at Brick Albert seldom break the unspoken dress code of a Costco button-down paired with either khaki, black, or navy-blue slacks. Once you get pegged as dressing a certain way, any deviation only invites conversation, and I don’t like talking about myself.

My usual social strategy is this:

On Fridays I ask about weekend plans. On Mondays I follow up. Tuesday–Thursday I chat about the weather. This is how I’ve survived nine years of bureaucratic drudgery as a budget and defense contractor for the federal government. It’s not that I’m anti-social or dislike my coworkers, I just can’t connect with personas. The social masks and constrained sense of self we curate in order to belong. Personality is threatening. Preference for one thing implies rejection of another. A flourish of fashion can make the boldest of statements against the backdrop of a corporate milieu. So I wore the damn cowboy hat to challenge my comfort with conformity.

Walking down the row of cubicles, heads began to turn.

Who does he think he is?

What, is the rodeo in town?

Daaayum—that’s a fine Stetson.

I wore it loud and proud and kept it on booting up my desktop—still with the classic Microsoft hum. I half expected a talking-to. Quietly pulled into the boss’s office and asked to doff my garish headwear, citing the employee handbook.

“If it were up to me,” I imagined him saying, “we’d all wear Crocs and tracksuits, but this is Brick Albert, goddamn it—we crunch numbers for the military-industrial complex.”

But when my boss laid eyes on my glorious headpiece, he worked his jaw in confusion and/or intimidation. Since time immemorial volume has always conveyed power. If ever cornered by a wild animal, thrust your bag or coat atop your head and puff yourself up bigger.

The day ended with my cowboy hat still adorned, which left me wondering:

What the fuck else could I get away with?

On Tuesday I tried sunglasses. Wayfarer Ray-Bans—as if hungover or concealing a black eye. Less ostentatious on arrival than my cowboy hat, until I stormed into our 11 a.m. meeting like a poker shark and took my seat at the conference table. Funny thing was—it was my best meeting ever. I felt none of the social anxiety that usually cripples my communication and has me stuttering all over myself. All points were made in short, concise fashion, staring everyone dead in the eye whether they knew it or not.

“Johnson!” my boss called, miffed by the glasses but not wanting to interrupt the meeting’s clockwise flow. “Where are we with the Predator missiles?”

I assured him my spreadsheet would be in his inbox by COB Friday. He glared as if in contest but quickly blinked and lost, unable to penetrate my 15% VLT lenses. His usually baritone voice cracked calling on the next man:

“Gregson! Brief me on spare tank parts.”

On Wednesday I combined both cowboy hat and sunglasses. My boss gave little reaction other than to study me up and down through suspicious eyes, wondering if he should renege after allowing both items on the floor.

On Thursday I pushed things further with a muscley tank-top fit for the beach. Women in my office go sleeveless every day, always perceived as elegant and still business casual. But if a man bares his arms he looks like a thug.

“Johnson!” my boss cried from afar, and here we go, I thought, I’d finally broke him, skirting conventions all week long, and now pushed through a nebulous yet not-to-be-crossed boundary. I couldn’t tell if I’d been fighting my boss or if my boss was puppet for some sort of unkillable ideal—a primordial organizing principle existing since before the Big Bang, first made manifest on Earth when one alpha caveman combed his hair with a pinecone and demanded others do the same.

I turned in anticipation of a confrontation but was struck open-jaw by what I saw. My boss with a shit-eating grin, Top Gun aviators concealing both eyes and brows.

“Johnson!” he said again, “I didn’t know you pumped iron, you son of a bitch!”

By Friday my bohemian attempts at self-discovery and/or rebellion had caught fire and spread throughout Brick Albert. Gregson came in wearing a Lakers jersey and a white UV sleeve, but that was tame in comparison to the leopard tights, sequin polos, and spikey punk jackets other coworkers dusted out of high school wardrobes as if in a fashion cold war against the world. People rode skateboards while wearing LARPing chainmail down hallways and spat dip into shiny red cups. We hadn’t yet devolved into using said cups for beer pong, but I suspected such antics were right around the corner. The bathrooms permeated vape and cigarette smoke, and some of our most gifted employees had a never-ending table of Magic: The Gathering set up in the breakroom. The damn thing was that within one week of eschewing esthetic and behavioral norms productivity tripled. Brick Albert was producing enough sophisticated and high-grade weaponry to wage war against a hypothetical Mars of equal population and technological prowess. We all received bonuses—a healthy direct deposit some of us used to break away in search of more fulfilling work, though from what I gather their souls were quickly ground to dust by a return to corporate values. The Ping-Pong and puppy yoga of Silicon Valley wasn’t shit compared to Brick Albert. I’m talking a total and complete expression of the autonomous and individuated self, no matter how vain, silly, or OSHA non-compliant. One and all was accepted here for who they were—so long as they hit their quota. Even I wouldn’t fucker with my Christmas bonus. So eight hours a day, five days a week, my ass was in my cubicle. Sure, sometimes with a Fear and Loathing Boonie cap and filtered cigarette between my teeth, sometimes with my white, squeaky Snoopy slippers warming my feet, but in my cubicle nonetheless.

Although our daily tasks were still the same, our workdays felt less tedious no longer hiding who we were. One way of coping with the Kafkaesque support of a global killing machine was to comment on it openly. On Monday my boss wore a true-to-life Darth Vader costume he had won in a vicious bidding war on eBay. Equipped with a soundbox that emitted labored breath noises, ironically, this was the first time I saw my boss as a real person—and not a mere arbiter of pointless tasks and standards—after he had turned himself into a machine-man to parody our industry. I would have never known he enjoyed anything other than busting our balls had we not created a culture in which he felt free to express himself. We both agreed, Empire was the GOAT, and puppet Yoda was far superior to CGI.

It wasn’t just my boss, this new injection of culture allowed almost everyone to become a clearer, more vivid person in my mind’s eye. Carol in HR brought in her Pomeranians. I learned adopting Hugsie and Mugsie kept her sane after becoming a sudden divorcee and empty-nestor. Gregson and I hit it off over beat ‘em up videogames; we’d both been raised on Street Fighter and thought it would be fun to meet at an arcade after work. For the first time in my near decade-long career, I finally had a friend.

The sudden warm regard we all had for each other caused us to question if Brick Albert could be better utilized helping humanity rather than mass-producing cruel and vicious weaponry used for killing and maiming from a climate-controlled cockpit suspiciously resembling a racing-game pod 7,000 miles away from the target enemy.

Are we the bad guys? we all began to wonder after unpacking the implications behind our boss’s cosplay. A psychological injury began to take hold, affecting Brick Albert’s morale. Although still free to be me, I questioned the quality of the me I was becoming in support of such a mission. This new and unconscious belief we all harbored trickled into work performance. The scientists and designers drafted concepts meant to stun rather than kill. Unsurprisingly, there were few buyers interested in stunning their enemies into submission. General carelessness caused me to delay shipment of small arms to a developing nation often fixated upon by CNN, which upset a major revolution contrary to the interest of Brick Albert. When these sorts of mistakes happen, it’s never the person responsible who is punished. In this case it was my Darth Vader, Top Gun-loving boss who was replaced by an even sterner version of himself. This new boss was mostly cheekbones with a disproportionate amount of white to the pupils in his eyes, as if perpetually afraid or overstimulated.

Within a week, any public display of personality was immediately deemed inappropriate. Cubicles were stripped of décor, and the employee handbook was affixed to the walls of every common area. Under a culture of fear and conformity productivity resumed its normal trajectory. Stockholders rejoiced. Yet in lieu of being able to think for ourselves, whatever moral reservations we held about our work evaporated. As did previous memories of the former Brick Albert. The most difficult loss in all of this was the slow inevitable reversion of the friends I’d come to know so well back to business-casual colleagues—personas who saved their fun for the weekends and talked about the weather on days in between.

Gretchen had been a fighter pilot. I mean, she wasn’t actually, but she barked at the planes—loud. She was originally assigned to patrol the base, but was too good, wouldn’t let anyone in or out. She didn’t trust photos, birth dates, bar codes, any of that.

Rather than lose her to civilian life, her trainer, Dale—who had grown accustomed to her feathered , sharp tongue, tri-toned chest fluff, the whole deal—convinced Calbert, the squadron’s star pilot, to take the ninety-pound German shepherd up on a training mission. Strapped in like a mental patient, she took to flying like a duck-billed platypus to electroshock therapy. The fistful of liver treats Dale served upon landing sealed the deal. Gretchen had found her calling.

But her calling meant she had seen some things. Some things Calbert had seen too.  Things that were barely visible from their altitude, things that maybe were just implied by what they saw before and what they saw after. Seven years later—a metal plate for her, a couple reconstructive surgeries for him—Calbert and Gretchen returned to civilian life in San Francisco, heroes.

***

Finding a Coit Tower full of feigned interest and superficial attaboys, Calbert stopped talking about it, any of it, to anyone besides Gretchen. And Gretchen had heard it all before, had witnessed it, so had little to offer other than a lick here, a sniff there.

Calbert’s family proved proud but unhelpful.

His gamer brother told him to open a dog-aviation-themed sandwich shop and pet spa with his friend HoagieHound73—a TikTok baker and dog-stylist who specialized in jet-shaped hoagie rolls and updos for Yorkies.

His mother said he should become an island-hopping private pilot for people who owned islands they could all visit.

His father suggested that he become a stewardess or a monk.

He thanked them for their suggestions and all the tiny flags they placed in his boyhood room while he was gone, and slid by.

He slid by so far that he was lying on the corner of a dead-end street, having just snapped a newly planted trident maple by means of excessive leaning when the city found him, his ribs just as visible as Gretchen’s, his drooping head unable to support the weight of his standard-issue VA trucker hat.

***

That’s how Gretchen came to us, her backstory relayed with bated breath by the multi- gendered staff of Pets Oasis, a city-subsidized way station for pets of the addicted or otherwise addled. The staff didn’t know whether to treat Gretchen with reverence, pity, or shame. War, they all agreed, was not cool, not even a little, but dogs fighting in wars, surviving wars, flying in fighter jets, was undeniable.

Gretchen was not mad, just disappointed. Lying down towards the back of her assigned den, paws tucked, resigned that the smells she longed for—jet fuel, Calbert’s body odor, military grade body wash—were not walking through that door. I was. I needed to keep the peace between Alex, my surprisingly angsty six-year-old son, and Stacey, my less surprisingly exuberant four-year-old daughter, who, since their mother died last year, could agree on just one thing: gee, a dog would be nice.

Alex and Stacey weren’t sure how to approach a hero dog, fluffy and foreboding, like a giant talking bear from the eighties. The attendant said not to worry, that Gretchen hadn’t bitten anyone the whole time, and that tied for the record for least amount of biting they had ever witnessed. I laughed, but they said it wasn’t a joke, all dogs bite these days; they are getting ready for something, evolutionarily, they said.

I approached with an open palm. “Palm closed, palm closed,” screeched the attendant.  Gretchen sniffed and then turned her head, as if to say, Who’s next? The kids followed, and though they stayed further away, she sniffed harder, searching for something objectionable. She didn’t seem to find it. But we had found .

***

Despite tacitly agreeing to exchange her cell for our suburban colonial, she didn’t like us at first, couldn’t stand the way we smelled, or that we didn’t smell enough, that we didn’t check IDs upon entry, that we appeared to only command her (weakly) and not anybody else. She wasn’t hostile, but she kept her distance, respectfully declining to do as we asked and rarely letting me or the kids get in more than an ear scratch here, a butt rub there, without a treat in hand.

About a month after Gretchen joined us, sirens interrupted her afternoon nap, her fluff-insulated face alerted by ears that would have pierced the fog if it sank any lower. From the window behind our second-floor sectional, Gretchen keenly observed the comings and goings of the gas company, fire department, and toddlers who loved fire trucks, her tail wagging, sensing something interesting, finally.

The doorbell rang. She hurried down, untrimmed claws clattering on each step, barking with an urgency we had not yet witnessed. I her collar as I opened the door. She was pulling, but not hard.

“Please control your dog,” the gas inspector said. He was a dowdy man whose mustache wax and suspenders told me that the protractor hanging from his belt was his favorite piece of modern technology.

“I’m holding her,” I said, “she’s friendly, just barky.”

“There’s been a leak. I need to check your system, sir.”

I ushered him inside, still holding Gretchen.

“Please control your animal, sir,” he said.

“Gretchen, stop,” I said. The way she was pulling now, I wondered if lard was keeping his mustache in place.

“Gretchen?” he said, as if it were impossible for a dog to have the same name as his grandmother.

“Not our choice. She’s a rescue.”

“We at the gas company believe in animal rights,” he said, like from a script he just remembered.

I pointed him to the garage meter, holding Gretchen until he went inside.

When free, Gretchen returned to her perch upstairs where Alex and Stacey were watching cartoon bear kids playing baseball to please their bear grandpa. I told them that Bugs Bunny does a great , and they told me they didn’t like real baseball. “We’re just watching a show,” said Alex.

The inspector opened the garage door, and Gretchen beat me down the stairs with sharp barks and tail wags. Stopping in the doorway, he , “Control your animal, sir.” I reached for her collar, but she ducked me and scrambled up a step, still barking.

“Lock her up, sir,” he said. “Now!” he snapped, seeming genuinely afraid.

I finally Gretchen and lead her upstairs. There’s no way to lock her up inside. The doors all have handles she can jump up and bounce open. I bribe her into the backyard with some jerky. When I close the door, she looks and barks at me like, I ignore it. “She’s outside,” I say, returning to the inspector.

“Good. Keep it that way. You know, we at the gas company know our rights too,” he says, and flashes a badge.

“I’m sorry,” I say, not sure what the badge says or how I’ve impinged on his rights. “She’s just excited.”

He goes on to inspect our house with a beeping gauge my kids ask me if I can stop. I tell them no, but if they want to play catch we can go outside with Gretchen.

“We’re watching TV . . . nicely,” says Stacey, holding Alex’s hand just long enough for Alex to give her a look and remove it.

Gretchen barks more insistently. I go out to the second-floor balcony, quick to close the door. She sits, allowing me to scratch her head and then mine.

I crack the door and call down, “You still there? Hello?” No one answers. I look down at Gretchen’s face. She’s still sitting, a short wag leaks into her tail. I let her in. We hear the garage door open again.

She’s too fast. She’s bellowing at the inspector, same bark just louder, faster. He holds what seems to be a different gauge in front of him like a fencing foil, shaking.

“Control it, now,” he .

“Sorry, she’s friendly, just barks,” I say, trying to reach her collar.

“I’m warning you,” he says. I can’t get her collar. She’s ducking and jumping around. The inspector suddenly moves towards her. He reaches out with what I understand too late to be a taser and zaps her in her still-visible ribs. She collapses on the step, moaning. He zaps her again.

“What the hell?” I say.

“I warned you.”

She’s shaking on the floor, curled up, making herself as small as possible. “She’s a hero,

veteran,” I say, leaning over her. The kids are at the top of the stairs. Another trauma to add to the list.

“Jesus, you could have killed me with your attack dog,” says the inspector.

“Not attack dog. She has a metal plate in her head; you could have killed her!” I’m not actually sure about the science. “Go,” I say. He does.

Gretchen looks up at me and the kids, whimpering, shivering. The kids are now petting her, kissing her face, asking me what happened, is she going to be okay. I don’t know is what I believe but what I say is, “The man got scared and hurt Gretchen. She’ll be okay.” I hug them, forming an impenetrable wall of arms around Gretchen. As I say it, this “she’ll be okay” sounds hollow and familiar, but I can’t pinpoint why. Later, after the kids are in bed, Gretchen curled up at my feet for the first time, I remember: It’s the same thing I said to them before their mom’s surgery, when I also didn’t know, when I also didn’t help, couldn’t help.

***

The taser incident flipped an emotional switch in Gretchen, and in us too. She let us care for her after that, pet sessions could last minutes without rejoinder, and she even listened to us sometimes. It was as if we proved our mettle to her, worthy of joining her pack. The kids wanted me to take pictures of them together, and told their teachers, friends, other dogs they saw, everyone, about their new hero dog Gretchen. It gave me something to talk about with them too, something distracting, but not just a distraction, something real.

Physically, the fallout was less positive. Gretchen declined food for a few days after. Even when her appetite returned, putting on the pounds was no easy task. She our small backyard for hours, seemingly knowing exactly how to burn each extra calorie we provided. Her only distraction was when a plane passed overhead. She would stop, sit, and point her nose at attention. A salute, I thought.

Her most evident joy came from walking the neighborhood, stopping and sniffing at her leisure. The only non-residential monument we passed regularly was a meetinghouse for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; the name etched in large marble letters over the arched . Under that, in small raised metallic letters, removable, it read “Visitors Welcome.” Occupying five residential lots, the lawn was immaculate despite a decade-long water shortage which had left the rest of the neighborhood lawns yellowed or artificial. Each tree and shrub was shaped and trimmed meticulously.

As we turned the corner one day, I noticed an older woman who had just parked her Buick in a 45-degree angle spot reserved for churchgoers. She appeared church-ready: powder blue dress, pearls dangling around her queenly, jutting collarbones. Rather than go inside, she followed us to the corner and stopped. I looked back several times. She just stood there watching us.

Under her gaze, I noticed signs I’d never seen before reminding “all God’s children” to “be respectful,” because “the Lord is watching,” and “violators will be prosecuted here, up there, everywhere.” I also noticed, for the first time, several dog droppings on the lawn. They seemed to appear out of nowhere, like mushrooms or children’s boots after a bout of rain.

At the next corner, I hear an air horn. It’s the woman, blowing it at us. “Excuse me,” she after the sound dies down. Gretchen barks once and pulls towards her. “Yes,” I say, about halfway back up the block.

The woman doesn’t move. I notice that her hair is molded in the same shape as one of the shrubs and is as wind resistant. I wonder if that’s intentional.

She points to the ground. “Please pick up after your dog,” she says.

“Oh,” I say, “she didn’t do that, sorry.” She didn’t. I would have noticed.

“Come see,” she says.

I come close enough to the old woman for Gretchen to sniff her.

“That wasn’t her.”

The old lady looks like she wants to rub both our noses in it.

“The other day I heard incessant barking in the afternoon. That wasn’t her either, I suppose? You know, there are city ordinances in SF, noise, waste.”

“Sorry, she was locked out for a bit. …About the lawn, I swear…”

“Lying to old ladies in a house of God no less,” she says, still outside. “Jesus would just pick it up.”

“If that matters to you, go for it,” I say, immediately It’s something my wife would have said, something I would have not wanted her to say. Take the L and move on, I would have told her. She wouldn’t have.

“In this dress, with these shoes, you want me to pick up your dog’s ?” she says.

I look down at her sneakers and smile at the word refuse.

She just stares at me, mistaking my smile for guilt.

“Okay, for the record, Gretchen didn’t do any of this,” I say, reaching down with a bagged, L-shaped hand to pick up some other dog’s “refuse.”

“Gretchen? I’m Gretchen,” says the old lady.

“So is she.”

“What a great name!” she says, brightening like a flickering bulb. “I’ve never met a dog named Gretchen before.”

As I tie off the bag, my Gretchen sits and she scratches her behind the ears. “What about all the rest?” she says, alluding to the other droppings of various sizes and ages.

“You really think she did all that?”

“As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.”

I pull Gretchen away.

“You have a blessed evening,” she says to Gretchen, not me.

After that, whenever I see Gretchen the woman, she asks me if she can pet Gretchen the dog. I always agree. She acts like we’re indirect friends through a mutual acquaintance. One time, I hear her say to Gretchen, “You know, I used to not like dogs. But you’re not a dog, are you? You’re a Gretchen.” Gretchen looks up at her, panting with upturned lips that resemble a smile. I smile too, thinking I might prefer dogs to Gretchens, and if both, so much the better.

***

Stacey has an idea. “Let’s take Gretchen when we fly to Grandma’s!” When Alex actually agrees, I can’t say no.

Apparently, Gretchen has emeritus service dog status from her time in the Air Force. Even during his slide, Calbert had kept the multicolored stars-and-stripes-emblazoned stamped document. We show it to the veterinarian, who doesn’t know what it is but is so impressed that she takes a picture with her phone and posts it on her office’s Instagram.

Gretchen can’t contain her glee as we arrive at SFO—the sounds, the smells, the tail alternately whipping each kid in the backseat—she’s the happiest she’s been in the few months we’ve known her. Once inside, we show her paperwork to airport security. They thank her for her service and ask Stacey if she is going to ride her to Chicago.

The TSA agents are less friendly. I try to explain her metal plate to the lady with the wand. She asks me to open Gretchen’s mouth. I point her to a highlighted sentence on page three of her discharge, noting her metal plate. She says anyone could have written that. I point to the U.S. Air Force Seal. She says her little cousin has one of those he puts on all his coloring books.

“You’ll have to go in the back room,” she says. The room feels like what would happen if a doctor and a travel agent shared a WeWork—maps, latex gloves, a garbage marked “biohazard,” another marked “soft drinks, etc.” I pet Gretchen’s head, scratching around the edges where I think the metal plate may be, though I can’t actually feel it.

The TSA room guy is wearing a pin that has a diagonal line drawn across the word “terrorism.” He’s squat and tan like a rotisserie squab. Gretchen licks her lips and sniffs his khakis.

“Hey there, girl,” he says. “I understand we have a metal detector problem.” I hand him the paperwork. His eyes widen. “Oh my god, Gretch!” he says, and gives her a hug. I’m confused. The kids are unfazed; why wouldn’t this guy know Gretchen? “We served together. I was a spotter. She used to hate it when I gave the no-go,” he says.

“I’ve heard she was something,” I say.

“Best team we had, insepa . . .” he stops himself. “Say hi to Cal if you see him. Civilian life can be, well, you see.”

“Will do,” I say. He pats her head and sends us on our way.

At the gate, Gretchen drags me to the nearest window to bark at the planes as they land, take off, idle. I can tell that the barks are joyful, but I don’t think others can. I overhear the woman at the nearest check-in desk calling security. The kids see my struggle and attempt to calm her, repeating “Good girl!” She keeps barking.

Security shows up. They say they can’t have a big dog barking like that, scaring everyone. “Her tail is wagging,” I say. They can’t hear me over the barking, point to their ears.  She stops barking, just stops. It feels like a miracle, but security says it doesn’t matter, that she is too erratic to fly. I tell them she was a fighter pilot, or was owned by one, and flew all the time, on dangerous, important missions. I show them the paperwork and try to describe the TSA guy. I say he was short, bald, should have had a goatee, but didn’t. They say that describes too many people here. They work for the airline, not TSA, not the airport.

“It’s a matter of customer satisfaction,” they say finally. “And a barking ninety-pound , that’s not going to win us any service awards.”

The kids are hanging onto their respective stuffed animals, looking up at us, still hopeful.

I try again. In the moment, it feels like if I can get Gretchen on this plane, with my smiling kids, on their way to see Grandma, it can all be okay again, to them I can be the hero everyone keeps telling me Gretchen is.

“Have a heart,” I say, “if she disrupts boarding you can kick us off.”

“We can’t take that risk. Viral videos. Now’s the time. We can get you a hotel voucher for tonight.”

“We live here,” I say.

“Staycation, dog friendly, biscuits at the front desk, bones in the room.”

I pull Gretchen hard away from the window. She pulls back and barks.

“Sorry kids,” I say.

Alex says, “Mom would have never let this happen.”

Stacey senses that doesn’t help. “It’s okay, Dad, don’t be sad,” she says.  They boop Gretchen’s nose with their stuffed animals. The barking stops.

***

Back home, I decide to take Gretchen and the kids for a walk. No one is really into the idea. I can’t even get a tail wag from Gretchen. We reach the church corner, the kids a half block ahead on their bikes. We see Gretchen the woman. I’m not in the mood, but my Gretchen pulls towards her.

“Gretchen!” says Gretchen, opening her arms wide and bending at the waist. My Gretchen turns around, hoping to have her butt scratched the way she has trained the other Gretchen to.

“You know, I was just thinking about you,” says Gretchen, looking up. “The Church is having an event, for the homeless, unhoused, people with nowhere to live.”

“Oh, you know, we’re not members.”

“I know that. We thought it’d be nice for people to bring pets, make it real homey for them.”

“And you want Gretchen?”

“Well, yes, who wouldn’t?” She pauses, continuing to scratch. “I have a plus one and, well, my daughter says that if the church wants to help people it should just turn itself into a shelter and be done with it.”

Gretchen the dog looks up at me doe-eyed, ears peeled back. I cave.

***

Gretchen and I arrive at the LDS event slightly late, which I think of as on time, but is the latest anyone shows up. The sloped chapel is stuffed with smiling faces, dogs hovering around a podium in front of an enclosed area where the choir might sit, but which now contains only three men and a few cat carriers. The men are noticeably clean-cut, possibly for the first time since they could grow facial hair.

Gretchen greets us by petting Gretchen, “Who’s a good girl?” she asks. Gretchen’s tail answers that she is.

“Glad you could make it!” she says, cheerily noting our relative tardiness.

The sea of smiling faces parts in her wake, as my Gretchen is sniffing around plates of mayo-drenched sliders. Suddenly, she stops sniffing and bolts. I’d have lost my arm if I hadn’t lost my grip first. She nearly bowls over Gretchen, who somehow doesn’t seem surprised. She runs straight for the pulpit, starts wagging like crazy, barking for someone to open the thick wooden door behind which the three guests of honor sit. Two seem frightened and move to higher ground. The third’s buzz-cut-topped head darts around, keying in on the bark. He can’t see her over the top of the wooden barrier. As I rush to get ahold of Gretchen, he swings the door open.

Gretchen is all over him, licking his face, rolling around in the open doorway. He’s hugging her, kissing the side of her nose. Her reaction is unmistakable: pure love.

“It’s him, right?” I say to Gretchen when she catches up.

She smiles a surprise checkmate. “The real owner,” she says.

We wait until Gretchen and Calbert finally get up; she’s still wagging so hard I’m worried she’ll displace her hips. She licks my hand then returns to him, . “I’m Calbert,” he says, extending his arm to shake mine. His grip is strong but cordial. “So you’re the one who has been taking care of Gretch?” She sits at his side.

I to think about the look on my kids’ faces when they wake up the next morning and Gretchen isn’t there. I dream up a therapy session with a thirty-five-year-old Stacey or thirty-seven-year-old Alex, theorizing why they’ve never been in a serious relationship: “One day we were playing in the backyard, the next day she was gone forever, been really hard to trust people after that.” I can’t tell whether they’re talking about their mom or Gretchen. I try to hold it together.

“And you’re back on your feet?” I cough up.

“Yeah, she tackles pretty hard, but not that hard.” His eyes crinkle.

“I found Calbert volunteering at the soup kitchen I’ve been serving at for forty-five years. You ever serve, really serve?” asks Gretchen.

“Does tennis count?” I say. No one laughs.

and he mentioned how his dog used to love them, how the city took her away, how they flew together to keep us, all of us, free, how there was a giant shepherd-sized hole in his heart where she used to be. And then he told me her name and I knew, I just knew I had to bring them back together.”

“She’s a kind lady,” says Calbert, kissing Gretchen the dog again.

“And so you have a place and everything?” I say, fishing for something I don’t want to catch.

“Not exactly. I’ve been staying with Ms. Gretchen a couple weeks, just until the mission.”

“Mission?” I hope he’s re-enlisting.

“Yeah…that’s…maybe you didn’t read the program, that’s what this is for, to raise money for the Philippines mission,” says Calbert.

“Oh, great!” I say, a little too enthusiastically. “I’ve always wanted to go,” I lie. “Gretchen and I went once, long flight, short trip, didn’t touch down, can’t say

much more.” He pauses to stroke Gretchen’s chin. “I think this one will be better.”

“Of course it will,” says Gretchen.

“Well, I’m happy for you, man,” I say. “She can hang with you, can bring her by before you leave too.”

“Thanks bud,” he says.

I turn around, grab a couple sliders, try to scrape off gobs of mayo with a toothpick, and duck into a pew towards the back. More people are sitting now, smiling, sober faces, teeth sticky with fake marshmallows from the hot chocolate station, lips glistening with mayo.

A young bishop takes the pulpit. He looks like a movie star or pro wrestler stuffed into his little brother’s dress shirt. He smiles the easy smile of someone He talks about what an impactful experience his Philippines mission was, what an honor it was to spread the word to those less fortunate, to build the Church, not literally, but to fill it, to bring them to Christ.

He tells us that the highlight was when he and his fellow missionaries spontaneously took a bus hundreds of miles to a neighboring village that was just hit by a stray cluster bomb. The citizens thanked them, loved them, insisted they didn’t even know the terrorists were around, but after learning, really learning, of Christ’s sacrifice, forgave both them and the bombers. He up a piece of pottery he says was a gift from the villagers who claimed it survived the bombing from a house that was now rubble.

I can see Gretchen’s head over the divider; it gets a two-handed rub from Calbert, whose head is down and seems to dip deeper when the bishop mentions the bombing.

“We’re going to try something new this mission, something that we’re very excited about, something that was suggested by the lovely Sister Gretchen DeMille, whose steadying hand has guided our Church since before I was born,” says the bishop, extending an open palm towards Gretchen.

“As Joseph Smith taught, beasts, or pets as we might call them, have spirits too, and more than that, they can save. The money we’ve raised here tonight will help pay for our missionaries’ treasured pets to join them in service.”

My gut churns anew with anxiety over what I will tell my kids. The truth isn’t bad, but it won’t make them feel better.

“And these brave, kind souls, are no ordinary fresh-faced missionaries. They bring their lived experience and newfound passion for Christ with them on their mission, a genuine mission, right Calbert Hernandez?”

Calbert stands up and salutes the bishop. Everyone laughs.

“Different kind of mission, but just as important… more. We have a genuine American hero in our midst, two really, if you include his dog, Gretchen. Yes, Gretchen, how serendipitous is that?” There is a collective “aw” which I choose not to participate in.

The speech ends with a call to bid on various Utah ski trips. I’ve had enough. This is good, I try to tell myself, it’s what’s best, I try to convince myself. I get up. Gretchen the woman stops me before I can reach Gretchen the dog.

“I hope there’s no hard feelings,” she says and hands me paperwork. I quickly understand it to be a renunciation of ownership for Gretchen the dog.

“You know the kids love her,” I say.

“Kids? Right . . . the thing about kids is they’ll outlive their memories. My daughter, she doesn’t even remember how much I loved her when she was little. Find another dog maybe, a puppy you can train from the start, manners, honesty,” she says.

Rather than respond, I walk away towards a circle of people shaking Calbert’s hand and rubbing Gretchen’s chin. I overhear the adulation they were maybe entitled to but had never received. I calm. Calbert sees me, breaks his handshake, and steps outside the circle.

“I just want to say, you know, thanks. You’ve obviously taken good care of her,” he says.

“My family, yeah. I’ll sign,” I say, raising the paperwork and lowering my voice, “but, I mean, do you believe all this?”

“I don’t know, man. When Gretchen told me about the mission, I was having withdrawals, pain worse than anything that happened over there, and what kept me going was the thought of getting back, to one of those places, where, well, you know what we did.”

“I don’t, but I know what you’re saying,” I say. Gretchen sits by my side, as she had done before, when she was my dog, expecting a scratch. I give it to her.

“Good, that’s good. Most people don’t.” He signals down to Gretchen. “Going back together, man, to do good. …If that’s not a sign I don’t know…sign me up for my own planet I guess.”

I shake his hand again. Kneeling, I give Gretchen a full-on hug, burying my head in her fur.

I find the human Gretchen and stick the signed papers back in her hand.

“You know, she really didn’t poop,” I say.

She looks me straight in the eye, in her house of worship. “You’re full of shit,” she says.

***

On the dark, dog-less walk home, I look around the familiar streets, in the neighborhood my wife and I decided to buy our first home, to raise our family, and feel estranged, like none of it is for me anymore. Then I take a conscious breath. The clean, cool air composes me.

I think about Alex and Stacey deep in innocent sleep, at my home, our home, where we lived together, where we had years together, where, even now, after her, hundreds, if not thousands of needy dogs would love to live with us, roam free and safe, loved. Our home where we’d never , where we could host Grandma, watch TV nicely, and treat our next pet, whoever they might be, with the kindness and dignity the hero Gretchen deserved; where I would wait patiently—a few months, a few years, a decade tops—to return to the church for the only thing that could draw me back: a very special service in honor of the late Gretchen DeMille.

It started, and it ended, with a bad bargain in the mountain caves of Tora Bora. I have nothing but time now for the what-ifs and the whys, but every trail I follow leads back here. So long ago, our unit swept through the sprawling tunnels, seeking Taliban. Conlin and I were the youngest in our squad. Back home, his age didn’t stop him from getting into bars, and the broken tooth he got from fighting didn’t stop him from grinning. Our lieutenant always put us together, thinking my cautious nature would temper his wild one. Conlin called me “Dad,” then the whole squad did.

After days of not seeing an enemy, the light on my helmet caught the eyes of a cowering Afghan boy. He held something out, as if in offering for my mercy: a pottery lamp so small it would fit in my hand, ornamented with intricate blue and green swirls. I was mesmerized.

“Clear!” I yelled as I backed out of his dark corner, pocketing the lamp.

As we exited the cave complex, a staccato of shots scattered shrapnel from the rocks. Conlin slumped against me. I turned and saw the boy holding a gun just as he took a bullet. As the boy fell, his eyes bored into mine. In the pocket of my fatigues, the lamp shuddered. On the ground, Conlin’s last smile still played on his lips.

I accompanied Conlin’s flag-draped coffin to his hometown. His mother and kid brother hugged me hard like family. Mama Conlin sent me home with a handmade quilt and made me promise to write. I can’t say exactly why I never did it, but it could have been because of the shadow.

A man’s shadow, unfaded by light, followed me since Conlin’s last day. Only I could see it. I thought that if I could ditch the lamp, the shadow would leave too.

On the way to rejoin my unit, I threw the lamp from a Black Hawk. It disappeared into the scrub. It was back in the foot of my sleeping bag that night launcher, but it was sitting on my meal tray when I got dinner on the base.

When I was discharged from the Army, I traveled the world, hoping to leave the lamp behind, convinced that the shadow would not follow me if I didn’t have it. I dropped the lamp in an Indonesian volcano only to find it between the threadbare sheets of my hostel bunk. I chucked it off Tower bridge in London, but it was back in my pocket when I paid for my drink at a pub.

Every time I found it, it quivered under my touch. The shadow lingered nearby.

I told a monk outside a temple in Bangkok about the shadow dogging me.

“Make peace with your sorrow and guilt,” he advised, blind to the shadow lounging in the grass at his feet.

That monk was right. It was time to stop running and set down roots. I bought a house and a few acres in a backwater town, moved in with two duffels, and made my thrift-store bed with Conlin’s mom’s quilt. The county hired me to work road maintenance. My second summer there, every man between eight and eighty was in love with the girl from the feed store, but nobody so much as me.

Jennifer Day was lemonade in the heat and sunshine after a storm. She glittered with magic when she laughed. She wore her strawberry blonde hair in long braids, and I never saw her have a bad day. When she rang up my order, being close to her burned off a little of that dark fog that hovered over me.

In hopeless moments of intense longing, I had an intuition that the lamp held answers. Since I was settled, the shadow didn’t follow me so much; it seemed to lurk inside the lamp. Jennifer had her choice of men. I was shy, surly and serious. Why would she choose me? I held the lamp close and thought of her. That was when the shadow emerged, thickening from a light shade to a smoky form to something like a real man. His robes were dust-colored, and above his head a hat floated like a plume of smoke.

“What are you?” I asked, knowing it sounded rude. I didn’t know what else to say to a man made of smoke.

“I am a djinn,” He said as if it were obvious.

“Like a genie?”

“Something like a that, yes,”

“What’s your name?”

He shook his head.

“Okay, I’m gonna call you Jack.”

“How may I serve you?” he asked in a rich baritone.

“I get three wishes?” I asked, remembering a cartoon genie.

“Three, or ten, or none.” He grinned like it was a joke. I set the lamp down and turned away, not wanting to tangle with this dark being. Out of the corner of my eye, Jack faded to shadow then disappeared into the lamp.

Nightmares of Jennifer falling for Dean Ratliff from the next town over kept me from sleeping. Jack was the answer to my angst. Knowing the consequences, I made the wish anyway.

She blushed and agreed. The date was magical. Her smiles evaporated my self-doubt. For once, I felt at ease, like myself. She even seemed to think I was funny. I dropped her off with an electric kiss. That night, pain tore from my neck through my spine to my fingers and toes. I fell to my knees and tried to keep breathing. I knew it had something to do with Jack; I pulled myself to the mantle to grab the lamp and summon him.

“Jack, what is happening?”

“Every wish has a price.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You never asked.”

“Is it always pain?”

“The price depends on how difficult it is for me to acquire. She liked you, but you could not have captured her heart without my magic, so it was a little bit of pain.”

A little bit of pain. I convulsed on the floor.

Once we were in love, the memory of the agony seemed more than a fair price. We married within the year. Our Fern was born first, then baby Brooke. Jack faded to “the djinn,” which faded to a mist in the corner of my eye. The lamp no longer gravitated to my hand. It became a dusty relic on a shelf, from another time and another place. I thought of it less and less.

Happiness was sweeter since it had taken an unnatural intervention to make it mine, but the thought of the bargain brought a bitter aftertaste. I felt that I lived my life in the time between the lightning that lit up the sky and the thunder that would come crashing.

One late summer day, Jennifer hosted a party and invited our friends and family. I was never much for socializing, but something about her made it easier for me to be around all those people. She and our girls wore matching cornflower-blue cotton dresses. They looked like storybook fairies, spreading good cheer to all our friends who saw them. Jennifer made sure everyone had enough to eat and someone to talk to. A parade of sticky-handed children followed her around like little ducks, asking for treats or fetching things she asked them to bring to guests. The They held hands, singing

Ring around the rosie

Pocket full of posies

Ashes, ashes,

We all fall down!

After three rounds, Jennifer fell to the ground on cue, but didn’t get up. I thought she was teasing the kids. Her long hair was splayed in the soft grass, her dress laid out around her. I ran toward her and realized she’d passed out. That sweet summer evening turned to panic. In a daze, I carried her to the car and raced to the hospital.

The next hours were a blur. I only clearly remember my Jennifer, still in her cotton dress and loose hair. My fae queen, confined to the sterile, scratchy sheets and stark neutral tones of the hospital room. She eventually woke up. They transferred us around and around the hospital, running test after test.

A doctor in a white coat with a solemn face told us they’d found a tumor in her brain. It was far gone. There was little they could do. His black eyes betrayed no pity; his practiced way of delivering devastation didn’t allow me to rage or cry. I couldn’t breathe. Jennifer looked away as tears streamed down her cheeks. I knew she was thinking of the girls, but I could only think of how I could not lose her.

Jennifer was quiet on the way home, staring out the window. I wanted to fix this, to offer reassurance that she shouldn’t despair. It’s crueler to make a promise before you’re certain you can deliver.  The thought of asking the djinn for anything more felt hopeful but desperately dangerous.  But he’d brought us together. What wish-price could be worse than losing her?

At home, Jennifer went to bed. I ran to the den to retrieve the lamp, its swirling design warming under my fingertips. Jack’s ghostly shadow emerged. I could barely make out his eyes, but a wisp of a smile haunted his face.

“What’s your wish, my master?”

“Will Jennifer die of this cancer?”

“Yes.”

“Can you make her better?”

He floated from the corner and glided around the room like a puff of smoke, relishing the freedom of movement, the intensity of my attention.

“I could. Is that your wish?”

“What will it cost?”

“One child.” My throat tightened, preventing me from yelping in a panic.

“No,” I rasped.

He swooped to the other side of the room.

“A fire will kill your neighbors,” he responded, calculating with lives like coins.

“Which ones?” I was disgusted at myself for asking.

He wafted to the window and looked down the street. “The blue house.”

My friend Bill lived there. I thought of Conlin’s broken smile. I felt sick for considering it. My conscience couldn’t bear another death.

“I will pay. Not them.”

The smoky form expanded, then settled on the recliner next to me.

“Of course, master.” He grew thick with thought, his form coalescing.

“What do you want?” I asked him, my voice cracking.

“Your pain.”

“I’ll take any pain.”

He puffed up, doubling in size.

“Make the wish.”

“I wish for Jennifer’s cancer to go away.”

I caught the hint of a smile as he nodded into a puff of smoke and whooshed back into the lamp.

The next few days, I wondered if I’d imagined my conversation with the djinn. But within a week, the color was back in Jennifer’s cheeks. She read the girls from Grimms’ Fairy Tales with more narrative enthusiasm then I’d seen for months. When she cackled as the evil witch, the girls’ squeals and giggles reached me in the next room. When they fell asleep, she asked me to take a walk with her in the moonlight. We strolled hand-in-hand around the yard and looked at the stars. She felt warm and alive and full of optimism. Any price is worth this.

“You’ve got an angel watching out for you,” he said. The lamp vibrated in my pocket. Jennifer squeezed my hand.

I was flooded with relief, yet my jaw grew tighter, and my fists stayed clenched. I braced for agony, and when it didn’t happen, dread grew and knotted me up like a vine.

My Jennifer didn’t die, but surviving gave her a thirst for things I couldn’t provide. She started with a glass of wine at dinner. Then a bottle. I read the girls to sleep so they wouldn’t see her stumble into bed. Maybe this was a phase. I’d seen soldiers overindulge after deployment; many of them went back to normal. But some never did.

Within a year of cancer recovery, Jennifer got a job evenings waiting tables. She said she needed to get out of the house more. Her new coworkers liked to party. I didn’t like that she experimented with drugs, snorting coke with 21-year-old dishwashers, but she laughed off my concerns and soon blew my paychecks on harder highs. She insisted that she was just having a little fun, living out a little youth now that she had a second chance at life.

On Brooke’s twelfth birthday, I brought home our favorite three-cheese pizza. There was no cake, just Funfetti box mix on the counter and no Jennifer in sight. I wished for Brooke to cry. Instead, she calmly suggested we drive downtown, where her mom had said she needed to meet a friend. We passed the picturesque main street for a rundown row of abandoned buildings.

After searching for an hour, we found her asleep in a condemned store’s entryway. Without complaint, my daughters helped load her in the car and rode home silently. We were all lost for words in our own ways. When Jennifer sobered up enough to realize what she had done, she was clean for three weeks. Brooke forgave, settled for a late grocery store cake, and held on to hope.

A few months later, I came home from my night shift to strangers sleeping on my couch. The living room was strewn with bottles, takeout boxes and used ashtrays. My girls huddled in their room eating cereal with sour milk to avoid the party outside. I cleared out the living room of the trash, literal and figurative. I made breakfast and invited the girls out for a warm meal. Seeing them come hesitantly out of their room made me realize they weren’t little girls anymore. Fern, who had been a boisterous small child, grew to a cloistered young woman, her big eyes watching like a deer ready to bolt to safety.

I summoned the djinn but knew speech would push me over the edge. Not wishing to cry in front of him, I stared into his smoky form and said nothing. He hovered nearby. Was there an expression of sympathy in his shadowed face? For so long, my dearest ambition was to rid myself of him. Now he was the only one who really knew me. As my silence persisted, he faded to smoke and hovered over my discontent, my one true companion.

Jennifer withered until she was skeletal and grey. One rare evening when she wasn’t high or hungover, she darkened the doorway of my den. She wore the blue cornflower dress, but the effect was the opposite of what I’m sure she’d intended. The dress hung loose and wrinkled. Her once vibrant skin was sallow and gray, her once strong arms, bony. Her hair was lank and dirty.

“I know you can make it stop.” My gaze slid to the little lamp on the mantle, but I knew she didn’t really know.

She knelt at my feet, eyes red with tears.

“I never wanted to be this. I wish I had died of cancer!”

She stared into my eyes, and I wondered if on some level she knew it was my fault. Why else would she ask this of me?

I stroked her head as she sobbed in my lap.

Any words I thought of seemed meaningless. The truth, too unbelievable. Guilt choked me. My own selfishness, my fear of losing her had turned her into this. On the mantle, the lamp quivered.

When she left, I grabbed it. It fluttered erratically like a bird caught in a net.

Jack unfurled from the spout, expanded, and settled in an easy chair.

“You didn’t tell me I’d pay with emotional pain.”

“You didn’t ask,” he responded.

“Can I undo any of this?” He morphed into a large face.

“You can undo it all,” he said, opening his mouth and swallowing me. I entered the dense fog of his form as scenes took shape:

A few months after the cancer diagnosis, my Jennifer lies in a hospital bed, wilting like the vase of curling pink roses at her bedside. My daughters are beset by grief. I can’t comfort them. I am helpless and heartbroken, and my love isn’t enough to heal them.

We travel back again, before I dated Jennifer. She smiles at Ratliff down at the feed store. She says yes, she can go out with him when she gets off of work. I am alone. 

Back further. I’m back in the cave with the boy. We both look so young, probably less than five years apart. The boy offers me the lamp. I ignore him and call for backup. A gunshot. Pain in my back. A second boy with a weapon. 

Then we were back in my den, the djinn reduced to human size, nearly solid with a curling mustache. His robes gathered their dusty color, and the tinge of his reddish hat deepened.

“Your wish is my command,” he said. I had it now: a path for preventing all the suffering, from the start.

“Take me back to the caves.”

Smoke and sweat fill my nostrils. I’m eighteen again, staring in the eyes of another scared boy. Instead of the lamp, I take a bullet.

It’s not like the vision he showed me. I am fully present yet still know what could and will be. I have a sense of the futility of the battle we are fighting here. I haven’t met Jennifer yet, and I also know she will have a good life without me. My girls will never exist. The grief for them, not the wound, is what is killing me. Conlin will accompany my flag-draped coffin, hug my mother. I’m barely aware of my unit rushing the cave where I lie.

I close my eyes and imagine the faces of my children. Conlin, panicked, kneels by me and kicks the lamp the boy dropped when he was shot. It clatters across the stone and dirt floor.

As I die, my soul unstitches from my body and lingers nearby. My spirit doesn’t fade. Shadow threads tie me to another vessel. I am pulled towards the lamp, into the corner where it came to rest. I watch headlamps moving through the dark, sweeping the cave, pausing on my body. After all these years, I no longer feel the weight of Jack’s shadow. He is free, free to die, free to rest. Now I am the shadow.

Every wish granted has a price due.

I ache for the lamp to catch someone’s eye on this dark cave floor.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s more Elvis in Vegas at Christmastime or if it’s just my daddy getting to me again.

They got him on electronic billboards wishing everybody happy holidays. He sings “Silent Night” or “Silver Bells” everywhere you go. You can’t walk the Strip without seeing ten Elvises in red coats and pointed hats on a unicycle or skateboard or making giraffes or big-boobed girls out of balloons.

Each year, they put out a twelve-foot Elvis in front of the Westgate. He’s hunched, arms out, stuck mid hip shake. He’s got on Santa’s suit and pom-poms, but no white bushy hair or beard, and his coat’s unbuttoned enough for everybody to see his muscled mannequin chest. His pom-poms and gold buckle bedazzle. Little red-nose Rudolph stands over to the side and stares up at him meekly, waiting for a pat, some kind of kindness.

I do the same: stare at him, not so much as twitch an eye, while tourists roll luggage around me or head out to wherever they’re going, wherever that might be.

It’s Christmas Eve, the only time there’s a quiet, warm hum in the ER. Somebody’s got hot chocolate. Somebody brought candy canes and sugar cookies with sprinkles. The overheads are at half-mast. Elvis sings “Jingle Bells” somewhere down the hallway. Hattrup is hanging lights in a window. He’s only got one string, which isn’t enough for anything, but I don’t chastise. Today, I’m letting the spirit in.

“Georgia Boy is back,” Hattrup says. He has a high, wispy voice and aluminum-colored eyes that flicker, making him seem anxious at every second.

“We call state troopers Georgia Boys,” I correct him. “Where?”

“Four.”

“Thank you.”

“You visit Elvis today?”

I walk, don’t answer.

Georgia’s asleep when I find him. With his hair and beard and bird chest, he looks like Gregg Allman Jesus. He’s shirtless—left arm blue, blotchy, swollen—and hooked to an IV and air. He’s from Valdosta, about an hour from Waycross, where I’m from, and we’re only a few years apart, so we got connections.

Georgia’s a frequent flyer and has already been told he’ll lose the arm to sepsis if he can’t keep it clean. It’s hard for him, because he lives on the Strip, plays 90s alternative, hoping passersby will toss money into his guitar case. He sang “Come as You Are” for us once. His whole shtick was rasp. Hattrup didn’t think much of it. I thought it was fine.

I pull his chart, and he stirs.

“Hey, Georgia,” he says.

“When’d you come in, Georgia?” I ask.

“Last night.”

“I was on last night.”

“Tonight, then? Is it Christmas?”

I tell him there’s about five hours yet.

“It always feels like Christmas,” he says. “They keep the lights up year-round in these parts.”

“We had some neighbors like that.”

He giggles, says “Us too.”

“At least the weather’s Christmasy,” I say. It’s the only time of year South Georgia and South Nevada share a similar temperature, a frigid fifty/sixty degrees.

“Did it snow Christmas Day,” he asks, “when you were about thirteen, fourteen?”

“Heck yeah. We got at least six, seven flakes.”

“Us too.” He smiles. “It was magical.”

Winter is the time for clouds in the desert, when I sometimes drive ninety miles to lie on my car’s hood and watch the sky. I get there at least a full hour before sunset, when the earth’s the color of Spanish moss in October and the sky old beat-up jeans, and the chunky clouds billow up like skyscrapers, and the thin ones stretch across quilt-patterned, each bumping into the next. It’s just like home, just right there, like you could touch them if only your arms were three times as long.

In swampy flat Waycross, you can see a storm’s advance miles away with its gray showgirl’s curtain.

Then the glittery night. They always said you can go into the Okefenokee and see the Milky Way with your own bare eyes, but I never did.

I miss the pines, how their branches hide with the moonlight, except for those at the tippy top. Under the moon, they smell like wood and mint and look like stick figures with triangle heads that lean with the wind, threatening to break.

At ten, the ER is called to attention, and Col. Mihata arrives to wish everybody a merry Christmas. Col. Mihata’s husky, wears wire eyeglasses, and comes across as friendly even though he smiles with gritted teeth. When he leaves, Hattrup is in my ear.

“You can’t,” he says. “Not safe.”

“Mission already accomplished.”

I walk back to the nurses’ station with him on my heels.

“I don’t mean the plane ticket.”

“He doesn’t have an ID, so I got him a Greyhound.”

“To Georgia? How long is that?”

“Two and a half days.”

“He’s an addict. He won’t make it.”

“He says he’s got enough stash for a few days.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“The reason for the season.”

I open Georgia’s songbook. He doesn’t remember his dad’s number, and he’s scared to talk to him anyway. He said call his Sunday school teacher: the number’s scribbled somewhere in the book. I learned this when we talked about how, growing up, we both liked Sunday school but hated church. His teacher was a gentle man who also taught him guitar.

“You can’t drive him to the airport, a bus station, or anywhere. What if he has a flashback and kills you?”

“He’s a heroin junkie.”

“He was in Iraq and Afghanistan and wherever the hell else. Put him in an Uber.”

“You’re free to come with.”

The songbook is a mixture of random ink and pencil sentences and lyrics, his handwriting sometimes large and curvy, sometimes tiny and all caps. There’re sketches of objects throughout: a fire hydrant, a traffic light, a Coke can.

“No, I’m going home to my sweet thing.”

I find the number on the third page, at the bottom. He literally wrote out Sunday School teacher, then a colon, then the guy’s name, Carl Thornton, then the ten-digit number. He drew a little guitar beside the digits.

“Call me and leave your phone on speaker the whole way.”

“He’s harmless.” I turn to Hattrup, to his fluttering tin foil eyes. “It’s Christmas. Let me do some good in the world.”

I dial before he can say something else.

It’s just after midnight when I hear a radio voice down the hallway. Spend Christmas right here with Elvis. Put a country ham in the oven, an angel on the tree, and the King’s songs—White Christmas or Blue—

Georgia’s awake, stares blankly at the TV, flips channels.

I tell him I talked to Carl, and he sits up. I tell him I talked to his daddy, too, and he rubs his face one-handed, hides his eyes. I tell him: Both men will be there when his bus pulls in. They’ve looked for him, knew he was in Vegas, even flew out a couple times, never could find an address.

I tell him the hard part: His momma died last year. Heart attacked her. She worried every day for him.

His shoulders heave. I hand him a box of tissues. He smacks it away, pulls out the IV, pulls off the nasal tube. He jumps up and bangs a leg against a chair, tumbles headfirst into the wall, clinches a fist, wants to punch the wall, needs to punch something, slaps the wall open-handed instead. Slaps it a few times.

He turns to face me.

“What happened in Iraq,” he says, “he never understood I couldn’t be normal after that.”

I wait for him to say something else. He doesn’t. I ask if I can give him a hug. He thinks on it, his eyes droop then blink, then he says please.

It’s just after seven when we walk outside, where the sun already blazes, and I remember Hattrup saying we might set a record.

“Hot damn,” Georgia says. “You know how many times I wore shorts on a Christmas?”

His bus doesn’t leave until nine something, so I say let’s go see Elvis. He nods, doesn’t even ask.

We stare and listen to slot machines beep and chime their way across the Westgate’s breezeway, hear someone win a jackpot.

Georgia’s shirt hangs over his shoulders like a cape. He took a shower at the hospital, but his clothes are still filthy. Tourists make a point to walk around us.

“You dig the King?” he asks, finally.

“My daddy did,” I say. “Liked him so much he wanted to be him. Had the wave haircut, the sideburns. Even impersonated him.”

Georgia sniggers.

“Back home, the ladies’ auxiliary put on a Hee-Haw-type show every Christmas. The mayor dressed up like a woman, and everybody thought that was funny. They set a pig loose, and some idiot chased him through the audience. Some beauty queen sang, and Daddy did Elvis.”

“Something happened to your old man?”

“I came home from bootcamp and told him I who I was, and he told me I was no child of his, and that was that.”

“Deep South strikes again.”

“So, I actually hate the King.”

He laughs.

“What you’re doing for me,” he says. “Thank you, Georgia.”

“You gone make it, Georgia?”

He shrugs. He’s honest.

He says he needs his music to live, so he has to keep his arm. I can’t tell if he really wants to get clean.

I just know he wants to get home.

Captain Abibalus was troubled. Walking up the dusty, cypress-lined path from Kyrenia’s harbor, Abibalus’ practiced eye took in the worn marble buildings. Much had changed since the last time he’d been here. A decade go, trade had been harder; less settled, but more profitable for the enterprising trader. It had been the same story in Alexandria. Old associates gone. Dead, driven out of business, or resting easy on the fruits of their labor. Dilapidated warehouses and fields gone to seed. At every corner, some gaudy new shop hawking poorly-made trifles. Rome had seen to it. Its gods were supplanting the old gods, its ways, the old ways.

Maybe he should have stayed in Iberia, Abibalus thought. The weather was worse, but there were more opportunities for a crafty and hardworking merchant like himself. Trade with the surly Gauls, and the taciturn British. Construction in that part of the Empire was booming, which meant an insatiable lust for materials, tools, and skilled labor. It created an energy very different from the one he could see in this aging port town.

Then he thought about dying in a foreign land, buried in the cold, wet soil without funeral rites. He shuddered. No, his people were from this area. He wanted to be mourned by a son or grandson when he passed, not years later, word of his passing carried by Rumor. He’d returned for good reason.

This glum mood couldn’t last long. Even after decades’ worth of journeys, the return to land always impressed Abiblus, whether it was to a faded backwater like this one whose glory days were long past, or to mighty Rome. The urban breeze was not pleasant — burning trash, burning wood from the smithies, burning, burning, burning — and occasionally, a small respite, the breeze carrying along a whiff of those crocuses Abibalus had never seen anywhere else. The sum of all these smells was commerce. For that, Abibalus had a nose like few others.

Meanwhile, strolling along the beaten dirt path he savored the way the solid earth didn’t sway the way his ship deck did while riding the Mediterranean’s waves. His body still felt the swaying; it would for a while to come. There was a time when he’d been able to absorb the transition from land to sea and sea to land effortlessly. Recently he’d noticed that it took longer to adjust. He’d experienced enough of life to understand that even this mild discomfort and disorientation was a kind of blessing. Like drinking too much. Another way for his body to navigate a strange and restless world.

Their journey from Alexandria had been smooth — Rome’s fleets effectively curtailing the activities of pirates. Now, his ship’s disposable cargo was in the process of being hauled out of the hold, to be turned into profit. At this stop it meant unloading ivory he’d taken on in Alexandria that had itself been ferried, carried and dragged from deep in the Egyptian interior. With the proceeds, he’d take on a load of copper before they continued to Syracuse. Later they’d finish at Ostia and unload the grain at the great city for which the Empire was named and on which so much depended. Even though the trade routes weren’t as profitable as they once were, certainly not for a small family outfit like his own, they were much more reliable. Grain shipments to Rome were an unostentatious way for a merchant like Abibalus to guarantee a prosperous journey, while making some deals on the side.

The Egyptian port city named for the great Greek conqueror had left a sour taste in Abibalus’ mouth. Not because of the trade; Abibalus had ferreted out a choice deal, though there were fewer of those than there had been a decade ago and took more effort to track down. No, because the city was so developed. A culture was settling over the Empire, a kind of complacency, expressed in new types of commercial activity. The vibrancy of Rome’s Republic was being replaced by a stultifying certainty. 100% returns on investment had shrunk to steady, stable 10% returns, barely enough to cover expenses unless one dealt in scale. Individual contractors were being replaced by guilds and associations. No more handshakes, no more personality.

And everything was getting cleaner and more expensive, transmuted by the magic of privilege and collective prosperity. Well, Abibalus thought, at least there was still one thing he could depend on, a rock of in an ocean of changeable novelty: Demetrius’ tavern. Each shaking step brought Abibalus closer to the tavern, where he could buy a fresh plate of roast lamb, and a cup of that good, fresh Cypriot wine they served. The tavern’s owner, a monumental figure named Demetrius who had settled down after making good on a lifetime of trades, had connections from the hills and mountains inland, he’d often boasted about it. The stuff the Cypriots didn’t ship abroad. It was dark, sweet, and rich; a flavor unlike anything Abibalus had ever found. It was a treasure in itself. There, with good wine, among other traders, Abibalus would see about prices in the area and get the latest news and rumors.

Although he’d passed away a few years ago, Demetrius left behind a wife and a large family. She and their youngest son ran the establishment. It was a popular gathering place and a convenient fixed point for striking deals or storing goods. A second opportunity to make a deal if for whatever reason, a shipment or agreement fell through. Especially with smaller projects. A few dozen crates of oranges you picked up on spec, a small shipment of olive oil you took a gamble on to maximize your profit. Having secondary markets on which to offload various speculative investments was a key to success — at least, Abibalus found that to be the case. 3% profit here and 7% there added up. And a small loss was better than a disastrous reversal.

Abibalus had sailed with Demetrius decades ago when starting out; the Cypriot had taken Abibalus on as a sailor, and then when he’d demonstrated a capacity for numbers, had helped stake him a share in the growing Roman-Iberian trade. After he’d paid Demetrius back for that investment, Abibalus had gone further, traded near the edge of the Empire.  Abibalus had considered the man more than a mentor — he’d been a friend. Demetrius had run a tight ship and taught Abibalus many of the nuances of shipping in this area, as well as the principles of trade. Family was the most important thing in business, but friendship counted for a lot too. Especially a friendship borne of the oaths men swore while steering into a wave taller than their ship’s mast, and praying to the various gods the ship’s crew venerated when a storm blew up unexpectedly in the Aegean. In fact word of Demetrius’ death was one of the reasons Abibalus had returned to this region: he’d left originally when striking out on his own, out of respect for the man and his legacy, and a desire not to compete with him.

As he walked past warehouses and small dwellings, Abibalus thought more about his old comrade. Beyond the pleasant memories of shared sea-battles, Abibalus held Demetrius in high esteem because he’d been charismatic and kind. Some of that magic had rubbed off on his establishment. Abibalus didn’t think much of his erstwhile captain’s wife, or his sons — nothing bad, but nothing good, either, he regarded them much the way he regarded anyone else — but the place endured in part because of the goodwill the man had accumulated over the course of his life, and the many connections that had subsequently been forged at his establishment. If Abibalus had any instinct for settling down, perhaps he’d look more closely at emulating Demetrius. But the sea called to him; a life on land was not in his soul. He had the money to settle many times over, and he was old, but he knew, deep in his bones, that he’d die in a boat, under the benevolent and crafty gaze of Melqart. His goods, his little network, would go to his sons, some of whom would prosper — his eldest, and his third — some of whom would probably squander it. Such was the way of the world.

With these uncharacteristic musings about legacy stirring his thoughts, Abibalus arrived at Demetrius’ tavern. The place had changed; they’d widened the front, and put up a wooden sign outside advertising themselves with a picture of a wine jug and a loaf of bread. Planters of small white and pink roses were placed tastefully on the windowsills, which had been spruced up with new planks of clean pinewood from the island’s mountainous interior. The establishment didn’t look quite so rough as it had under Demetrius. Abibalus scowled instinctively. It was happening here, too, in sleepy Kyrenia — everything was getting nice and clean.

The interior confirmed Abibalus’ fears. Formerly dark and dirty, the tavern had been painted brightly and filled with new wooden furniture: tables and benches, a few of which were occupied by patrons. Rather than the boisterous and rowdy tumult of years past, the conversation was being held at a respectful and quiet murmur more appropriate for diplomatic delegations and scribes than for merchants. The layout had changed, too; the dining area was shortened. Where in the past there had been a long bar over which Demetrius used to lean and shout business and affectionate if insulting nicknames at the various travelers and traders who’d stop in, all of whom he knew by sight, there was now a clay brick wall. A pretty slave lounged behind a wooden stand, twirling her long black hair with cultivated disinterest. When she saw Abibalus enter, she guided him to one of the unoccupied tables and began listing the types of food and wine they offered. This was new, and Abibalus didn’t care for it — he’d been to many establishments like this, and it wasn’t why he’d come to Demetrius’. He could overpay to be served by slaves anywhere.

He resolved to leave. During previous visits to Cyprus he’d missed the island’s other eating options owing to his friend, and then more recently the loyalty he bore to the memory of his friend. Abibalus was just about to thank the slave for her time when he saw a small group of traders from Tyre. He knew this because he’d done business with their captain before, a crafty but trustworthy man named Phelles. He made his way over to their table, where a young man, one of Phelles’ crew, appeared to be holding court.

“Captain Phelles, my good fellow. How goes it?”

Phelles looked up warily, then recognition lit his eyes. “Captain Abibalus! Well met old friend. I didn’t realize you were back in this area. Here to pick up some of our old friend Demetrius’ slack?”

“Precisely right. We’re just in from Alexandria,” Abibalus said. “Stuffed with grain for Rome. But I had a chance to acquire some choice ivory from far up the Nile, and happen to know of a group of blacksmiths who are always eager for copper near Syracuse, so made a quick detour here. The grain will keep. What are you up to?”

Phelles grinned. “Stopped over here on a short hop from Tyre. Heading back with copper and timber from the interior, then who knows.” He waved the slave girl over and ordered her to bring food and wine for Abibalus. “Sit, sit, join us. We were just discussing politics.”

“Politics and religion,” said one of the men sitting next to Phelles.

“My first mate, and son-in-law,” Phelles said. “Kyriakos. He was telling us about some new god he follows.”

The Greek carefully wiped his mouth with a piece of linen he procured from his clothes, then cleaned his hands with the same. “Not some god, the God,” Kyriakos said. “Jesus Christ, son of our lord and father.”

“God the father? The sky God?” Abibalus said.

“No,” Kyriakos said, his brow furrowing. “No, God, Jesus Christ, not a god, or the sky god.”

“Easy friend, I meant no disrespect,” Abibalus said. He’d been in thousands of conversations over the course of his life and could see this one was in danger of heading totally astray. He resented having to diffuse what looked like it might turn into a trying meal, with him shoveling his energy and effort into the maw of this young man and his religious devotion to — to what? Some new god or gods. Meanwhile they were both part of the same old empire. People were losing out on economic opportunity, were missing the prosperity of the previous generations, and it seemed like every month there was some new cult or sect springing up as people invented new spiritual spaces to make up for their lost shot at wealth or social mobility.

On the other hand, all things considered, it never hurt to learn a bit more about a new god. And better to risk a little offence here, where the stakes were low.  This way, when Abibalus met a trader who followed the new god he’d know how to avoid putting his foot in his mouth. “Tell me more about this god. Excuse me, God.”

“Hope you enjoy the food,” Phelles said, laughing and elbowing Abibalus in a comradely fashion. “You’ve been away for too long. You’re in for a real story.”

Kyriakos looked at his father-in-law with annoyance, then launched into an improbable tale with the fervor and conviction of a new convert while the other people at the table ate or drank, obviously having heard this many times. Abibalus understood immediately how it was — this was probably the influential eldest son of someone Phelles wanted to be connected to, some Greek, and either had always been fervent or had recently converted. You live long enough you see all sorts of things like this. Abibalus was relieved it hadn’t happened to any of his children, becoming enamored of a god, but there wasn’t anything dishonorable about it. It was just sort of inconvenient — being dogmatic about a religion would certainly make life as a trader difficult.

“Hang on,” Abibalus said when Kyriakos got to one point. “Did you say the crowd released a murderer and crucified the King of the Jews?”

“That’s right,” Kyriakos said. “The Roman governor asked the crowd who to pardon, Jesus Christ or Barabbas, a common murderer, and the crowd elected to release the murderer. The blood of God is on their hands.”

“Jesus Christ is your God? And you say he was crucified?”

“That’s right,” Kyriakos said with conviction. “Then ascended to heaven where he is seated at the right hand of God the father.”

Abibalus looked at Phelles for tacit permission — this was, after all, his son-in-law, his business associate. He didn’t want to injure the man. “You know I was there. I was in Jerusalem when this happened. I guess it was about a decade ago. I saw it all.”

“You saw the crucifixion!?” Kyriakos was astonished.

“Sort of. It didn’t happen the way you said. I’m not saying your man Jesus is a god or not, but it didn’t happen that way. Would you like to hear how the thing transpired?”

Kyriakos was quiet. He looked intensely at Abibalus, and, apparently satisfied that the man was telling the truth, he nodded.

“So I was in Jerusalem on business. Normally I stayed with shipping routes, “do the trade you know,” as they say, but Demetrius was looking for opportunities to expand. I offloaded a shipment of armor and joined a caravan to Jerusalem to deliver them to the Roman garrison. This was a priority shipment and I was to be paid in coin. Good silver. Back then, Tiberius was emperor, and one had to take extra steps to ensure things like that were solid. Demetrius had a contact in Rome, the husband of a very good friend of his wife’s and this was a good deal. So it was decided that I’d travel further inland to see if there was other business to be done, other opportunities.

Well when I got there, of course, there was some kind of festival. And this was a Jewish city, and the Jews are a very devout people about their god, and the Romans had got hold of a man for preaching insurrection against the empire. The man’s name was Jesus, though sometimes he went by Jesus Bar Abbas. Some people claimed he was the Messiah. I can’t say how he saw himself.

I’d dropped off the shipment and was awaiting a meeting with the governor for payment, a man named Pontius Pilate — a quiet man, I can’t say I was impressed by him — when a great crowd gathered to demand the release of this rabble-rouser, whose name was Jesus Barabbas, or that’s how they called him. The crowd prevailed upon Pilate to release the man and Pilate agreed. Pilate said that if the city would take responsibility for him, that Jesus Barabbas would be released to them, but that if Jesus continued to preach insurrection, Rome’s troops would move to detain him again, and there would be bloodshed. This seemed to me quite proper.

So Jesus Barabbas was released to the crowd, and they were happy. The crowd headed off to watch the crucifixion.

Later, when collecting my payment, I asked Pilate about the episode and he said that this sort of thing wasn’t unheard of. The Jewish people would occasionally produce charismatic individuals claiming to be their messiah, their savior, a harbinger of the end-times. He said that he’d talked to this Jesus while the man was in custody, and helped him see reason. Then he did something remarkable to me; he asked if I’d do him, and Rome, a favor.”

The table were all watching Abibalus intently. Nobody had heard this story before, not because he hadn’t told it, but because when he was telling it before nobody had assigned it any significance. Abibalus felt that it was better not to dabble in politics, or in religion, save to make offerings to the sea gods of whatever country he was in. Crossing gods — or God — was terrible for business. Crossing their acolytes was just as bad. But — this is how things had happened and Abibalus felt obligated to see the matter through.

“Pilate asked if I’d take this Jesus of Barabbas out of Jerusalem and bring him where ever he wanted to go. He said, when I paused, that he’d give me a hundred silver pieces on top of what Rome owed me for safe transport. I agreed.”

Kyriakos snorted. “This is outrageous.”

“Easy son, Abibalus isn’t a liar. Finish your tale,” said Phelles.

“That evening, I collected Jesus Barabbas, and his woman, a woman named Mary. She was with child and he was a tall, good-looking man with fair skin, piercing blue eyes and the sort of ruddy brown hair you see sometimes in Ionian Greeks. We brought them with us out of the city. The caravan took two days to reach Jaffa at the coast. We encountered and defeated a small group of bandits along the route, which helped warn me off mixing land with sea trading. Then we prepared to set sail. I asked Jesus where he wanted to be taken and he said Marsillia. Said his father had taken him north of that place, to Britainnia, to trade tin, and that he’d try to get there to start over.”

“We took on oil and cedar at Jaffa and made our way west, stopping at several cities along the way. I found Jesus Barabbas to be a very decent person, a charismatic storyteller, a lousy sailor, and overall a model traveler. He was also good luck; everywhere we landed, prices were a little higher than I expected, and there was something available I knew I could offload at the next port for a profit. It was a good trip, and I was sad to see the man go when we finally reached Marsillia. I gave him and his wife 30 of the 100 silver pieces I’d received to bring him away, and wished him good fortune. And that’s the last I saw of him.”

Phelles nodded. “Quite the tale. Well worth the price of the food and wine I’m treating you to.”

“I don’t believe it,” Kyriakos said. “I know the story of Christ. The Son of God wasn’t some common criminal. And he wasn’t married!!”

“Two thieves were crucified, and some Jewish terrorist who’d cut a Roman Legionnaire’s throat. Jesus Barabbas was not. You can probably meet him, if I had to guess he’d be in his forties by now, with at least one child. Start in Gaul, work your way up toward Britannia.”

“No, the Romans released the murderer, because the crowd demanded”—

“Look,” Abibalus said, interrupting him. “Don’t be ridiculous. The Romans have never released anyone who killed a Roman soldier. Never. If it had happened the way you said, Jerusalem would be in the past tense, now, Tiberius would have ordered the massacre of the entire city, like they did Carthage. I’m not saying your man Jesus isn’t the Messiah, or if he is or isn’t a God. Or the God. Gods walk the earth all the time, and we mortals do what we can to get their favor and avoid their anger. I don’t know what happened to him after I left him, or what significance he has. I’m just telling you what I saw.”

Abibalus felt as though something had broken inside him, some dam that had been holding back a reservoir of anger about the world that people were making, this younger generation with their certainty, their fastidious habits, and their new gods.

“I took that man, Jesus, across the Mediterranean. That’s what happened. Whatever unfortunate they crucified was also a man like any other, just another sad body grabbed by the Roman Empire and put to death. If you want to ground your faith in a lie, that’s up to you, but you can’t tell me what I saw, what I know.”

“And besides, why can’t a murderer be a god? Murders happen every day. Who’s to say it isn’t part of your god’s plan? It must be, if there’s only one of god. Think about it.”

“Now,” Abibalus said collecting himself and turning to Phelles, “what news of Tyre? How’s the harvest looking this year? Rumor is the rainy season lasted a little longer than people expected… I can tell you the grain harvest in Egypt is shaping up to be about what people projected…”

The rest of the meal progressed well. Demetrius’ kitchen was still producing good food, and whatever connection he’d made with the interior in the Troodos Mountains seemed as bountiful as ever — the wine was uniquely delicious. And Phelles was a font of knowledge about the region, as well as the nuances of developing political (and as Abibalus now knew, religious) issues. It seemed that there was a lot more instability under the surface. And instability, of course, meant opportunity.

Finished with his food, Abibalus thanked Phelles for the hospitality, and absented himself from the group. He made his way back down the path toward his ship, where he’d bed down in his quarters. For some reason, he could never sleep soundly on shore.

The ship was nearly done unloading when he returned. The buyer for the ivory was waiting for him; he concluded their negotiation, haggling a little over the final price before settling on a sum a little higher than Abibalus expected. Tomorrow he’d make his way over to the smith district to hunt down name he’d been given in Alexandria and find the smelted copper ingots, hand over the coin, and arrange for its transport to his ship.

Then, off to Syracuse.

Abibalus walked across the deck of his ship to his quarters. Inside the small room, his thoughts drifted back to that strange trip years ago, with Jesus Barabbas and Mary. He’d forgotten all about them, yet here they were, before him again as though it had happened yesterday. Jesus had made an impression. There was no denying it. Was the man a god, like the Greek said? If the priests and prophets were right occasionally gods walked among mortals, descending from their mountains or clouds, or rising from the deep. Perhaps Jesus had been sent by the Sky God, or by the Jewish God. Why not? Abibalus remembered his eyes clearly, the cerulean blue, a blue like he’d never seen before or since, not even in northern lands where that color eye was common. And what a story it made, he thought, stripping off his shoes and clothes before easing down to rest his weary body in bed. Him, humble Abibalus, the ferryman to a great God. Perhaps there were parts of the ship where Jesus had walked… a blanket from where he’d slept with Mary. As he laid his head on a pillow, Abibalus could already see the opportunities opening before him the way they had when he was a young man, and the future was bright and limitless. The sun coming up in the east, over the horizon. The ship creaking, low in the water, its hold full of cargo. In the distance, the approaching port.

Barabbas walked hurriedly down a dusty side alley in the old city of Jerusalem, glancing side to side before furtively ducking into a low doorway of a house where he was finally able to drop his uncomfortable human disguise and assume his true form. His size and shape remained roughly the same, but his skin changed to something akin to scales of a metallic green hue, and his face flattened and slightly elongated with completely black eyes and mere slits for nasal and auditory apertures. His mouth became a toothless oval, fishlike. For though he clearly was not a creature born of this earth, his own planet was mostly marine, and the intelligence that developed there were originally aquatic. Human biologists would lately describe the phenomenon as convergent evolution, and it applied equally to interplanetary organic life. He had actually come to Earth from a planet orbiting the star that would eventually be named Theta Herculaneum. He had not come alone, however, but as the leader of 17 emissaries that were to meet their foe on neutral ground for negotiations to a possible peace treaty of a war that had lasted nearly 100,000 years.

Across the empty room from Barabbas sat a curious structure: two dark metallic cubes sitting one on top of the other, with a third much smaller cube placed on top. This smaller top cube slowly turned a quarter of a rotation and back again, as sound emanated from it.

“Barabbas, I assume,” came the voice from the cube. “You are ten minutes late from the time agreed upon.”

“I was stopped by two of the humans. Soldiers of the Roman faction, apparently. They tried to detain me and were holding their iron blades as if to strike.”

“And what did you do?” Asked the cube.

“I killed them, of course. It takes so little for these fragile creatures. I merely used a charged neutrino stream and they never knew what hit them.”

“That may have been unwise,” replied the cube.

“What do I care? I disagreed with the council’s decision to come to this planet, and I don’t understand what we should have to do with these mammalians. It’s revolting seeing their absurdly primitive society dragging itself around in the dust, using organic labor to pile up rocks to live in. They haven’t even figured out the periodic table on their own yet!”

“Perhaps you should judge not lest you also be judged. Where do you think your species came from? Or mine, for that matter. We, too, started out as organic, carbon-based matter. We infiltrators, too, had to take the long, hard road to hyper-enlightenment and transmorphosis. From what I have intuited from the archives, my own original world was not dissimilar to this one. That world which perished in a supernova 500 million years ago. Yes, these humans are a primitive, barely stage one intelligence. But your own species, Barabbas, is not much older from my perspective, and still merely at stage three. Still dependent on solid organic matter, still stuck in slower than light speed travel.”

“Fine, you made your point. Let’s get on with things, shall we? We both came a long way for this meeting, after all. By the way, what shall I call you?”
“The name I have been using here is a common one in the local dialect: Jesus.”

“Do you have a real name?”

“Not one that can be conveyed aurally.”

“I heard some talk from the local humans about someone named Jesus that has been putting on displays of breaking the laws of physics as they understand it. Something called miracles, apparently. What exactly have you been up to?”

“Nothing you need worry about. Our terms for peace are simple. We will agree not to destroy your species and to let you maintain your influence over all systems within 50 lightyears of the Theta quadrant. All we require is that you leave the Sol system and all its planets, including this one, and never return.”

Barabbas, normally an acute thinker and decision maker, took a moment to process the shocking offer he had just heard. It made no logical sense to his evolved ichthyic brain, nor could he compute what permutation of game theory the infiltrators were pursuing.

“What is so special about this world? And what makes you think we’re interested in it anyway? We have plenty of our own, with much more promising species under development,” replied Barabbas.

Jesus maintained his same equanimous tone, his machine intelligence never betraying a hint of anything resembling emotion or sentiment, “Our terms are clear. If you agree, we will cease the dismantling of your star systems effective immediately. You must closely follow my instructions before leaving this world never to return. The rest we will be under our purview.”

Barabbas felt unable to raise any objections, though he still did not totally trust the machine, or understand what factors had changed recently to cause such an unexpected outcome. Yet he hesitated momentarily once more, warily and wistfully, before replying, “Agreed.”

The next twenty-four hours Barabbas spent on the planet before leaving were unusual, but remained forever mysterious to the aquatic Thetan. He sent a message via a quark stream to his diplomatic counterparts located around the globe telling them to exfiltrate immediately. He was then led outside the house by Jesus, into the busy streets of the primitive human city of Jerusalem. Both had obviously shifted their outer appearance back to that of local humans of the Judean tribe. Ironically, they shared a close resemblance at this point despite their almost infinite divergence of mind. They both had short, dark wiry hair with thick black beards, dark olive wood complexion, and wore loose linen robes with leather sandals. If not twins, they might have almost been mistaken for genetic siblings.

Jesus led Barabbas to another nearby house where he ingested some bits of plant and animal food with a small group of human followers. After leaving, Barabbas was suddenly beset by a larger group of Roman soldiers and arrested. He resisted the urge to neutralise them all instantly due to Jesus’ strict instructions to cause no harm to any human. He was subsequently released by an apparent local leader of the humans less than six hours later. As he ambulated towards the exit of the palace courtyard, he saw Jesus under guard by the same group of soldiers. Jesus glanced at his former adversary briefly before silently continuing his entrance to the prison. Barabbas left and walked out of the city, preparing for his departure according to the terms of the treaty.

He could not overcome his innate curiosity, however, and he delayed his escape to learn more about the Infiltrator’s plan. He waited on a small shrubby hill south of the city throughout the night. In the morning, he witnessed a slow procession approach in his direction centered around Jesus. He appeared dirty and covered in liquid blood of the human type. On one part of the hill a piece of dead wood was raised vertically to which Jesus was attached with ropes. At a certain point he lifted his head to the sky and said something in the local dialect, which Barabbas interpreted as “My progenitor, how have you forgotten me?” His head drooped down, seemingly lifeless. Almost imperceptibly, however, his eyes looked directly at Barabbas in the distance, as if signalling he knew the terms of the agreement were being broken by his lingering presence.

Barabbas felt fear for the first time in centuries, and immediately vanished from the city. He soon reappeared in his vessel orbiting the planet, where he briefed his companions on the demands of the Infiltrators, and the decision he had made on all their behalf. “If he leaves our sector of the galaxy alone, let Jesus have his plans for his human planet,” he thought to himself as they accelerated toward their 50-year journey home.

My first memories are of the hills outside Judea. A small lizard, with a black stripe and black eyes, staring at me and I at it. I knew then if I looked away first, I would die, so I did not look away. It disappeared behind a rock, and I turned around, back toward the caves.

Antonius and Deborah appeared around this time. I see them clearly as I see that lizard. Antonius’s arm, wrapped around Deborah’s shoulder, pulled Deborah’s close as they stepped down into the shadows. Her feet, bound with bloody cloth, felt for a rock that hurt them less. Once far enough into the black, they unbound the cloth from their hands and face and touched each other gently. Deborah sobbed. Antonius used the side of his thumb to pull her chin up near his and pressed his lips against the pale gray patch of skin beneath her eye.

These are not their real names. They don’t have real names. They aren’t real and they made me understand this as soon as they reconciled themselves to the fact that I would not keep away from them because I had nowhere to go. Outside the law no one is, said Antonius. How I was able to understand them is beyond me. Deborah imagined the caves conceived me, this gap in the earth, and the earth knows all languages all minds because it came before us and is inside us.

I enjoyed staring at their faces. They reminded me of the melting rocks far back into the caves tipped with beads of dark water. At first Antonius grew angry at me, cursed me when he found me watching Deborah sleep, the only time she removed the cloth. But I told him I had never known anything could be so beautiful.

Do you know what you look like? he asked.

I didn’t know what he meant. I shook my head.

He laughed and threw a small rock down toward the far back of the cave and it fell and fell and made no noise because he thought it didn’t have a bottom, but I knew it did and heard it crack against itself somewhere far away and Deborah woke up with a start as if from a dream.

We lived together as we could for several years or months. They were dying but we were all dying. Antonius believed that those who behave as if they are dead are closer to God. He laughed sometimes when he said this and looked at me as if he were asking me a question. Deborah would only hug her chest as if trying to crush her own life out of her. I believed she was God and told her so and she told me you can’t be God if you don’t believe in Him and Antonius said maybe the little bastard is right, maybe that’s exactly what God is.

Eventually the disease that ate their flesh ate it faster than it could reproduce itself and a sore on Antonius neck grew and grew. I believed it would burst and he would be saved but it stilled like a rock and interfered with his breathing and two days later he had become no more than a stone with blue eyes staring up at the stone milking water above us. Deborah screamed through the night, a curdled broken sound I have never heard before or since. I went to her and touched her back and she shuddered and stopped the noise at once. We looked at each for a long while until she told me to go away.

I found her at the bottom of the gorge the next morning. She had pushed Antonius’s body off and threw herself after. She had little life in her but enormous strength. She could not reconcile herself to what the sun demanded. I arranged their graves in the crevasse where she had wanted to be, not in the caves, which she could never love, and covered them both with dirt and stones and a wreath of spiked plants.

That night, I searched for the rock Antonius threw down into the cave. It turned out not to be a rock at all but a small wooden coin with a wax image of Deborah before she had grown beautiful. I thought to burn it but mastered my anger and placed it under the earth where their bodies lay. A snake eagle watched me. I screamed and cried and threw clumps of dirt until it flew away.

Days passed. Years. I’m not sure. I started to go down towards the side of the cliffs where the sun disappeared, to get water at the black lake. I didn’t need it as I had the moisture from the rocks, but I liked seeing myself in the flat, sunlit expanse. The image of me would change shape, and I would touch it and it went away, blurred. The sunlight would begin to hurt my eyes. I would admire this pain in me, wonder if it was me, or another me, and I would not look away until the dark came alive with the sound of gray birds hidden inside the invisible.

One day in the colder months I climbed down from a vigil at Deborah’s cliff and found shadows all around the lake’s edge. I immediately fell to the earth in the manner of a lizard, as Antonius had instructed me. He said that the only other people who come to these hills are soldiers who would kill us in a heartbeat because we were outside the law, and we offended the law by merely existing. Thieves and murderers live here too, Deborah said. Thieves and murderers are just the inverse of soldiers, said Antonius. They would all disappear like smoke without the law. Deborah rolled her eyes and Antonius laughed.

Perfectly still, my chin against the warm earth, I watched the shadows descend into the water one by one, by turns, embracing a taller, gaunt shadow at the lake’s center. They did this until the light turned the black water the color of blood. Then they climbed up onto monstrous jackal-like animals and disappeared into the further distance.

They returned the next day and the day after that. I crept closer at each appearance. On the fifth day, I saw the man in middle of the lake clearly, his long raggedy beard and a calf skin on his towering, bony shoulders. I could see his eyes like those of that lizard from even that distance and his eyes did not look away from me even as he pulled yet another body from the water.

I would not look away. I stood and walked the last hundred or so meters, through the crowd of ugly, wax faces. They parted easily, like flesh pulling back from Antonius’s sores, and I stopped at the shoreline. A young man who had been in the water with the tall one, staggered out of the lake far away from me as he could. The tall one watched me, and I could see he was afraid and unsure of himself because he had never before been afraid in his life.

All are welcome, he said.

His words had no meaning to me outside the shape they made in my own mouth as I repeated them back and thought of Deborah’s eyes when I touched her that one time and the noise stopped for a moment inside her. This man did not have long for this world either. Death had already crawled inside him to die. The crowd around me breathed as one. I would come across many crowds in the years to follow, but they never could be more to me than this first one, waterfowl making noises to each other for the sake of making noise, unsure, terrified, as willing to worship this man as to cut off his head.

The man flinched, pressed his fingers to his eyes, and waved at a woman near the large animals. This woman put aside the small bowls she had been filling with red water and approached me, brushed my hair from my eyes and asked how I came to be all alone in the desert.

If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t have told her. People don’t deserve answers just because they ask questions. But they think they do, and this is why they are unhappy. I walked out from under her small, cool hand and through the small crowd of shepherds and fisherman and tax collectors, all bound in bright rags and half blind with sunlight.

When I passed beyond their last larval head, the entire mass moved all at once, contracting like a muscle, but I did not look back. I ran for my life, as fast as I ever did in my life, until my head swam with bright dots, and I found Deborah’s cliff and held my knees to my chest and rocked.

The soldiers came one day at noon. I’m not sure if they did so because they had heard about me or if a new administration had simply ordered the hills cleaned of undesirables. This is language I would hear later, in different cities, and have never been able to make sense of what it means. Only in the hills and mountains have I ever felt clean, pure, and filled with my own desire.

Their Captain ordered the cave searched. They made their way into the dark clanking their swords against rock and cursing the gods and the officer to disguise their fear. I hid deep down in the pit that Antonius believed had no bottom, in an opening no man could ever fit, and listened to the voices that I could sometimes hear down there, scratching sounds mostly but sometimes something more, a whisper, a song of some sort that set my heart on fire.

This went on for hours. I heard new noises up above, the echo of them leaving. I waited several hours or what I imagined to be hours and crawled out into the moonlight. It was a half-moon that night, my favorite. I liked to go to Deborah’s cliff and stare up into the gap where the white light disappears into absence. The longer I stared the more the light around it moved and then too the entire landscape and Deborah and Antonius sat up among the rocks. Deborah adored the moon. The sun lies, she said, but the moon guides us through the world’s nightmares into our dreams. Antonius agreed. I did too. You could hold its divots and pits and bruises in your eye for as long as love is insofar as it is love.

The soldiers were waiting. They must have found my footprints in the dust near the grave or Antonius’s portrait of Deborah, that mewling image of her before she became God. They laughed and shouted names at me and I stared down the Captain, who only had one eye and the sad frown of men deranged by pity. I held myself in the shape of a bat and tried to only hear, to not see, to go beyond seeing into pure noise and sound like the noise far down below but it was no good and I smelled one of the horrible ones creeping up behind me. Maybe I could have saved myself, but I would not look away from the Captain who was afraid like they are all afraid together.

I woke up inside the thudding noises of sprawling Jerusalem. Ancient criminals watched me from the corners of a barred room, near a fouled cistern, hiding in their human stink. I would be in many dark rooms like this in the years to come. The drunks and liars around me moaning and begging God for mercy. They didn’t mean to hurt anyone, they say in one breath and wish horror and hell on their enemies in the next.

It’s always the same, but I prefer it. I like the dark. I like the honesty. I can think of Deborah’s face, hear Antonius’ laugh. No one can take the memory away from me here, and I tell the others about it the only way they understand, through fists, insults, pain. I’ll burn down Rome! I scream at the guards, when they open the door, carrying spiked clubs and metal chains. I’ll set fire to the waters of Babylon!

The old men in the corners, who have been here the longest, who have managed a life in these holes pocking the bright ugly life above, beg me to play along, to just be polite to the soldiers, to keep everyone out of trouble. Shut your mouth, they say. Keep it down. Don’t be a fool. They’ll put you on the cross.

You think I’ll blink? I shout back, my mouth weeping blood. You think I’ll look away?

Brendan always felt smaller than the other guys in the locker room. Probably it was their triceps, military tats, and/or their ability to call each other “bro” and sound natural. It didn’t help that the locker room was cramped with guys who paid no mind to the “Please Change In The Stalls” sign and took off their street clothes to put on their rash guards, grappling shorts, and gis. Nobody made any bones about walking around with their cock out, either. “Look at the floor. Look down in your gym bag. Look anywhere else,” he told himself when he caught sight of someone’s penis. Even so, he couldn’t help but make a note of how big many of them were. Even the guys with smaller ones seemed totally at ease as they changed. It wasn’t that he himself was that small; he was tall enough, broad enough in the chest and shoulders. These guys were big big, though. He wagered that most of them were at least 6’2. Chest hair covered their impressive pecs. Rippling veins traced up their arms to their pronounced biceps. The width of their backs and torsos narrowed into tight waists, which then thickened out into massive thighs.

Being the only one changing in the dressing room felt like calling attention to himself, but stripping in front of everyone was out of the question. He hadn’t even sparred with anybody yet, and he figured somebody was going to call him out for it at some point. Hopefully not tonight. All this said, any potential risk of exposure was out of the question. He stood silently in the cramped room, attempting to look anywhere but at the mirror. Once again, he asked himself: What am I doing here? With these guys? It was, admittedly, a little bit that he wanted to fuck them. More than that, he wanted to be them deep down. These men looked impenetrable, unbreakable, and he wanted people to see that in him. When Coach asked why he decided on jiu-jitsu in the first place, Brendan said he wanted to learn a new skill and step out of his comfort zone. He wanted to push his body and expand its capabilities. When Coach asked if he had any previous combat sports experience, Brendan mentioned that he did taekwondo for a few years as a kid, even reached brown belt, though he felt that hardly counted. That was more like a participation trophy. It’s not like he remembered any of the moves. It’s not like he felt stronger.

“Hey, I wouldn’t fuck with you,” Coach said. He was probably just being nice. He might as well have said, “Oh, that’s cute.”

Brendan left out that he wanted to feel safer in his own skin. He didn’t want to appear any weaker to Coach than he already did. Hell, Brendan was too anxious to meet guys on Grindr, let alone hold his own in a fight. He’d heard about guys getting catfished and beaten up after going over to someone’s apartment. With his luck, he’d be another of those stories. He thought maybe if he learned how to fight and physically hardened up in the process, he’d be less afraid of putting himself out there. There was also, of course, the sheer contact of the sport – close, sweaty, intense contact with other men. At least here, he could get some of that energy out of his system, even if it wasn’t quite fucking. Maybe he would even meet somebody. Maybe things would be nice, for once.

Brendan put on his gi and worried about how it hugged his stomach but billowed at his chest. He always had a hard time figuring out what he looked like, if he was actually skinny or actually chubby or actually built, and a surefire way to send that confusion into a full-blown spiral was to put on clothes that accentuated the inconsistency of his features. As he stepped onto the mat, he wondered if everyone else could tell how uncomfortable he felt. If they could, they did a good job of not letting it show. Daniel stretched out his hips and cracked his joints so loud that Brendan heard it from the other side of the mat; he hoped his flinch wasn’t visible. Jose did push-ups and grunted his count out loud. Kelley bowed to everyone and shook their hand.

“Oss,” said Kelley when he shook Brendan’s hand.

“Huh?” asked Brendan.

“We say it to show respect. Not really sure what it translates to. Guess it means whatever you want it to mean,” Kelley replied.

“Oh. Oss.” Brendan worried that his palms were too sweaty, but also gripped hard to show that he, too, gives Firm Handshakes.

Standing in the corner was Coach, tall and broad. His traps and shoulders seemed to want to burst through his gi. His hair was cleanly buzzed and his face was flecked with salt-and-peppery stubble. He stood clutching at his black belt, striped with four pieces of worn white tape wrapped over the red rank bar. Brendan found him outright terrifying; he could have sworn that his eyes turned obsidian black at certain angles when he was observing drilling and sparring. Coach’s face was steely and angular, hard and shark-like. Brendan generally had a hard time reading people’s faces, but Coach’s in particular gave him nothing. He imagined that to hit the mat with Coach was the only way to know him, and to understand him likely required submitting to him.

Coach instructed everybody to start jogging, which felt pretty easy for Brendan. He never liked running before, but found the pace easy, the mat soft on his feet and shins, and his body uncharacteristically loosened. The class went through the motions, switching from light jogging to side-shuffling to karaoking in and out. They practiced hip escapes across the mat. Brendan lay on his back, brought his left foot up as close to his buttcheek as possible, and jutted his hips towards the left, scooching backwards. He repeated the cycle, alternating left and right, until he stood up and immediately had to steady himself. Only fifteen minutes of the ninety-minute class had gone by, and Brendan was spent.

The idea of drilling different positions made his anxiety about his, well, everything significantly worse. Most jiu-jitsu positions were extremely close and intimate and sweaty and, therefore, kinda gay. Though Brendan was also kinda gay, he didn’t feel aroused when drilling, even when partnered with someone he found attractive. He did worry that he was breathing too hard or sweating too much or might let out a fart while his partner practiced “knee-on-belly” on him. No, drilling positions didn’t turn him on, but he also secretly wanted to be the most fuckable training partner on the mat, whatever that meant. Sure, most of the other guys were straight, married with kids, cops, Republicans, etc. He knew that he shouldn’t want to be desirable to them, as he knew there was no realistic scenario in which anything would ever happen. Besides, he had Good Politics, and many of them had Bad Politics. He shouldn’t have wanted them anyway. They’d probably beat him up if they found he was queer anyway.

…

“Get your hooks in, put your hands on my belt, push me up, and then bring your knees to your chest.” Brendan felt that it should be easy enough; his training partner (“Big Henry”) had just repeated the position several times and even regained his guard from it. He arched his feet under his partner’s thighs, “hooking” them in, put his hands on his belt, pushed him up, and brought his knees up to his chest. As soon as he stretched his legs to the side to lock him into his guard, he dropped Big Henry back onto him. Big Henry’s knee fell directly into Brendan’s crotch. Brendan thought he might vomit. A bead of sweat from Big Henry’s brow dripped into Brendan’s eye. He heard Coach say one word: “Again.”

After several more attempts to trap Big Henry in his guard, Brendan was granted a reprieve when Coach called for a water break. He picked up his dented Hydro Flask, adorned with a singular sticker that announced “This Machine Kills Fascists.” It occurred to him that his sticker potentially identified him as a Woke Liberal to his Probably Fascist peers. Despite the proclamations of his water bottle, he did not have the confidence in his convictions to debate with a Scary Stronger Straight Guy about them. He knew he didn’t have the courage to punch his local nazi. Could everybody see through his posturing? Did they want to teach him a lesson? To shove him into the proverbial locker? He couldn’t focus on drinking his water like a normal person while his mind raced. In turn, his water went down the wrong way, and he coughed it out onto Big Henry’s chest.

“Oh fuck. Oh fuck. I’m so sorry,” Brendan said. He grabbed someone’s sweaty towel and tried to dab the water off of Big Henry’s gi.

“All good, brother,” said Big Henry. “Happens to the best of us.” Big Henry patted Brendan on the shoulder. “You know what this means, though?”

Brendan’s stomach tightened. He rubbed his palm down the side of his leg, as though to massage some pulled muscle in his outer thigh. Whatever humiliation Big Henry had in mind for his punishment was going to be painful and likely public. The idea of it kind of turned him on, which made him feel dirty.

“You owe me a roll now!” said Big Henry. This was the worst thing he could have said. A roll meant six unbroken minutes of sparring. He had seen guys get submitted multiple times in one match. No matter how much it hurt, how many times they tapped, how close they came to being choked unconscious, how exhausted they were, they were expected to get back up and kept fighting. The guys used rolls to experiment with different positions and try out what they’ve practiced for real, met with actual resistance. Real competition. Brendan knew the application would be harder than the trial run.

“This is only my fifth class.” Just saying “fifth” was humiliating.

“Five classes and you haven’t rolled yet?” Brendan shook his head.

Big Henry squinted and looked over at Coach, who was pouring seltzer water on a spot where someone had cut themselves and bled out on the mat. “Better save that seltzer water for after rolling,” Brendan thought, as Big Henry was likely going to drop the nice guy act and disembowel him right there. The other guys would watch, laugh, probably call him a few slurs, and then bow and shake each other’s hands and say “oss.” Out of respect, obviously.

“Coach, is this guy good to roll tonight?” shouted Big Henry, putting a friendly arm around Brendan’s shoulder.

“Yeah, it’s about time. Can’t keep holding out, Brendan. You’ve got to dive in at some point,” Coach said. The driplets of blood mixed with the bubbling seltzer in a grotesque melange. Brendan wondered how much of the blend was composed of sweat as well.

“I’ll go nice and easy. We’ll flow roll,” said Big Henry. Brendan couldn’t tell if he was just saying that to appease him, or if he was genuinely trying to make him feel more comfortable. He searched desperately for some excuse to bail himself out, but people were pairing up and starting to take their positions on the mat. This was happening.

“Let’s do it, ” Brendan said.

“Hell yeah, brother!” Big Henry laughed and stuck his fist out to be bumped. Brendan managed to miss most of Big Henry’s knuckle. As they walked to find a spot on the mat, Brendan attempted to convince himself that this was a good thing, actually. He knew that the expectation was that new guys would spar after their first or second class, even if just to go over the few positions they’d learned so far. It was, frankly, impressive that Brendan had been able to avoid it for five classes. He usually feigned an upset stomach and hid in the bathroom, figuring if he put on enough of a show, Coach wouldn’t push him on it. Nobody wanted anyone to shit themselves all over the mat. The gym had only recently reopened after a nasty staph infection, so there was a vigilance in the air that Brendan could typically capitalize on. Tonight, however, he was stuck.

“If you’re not rolling this round, keep an eye out and make sure nobody gets their heads cracked open,” said Coach. Brendan imagined Big Henry throwing him down headfirst from a standing position, his skull smashing into someone else’s. He considered what the rest of his life would look like with a traumatic brain injury. His parents would have to change his diapers and wipe his drool. Were the waivers he had to sign after his trial class not a strong enough deterrent against getting folded like laundry by a guy named “Big Henry” and risking permanent disability or death?

“Once the timer starts, shake hands and get to work,” announced Coach. There were six other pairs of guys getting ready to roll. Brendan noticed how many of them were laughing with each other. He wondered if anybody else felt paralyzed with terror. He expected the colored belts to be comfortable, but even the other white belts seemed right at home.

“Oss.” Big Henry stuck out his fist for knuckle bumping.

“Oss,” replied Brendan, laser-focused on not missing this time. He pounded Big Henry’s fist and then mimed it exploding back. What the fuck was that? Big Henry didn’t seem bothered; he chuckled and then grabbed Brendan’s hand for a quick handshake.

“Do you have any injuries I should be aware of?” asked Big Henry. Brendan gave it some thought. He had never broken a bone before, but the scene where James Franco broke his bones to cut his arm off in 127 Hours did make him pass out in the theater. He wanted something to say though, just to have some battle scar under his belt.

“I got my appendix taken out a year ago,” he replied.

Big Henry nodded. “Ok. I’ll keep that in mind.” He gestured to his left knee. “I tore my ACL on the mat back when I was a first stripe white belt. I did physical therapy and everything, so I should be fine. Just try to be careful.” This struck Brendan. For one thing, he didn’t consider an ACL tear as a potential outcome here; now he had another thing to worry about. He felt stupid for not thinking this through. For another, his feeling that this brought Big Henry back down to Earth was quickly replaced by an awe that Big Henry would come back and keep training after that. Big Henry, now a two stripe blue belt, had overcome his injury, and that both amazed and frightened Brendan.

“For sure, bro,” said Brendan, cringing at himself for how unnaturally “bro” came out.

“Awesome. Again, I know it’s your first real roll. We’ll go easy. Just practice what you can remember, and I’ll let you work. If you screw up, though, I’m gonna show you what you did wrong. Don’t worry. We’ll have fun,” he said with a smirk. Brendan didn’t feel good about whatever that meant, but he also wondered if maybe this was some straight guy version of negging. What if Big Henry was flirting with him? What if Big Henry actually wanted to see how hard Brendan could go in his first roll? Maybe they’d get so worked up from the roll that they’d both excuse themselves from the mats and have sweaty, rough locker room sex. That could be interesting.

Coach clicked a button on his remote: six minutes on the timer. Big Henry sat back on his butt, hunched up his shoulders, and immediately grabbed Brendan’s lapel. Big Henry scooted in towards Brendan and hooked his feet under his thighs. Brendan felt one of Big Henry’s toes briefly stroke his crotch. Before he could think too much about it, Big Henry pulled at Brendan’s lapel, bringing him closer. He then used his feet hooks to sweep Brendan from his guard and pin him down into side control. Brendan was stunned by how quickly Big Henry pulled a butterfly sweep on him, and frustrated by how easily he gave up his position.

“Breathe, breathe, breathe,” said Big Henry, as he hooked an arm under Brendan’s head and held tight. Part of the “fun” of side-control, Coach had said in an earlier class, is using your chest to exert as much pressure on the person on the bottom as possible. Big Henry, with his massive chest, was very good at applying pressure and was, therefore, very good at making sure that Brendan couldn’t breathe. “Make a frame and shrimp out,” Big Henry whispered to Brendan. Brendan squeezed his left arm out from between their two chests to frame his wrist against Big Henry’s giant, hulking neck. He then repeated the hip escape process from warm-ups: brought his left foot up to his buttcheek and the scooched out toward the left. To his surprise, he slid out from Big Henry’s side-control. Feeling uncharacteristically confident in his abilities, he grabbed Big Henry’s lapel, pulled him in, and wrapped his legs around his waist. He had Big Henry in a full guard. He couldn’t believe it.

“Nice! Now start attacking!” Big Henry said.

Brendan remembered what Coach instructed him to do during his trial lesson to perform a cross-collar choke successfully. Reach up to your opponent’s lapel and grab the back of the collar so that your thumb touches the back of their head. Repeat the process with your other hand on the opposite side. Flex your wrists out so that the bones jut into their neck. Pull them down towards your chest. Try to keep your elbows as tight and straight as possible. They should tap out in seconds.

Big Henry was not tapping.

Despite Brendan’s best efforts, he clearly missed a step in executing his cross-collar choke. Big Henry, for his part, was beet red and spittling at the mouth. But he was breathing. Brendan, having come so close to landing a submission, felt himself adrenalized by the intensity of competition. His breaths quickened. His grips tightened. He was going to tap Big Henry at least once this round, even if it killed him. Big Henry grabbed at the opening of Brendan’s gi just above his belt and slowly began to stand up, Brendan’s legs still wrapped tightly around his waist. Soon enough, Big Henry was standing up, albeit slightly hunched over Brendan. Brendan held on stubbornly, tightening his lock onto Big Henry’s hips. Suddenly, Big Henry grabbed Brendan’s lapel and effortlessly pulled Brendan up off the ground. They were nearly face-to-face. Brendan was stunned at Big Henry’s strength. Almost as soon as Brendan could process the fact that he was airborne, Big Henry slammed him onto the mat, immediately destroying the strength of his guard.

The impact knocked the wind out of him. Brendan wheezed as he looked at the timer: 4:49. 4:48. 4:47. It had barely been more than a minute, and he was totally gassed. Slowly, he crawled onto all fours, noticing droplets of sweat hitting the mat under him. He sat back on his haunches, looked at the ceiling, closed his eyes, and gasped “Fuck me” to no one in particular. To add insult to injury, Big Henry sat in a casual half-guard, slightly on his side, with his hands forming a frame in front of his chest.

“Breathe. You don’t need to go 100%,” Coach called out from the wall. Brendan took a deep inhale through his nose and let it out of his mouth. He repeated the process two more times and then looked back at Big Henry. Big Henry smiled. Brendan thought he had really nice teeth, but then wondered if both of them should have been wearing mouth guards.

“‘Atta boy! Let’s start from side control. You get on top,” said Big Henry, as he lay down on his back. Brendan hooked his arm under Big Henry’s head and held it tight. He pressed his chest hard down perpendicular to Big Henry’s, flexing his hips into the ground. “Good pressure!” grumbled Big Henry from down under. Brendan felt ravenous. He was going to prove that he belonged on the mat. Big Henry was going to tap and tap quickly. He felt so focused that he didn’t even notice his pulsing boner.                                                                                                                        In order to stay heavy against Big Henry, Brendan continued driving his hips into the mat, up and down and up and down. It felt good to hold him down so tight. He reached an arm across Big Henry’s chest and gripped palm to palm with the hand coming out from under his head. Big Henry kept bumping up his hips to break Brendan’s hold, but Brendan held him down. Brendan noticed that Big Henry’s left arm was open. He realized he was in a perfect position to try out an Americana. Trap his forearm between yours in a triangle. Grab your wrist. Keep it tight. While dragging the arm down towards his hip, bend it upwards. If you do it right, he’ll tap in no time.

Brendan worked through the steps in his head. He grabbed Big Henry’s forearm and quickly trapped it between his arms in a triangle shape. He gripped his wrist, flexing it over like he was revving a motorcycle engine. God, it felt good to hold him down like this. He kept driving his hips into the mat. His toes curled. He was vibrating all over. He dragged Big Henry’s arm down towards his hip and then bent it upwards. Brendan felt so good, he didn’t even feel Big Henry tapping on his back. Oh fuck. Oh fuck. I’m gonna tap him. Oh my god. Oh my god. I’m gonna do it. Oh fuck. Oh fuck!

Snap.

Brendan rolled over on his back. Everything looked and sounded fuzzy to him. He noticed his pants were wet. He heard someone crying out. He sat up and saw Coach, among others, crowding over Big Henry.

“Breathe, Henry. You’re going to be okay. Just breathe,” he heard Coach saying quietly while Big Henry sobbed.

…

Brendan wept on the toilet. He was sure that his classmates would start pounding down the door any second now. It was one thing to accidentally crank a submission too hard in a roll. It was another thing entirely to crank out a nut while obliterating your opponent’s shoulder. He catalogued every humiliation he’d ever been through. Nothing came close to this. He felt like a monster, like a predator. Big Henry had been so kind to him, and Brendan didn’t just hurt him, he violated him. It was stupid to think that jiu-jitsu would fix his shit, make him feel strong again. He wanted to die.

He heard a soft knock on the door.

“Brendan, everybody else has left. Please come meet me in the office so we can talk.” It was Coach’s voice.

Brendan sat down in a rolling chair across from Coach. The office was small. The desks were cluttered with paperwork. Lined up on the walls were boxes of gis, t-shirts, and other merchandise branded with the gym’s logo for sale. He wondered if he should buy Big Henry a new gi as penance. He then considered whether he should buy himself a new gi; he was fairly confident that the stain would come out in the wash, but couldn’t bear the thought of training in it again. Then again, he figured he wasn’t going to be training again regardless. Coach had changed out of his gi and into a blue flannel shirt and jeans. He was scarier in regular clothes.

“The other guys are going to kill me, aren’t they?”

Coach looked at him. “A few of the guys drove Henry to the ER. The others went home. He’ll probably have to take a few months off, at least.”

“I didn’t realize he tapped.”

“That was some serious shit you pulled. You need to be present and listen to what your training partners are telling you. You could seriously fuck someone up if you don’t respect the tap. Imagine choking someone out. Imagine me choking you out. All you’ve got is the tap. The tap is the line between total control and blacking out your opponent. We’re in the business of control here. This happens again, we expel you. People don’t come here to fuck around. We have a reputation to keep up. If word got out that we kept someone around who couldn’t control himself, people would find another gym.”

Brendan’s leg stopped bouncing. He unhunched his posture and looked up at Coach. He realized he hadn’t seen Coach blink once during this meeting.

“All that said,” Coach leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “That was a damn good submission. Very clean.” He gave Brendan another once over, up and down. “Very strong pressure.”

Brendan couldn’t tell what Coach’s angle was. He figured if Coach didn’t use this private meeting to give him a taste of his own medicine, he certainly wasn’t going to spend the time praising him. Coach had him locked in a full guard, and he didn’t know how to break it.

“What’s kept you coming back here?” Coach asked. Brendan would have been lying if he said he wasn’t thrilled by the ways his muscles ached after the trial lesson. How he had stretched parts of his body he didn’t even know could move that way. How much he liked being pinned so tightly to the ground that he had no escape.

“I guess I just wanted to try something new. Step out of my comfort zone,” Brendan replied.

Coach nodded. “You never grow from a place of comfort.” Brendan still couldn’t read Coach’s attitude. “I think you should keep training.”

Brendan looked down at the soiled gi folded up at his feet. “I don’t think I can do that here.”

“Not if you keep ignoring taps. But Henry once choked someone unconscious in a roll. There’s a reason he went easy on you tonight. Everybody is just figuring it out while they’re training. That’s why you shouldn’t go 100%. You’re not competing.”

Brendan felt a conflicting mixture of relief and further embarrassment. It helped to know that he wasn’t the only one who’s gotten carried away with a submission, but he had to imagine he was the first to cum while doing so. He wanted an out; he didn’t want to show his face around the gym anymore, but he also didn’t want to fess up to his “accident.” More than anything, he wanted Coach to stop staring at him. He took a sip from his water bottle.

“What’s that sticker say?”

Brendan slowly swallowed, remembering how coughing up on Big Henry’s gi incited all of this.

“It says, uh, ‘This Machine Kills Fascists,’” said Brendan. He felt heat travel up his body and sit right in his forehead just behind his eyes.

“You a Woody Guthrie fan?” asked Coach.

“Who?”

“Woody Guthrie.”

“Oh. Not really. I just like the sticker.”

“You should listen to Woody.” Brendan supposed it was reasonable to listen to the artist responsible for the political declaration on his water bottle.

“Ok, I’ll check him out.” He wasn’t sure what else to say at this point. What he wanted was to go home, eat something unhealthy for dinner, take an edible, and melt into his couch. Coach kept looking at him, eyes blank. His mouth sat open, enough that Brendan could see through his rows of teeth.

“You know. You don’t need to drive your hips down as hard to keep the pressure heavy.” Coach leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “I bet it felt good, though. Real good.” A droplet of cold sweat fell from Brendan’s right armpit. His mouth was dry as hell. His knee started bouncing up and down again. Coach would not break eye contact with him. Brendan looked everywhere else in the room. At the stacks of gis for sale. At the trophies. All the while, he could feel Coach’s gaze drilling into him. In that moment, he realized that despite, or perhaps because of, his fear of Coach, he was hard again.

Brendan picked up his gi. “Put it on the desk,” instructed Coach. When Brendan put it down, he noticed his hands were shaking. Coach locked his gaze on Brendan as he obeyed the order. “I’ll see you back here next week.”

“Yes, Coach.” He stood up, bowed, and shook Coach’s hand.

Coach held the grip for an extra second. “Oss,” he said.

“Oss.”

The patrol was unsettling. The initial ‘liberation’ euphoria had soured. It was all bad vibes from the second we exited the Country Club. Hard brown faces casting the evil eye. Old men sitting in front of shuttered store fronts, sizing us up. We still didn’t have an interpreter, but I tried to press a few locals anyway. I showed them Izzat’s photo. I gauged reactions. No hints of recognition. Just hard stares and brusque wave-offs.

The sun blazed. This weather was the first taste of what lay in store once the real summer arrived. The midday streets were largely deserted. The city folk opted for rooftop siestas to beat the heat. Nothing shaking. Nothing brewing. It dawned on me that a quiet, uneventful patrol should be considered a good thing. I couldn’t dig it. The platoon needed action. Grinding away in the heat like this would melt morale for good. Also—I wanted some leads on this Izzat fucker.

We rolled into the last leg of the patrol route. Babil District. Previously home to the Regime elite. Gaudy mansions nestled along the Tigris. Miami Vice gone rococo. Call it ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Tasteless.’ The ‘hood was abandoned. The previous occupants no longer welcome. Even those that managed to keep their faces off the ‘Deck of Cards’ knew that sticking around meant a death sentence, either at the hands of infidel invaders or uppity Shi’a looking for some payback. A couple of the homes had been looted, but surprisingly most of the mansions looked unbothered.

We were about to head back to the Country Club when Benny popped up on the radio. “Sir, we’ve got some cops waving at us back here. Trying to get our attention.”

“Go see what they want, Benny,” I said. “Stay alert. Lots of bad guys out here impersonating cops.” The image of Izzat in his police uniform was burned into my eyelids.

Benny dismounted and approached Baghdad’s finest with one hand on the butt of his Berretta. O’Reilly and Blanky pushed out on Benny’s flank, ready to help him dump the cops at the first hint of chicanery. Benny jabbered back and forth with the tallest cop. Benny only knew two words in Arabic so the tall cop must have had some English. Benny gestured towards the river and then walked back to his truck.

“Sir, this cop told me there’s something we need to see in one of these houses,” Benny said. “He says its bad. I don’t think he knows what to say in English.”

I huddled with Benny and the Iraqi cops. The tall cop said his name was Ali. That was a good sign. No self-respecting Sunni would ever use ‘Ali’ as an alias. It would be like an Irishman naming his kid Oliver Cromwell. So that lowered the odds of Ali being Mukhabarat in mufti. Ali pointed to a house sprawled out on the bank of the Tigris. Ali said he wanted to show us something inside. The crib had a distinct ‘80s vibe. All white walls and glass brick. Suitable digs for a proper villain. Benny posted security and followed me and Ali through an unlocked door.

The inside of the house was cluttered. Kid’s toys on the floor, dishes in the sink. Weirdly normal and domestic. Ali led us through a large TV room. Stacks of DVDs on the recessed bookshelves. The DVD collection boasted a high percentage of ‘Skinemax’ style soft porn. Those UN import sanctions must’ve been tougher than I thought. I reckoned you had to take what you could get in a nominally ‘Muslim’ country. On the far end of the bookshelf was a metal door that looked like it belonged in a bank vault. Ali shouldered the door open and motioned for us to follow him inside.

Death funk. Strong enough to gag a maggot. I should’ve known we wouldn’t make it one full patrol without stumbling across some sort of mutilation-torture caper. Ali flicked on an overhead fluorescent light. Apparently, the generators still had some juice. The room was small and windowless. An empty safe in the corner. A large desk with a computer, several notebooks, and a money-counter. A dead guy seated behind the desk. He was bound to the chair, his face pulped. Dude didn’t go easy. Both of his eyes had been burned out. All the fingers from his right hand were lopped off. The severed digits formed an ersatz Stonehenge on the floor.

Judging by the smell, the dead guy had been here a few days. Long enough for advanced decomp. Whatever had gone down, it was worth documenting. I sent Benny back to the trucks to grab a camera.

Ali pointed to the dead man. “This man. Saddam man. Very bad.”

“Mukhabarat?” I asked.

“No. No Mukhabarat,” Ali said. “Money man. His name Saeed Hasan.”

“Money man? Did he work for the Finance Ministry?”

“Yes. This man work Finance Ministry.”

Finance Ministry. The Oil-for-Food skim. Linkages re-linked. My mind raced. I forced myself to breathe deep and stay quiet. I scanned the room. There—under some papers next to the money-counter. A satphone. Add it up with the safe and the money-counter.

“Was this man a hawaladar?” I asked.

Ali side-eyed me. “You know hawala?”

“Yes,” I lied. I didn’t know anything beyond what Fuad told me. “Was this man involved with hawala?”

“Maybe hawala. I don’t know.” Ali frowned. He looked eager to explain but lacked the words.

“Ali, how did you find this room? How did you know this man was here?”

Ali’s frown turned to worry. “Bad smell. Man told us bad smell. Show us.”

It seemed unlikely that a random citizen called Ali off the street and led him to the scene. My guess is that Ali and his two cop buddies were casing houses door-to-door to see what of value might have been left behind by their erstwhile masters. That would explain the empty safe. Snatch the cash and then notify the Americans to make it seem like you weren’t involved. I didn’t blame him. With the regime kaput, Ali would be shit-out-of-luck in the pension department. I was willing to chalk up anything Ali scored from the safe as reparations for future funds denied.

I pulled Izzat’s photo out of my cargo pocket and showed it to Ali. “Do you know this man?”

Ali studied the printout. Instant recognition. Ali swallowed a couple of times. “Yes. He is bad man. Saddam man.”

“Mukhabarat?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“How do you know him?”

“My boss. He give my boss money.”

“Do you know his name?”

“No. No name. Colonel. Rank is Colonel.”

“Why did he give your boss money?”

“I don’t know. Before America come Baghdad. He give boss money. But no policeman. This man Mukhabarat.”

Benny returned with the camera. We photographed everything. I made Benny roll the dead guy’s fingerprints. Benny hit me with the ‘why am I always on corpse duty?’ stare. I ignored him and bagged up everything we could carry. I thought about dragging the body back to the Country Club but decided against it. The prints and the photos would have to suffice. The Country Club didn’t have room for any more dead Iraqis.

I asked Ali to come back with us to the Country Club. I wanted Souza and Staff Sergeant Kinney to take a run at him in the mother tongue. Ali became visibly nervous. He probably thought the Country Club was just a layover en route to Guantanamo. I assured him he wasn’t being detained and said he could bring his two cop buddies. Ali’s comrades didn’t seem to dig that idea, but we talked them into it. The three Iraqi cops squeezed into the gun trucks and we headed back to the Club.

I walked into the HUMINT Exploitation Team’s hooch. Souza was still asleep. Probably the first shut-eye he’d had in almost three days. Normally I’d have let him sleep it off, but I was too amped on the possibility of Ali leading us to Izzat. Kinney was awake, typing fast into one of those small rubber laptops. Souza had a poncho liner pulled over his head despite the heat. I kicked his boot. Souza bolted upright, confused eyes tried to focus. He recognized me after a beat and tried to lay back down. I lit a Miami and stuck it between his knuckles.

“Rise and shine,” I said. “We got work to do.”

We sat in the HET hooch and chain smoked while I brought Souza and Kinney up to speed. Kinney got Ali and his comrades set up in separate rooms and worked out an interrogation plan. Souza monkeyed around with Hasan’s satphone. Eventually he pulled out another piece of vintage-looking spook kit and hooked it up to the phone. Within a few minutes he’d downloaded the numbers and call log. Souza speed-typed a report and sent the phone numbers up to the signals intelligence boys. Once the numbers were on task, we’d have a good shot at geolocating the phones. In the meantime, Souza ran the call numbers against an existing intelligence database. Lots of international calls. Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, France, South Africa. Lots of calls to Mexico. Two calls to numbers in the US. It felt congruent with Fuad’s take on the hawala networks, but it still wasn’t the concrete proof we needed to get CIA to bite.

Kinney returned from the interrogation booth. Ali provided some additional info on his boss. The boss’ name was Thamir al-Tikriti. Thamir was related to Saddam. A second cousin maybe. Ali seemed certain that Thamir served in the Mukhabarat back in the early ‘80s. Sometime after DESERT STORM he’d transferred to the Special Republican Guard where he retired as a Brigadier General. Recently, he’d been brought out of retirement to serve as the Chief of Police in Baghdad. Ali said that up until Thamir fled a couple of weeks ago, he and Izzat met regularly at Police HQ. Ali didn’t know the exact purpose of those meetings, but claimed Izzat regularly delivered large attaché cases that he assumed held money or other important financial documents. Ali wasn’t sure where Izzat or Thamir were now.

Saeed Hasan remained a mystery. Ali and his buddies confirmed that Hasan worked for the Finance Ministry, but they couldn’t provide any details. Ali didn’t think the mansion was Hasan’s house. Apparently, he wasn’t high enough on the food chain to rate a sweet Babil crib.

I fired up my third Miami and closed my eyes, trying to assemble a possible narrative. Proper nouns danced through my brain-housing group.

“OK, so we have Izzat the spy potentially serving as some sort of bagman for Thamir the Police Chief,” I said. “Thamir disappears, but Izzat stays behind in Baghdad to hit the bank. We know Izzat met with Fuad at least once, and I’m betting it wasn’t just to buy black market whiskey. Fuad alluded to the fact he was gathering info that night we caught him at the souk. Then we get a kid witness saying a guy matching Izzat’s description was circling Fuad’s crib the same night Fuad leaves us a note saying he’s going off the grid. Fuad also hips us to the Oil-for-Food skim-hawala caper. We find Hasan tortured to death in a room that fits the bill as a hawaladar’s office. Hasan was probably killed a day or so before Fuad goes to ground, but we don’t have anything to connect Hasan to Fuad, Izzat, or Thamir. Does that about cover it?”

“Pretty much,” Souza replied. “We know Fuad and Izzat are connected, and we know Izzat and Thamir are connected. Hasan is still a wild card. We can’t be certain of how or even if he’s connected to the skim. All that said, we don’t have the dope on the call-log analysis yet. If we get lucky maybe the calls will link Hasan to the Finance Ministry, the Police, or maybe even the Mukhabarat. But don’t hold your breath. Establishing linkages from satphones to those organizations is one thing, but sussing out any useful context is gonna be a long shot.”

Staff Sergeant Kinney jumped in. “In the meantime, we’ve got Ali and his buddies in play. We set up a comm plan to keep in touch. Unfortunately, the cell network is still down hard and we don’t have the budget or the inventory to start outfitting every Omar with a satphone. That said, the cops know to come back here to the Country Club according to the schedule I gave them. Normally I’d never want to ‘group date’ sources like that but under the circumstances, it was all I could do.”

Souza and I nodded in agreement. Now came the hard part. The waiting.

Purchase a copy of The Baghdad Shuffle here.

The two boys creep towards the edge of the crater and stare across. Its opposite rim seems an impossible distance away. The Geiger counter clipped to William’s hip rapidly clicks an unending warning. He absentmindedly runs his thumb over the device.

“Can we please go back home,” he begs his friend.

As usual, James ignores him and inches forward until his toes hang over the edge. He has waited too long to see this, and he didn’t go through all the trouble of sneaking out just to turn around. He will touch the heart of this thing.

James runs a hand through his close-cropped hair, takes a step down into the crater and disappears. For reasons William doesn’t quite understand, he follows.

The slope of the crater is so steep it’s almost vertical. The boys can barely stay upright. Gravity, along with their own momentum, forces them to half run, half stumble the whole way down. The boys can barely keep from tripping over their own feet. James laughs, impressed with his own speed, while William puffs out his chubby cheeks and holds his breath. He knows one wrong step means a matching pair of broken arms and legs.

The incessant clicking of the Geiger counter keeps pace, increasing its speed and volume the deeper they go.

“That thing is so annoying,” James pants once they reach the bottom. He’s a scrawny kid, a full head shorter than William, but he’s still always bossing him around. “Turn it off.”

William is bent over with his hands on his knees, wheezing. He unclips the old device and holds it in his palm. It was a hand-me-down from his big brother. Everyone is supposed to keep one with them, but James always conveniently forgets his.

“My dad told me to always leave it on,” William breathlessly protests.

James groans, “I already know we’re not supposed to be here. I don’t need that thing yelling at me the whole time.”

William hesitates with his thumb on the switch for several seconds before flicking it to off.

Silence.

“Thank God,” James says, already walking away, “Now, hurry up. It’s a long way to the center.”

William’s breathing is almost normal again. He forces himself to stand up straight and looks back at the incredible slope they have just run down. The curve of the crater wall is so great, the rim curls over their heads. “Hey James, how are we supposed to get back up?”

“I’m not worried about that yet,” James answers without turning around.

Unsatisfied, but with no other direction to go, William trots after his friend.

There isn’t much to see. Save for the two boys, the crater is devoid of all life. Birds fly around instead of over, and they never land nearby. No worms or insects make their home in the dead soil. The lifelessness here is matched only by the stillness. There is no breeze to cool their hot, sweating faces.

William looks up at the sky, thankful to see it’s still blue. His parents have always been very clear, gray skies mean run. Find shelter. Head for the nearest public restroom or abandoned subway tunnel or knock on strangers’ doors if it means keeping dry. Anything more than a drizzle and he should pick up a rock and smash a car window rather than get caught in the rain. They constantly remind him it isn’t safe to splash around in puddles like they did growing up, and the crater would be nothing but one huge puddle.

If it rains, would they drown or disintegrate? Would their parents find their bodies or their skeletons? Would even their bones be left?

#

It was his brother’s birthday when William’s parents first sat him down and told him about the bomb that dug this hole. He was old enough to remember the day it dropped, but his parents told him things other kids his age still didn’t know, such as why the bomb was built in the first place, and why some people still called it a miracle.

The country that invented the bomb sure was proud of it. Their leader used to get on TV just to brag about all destruction this one bomb could cause. It was peerless. It could wipe away all their enemies, like cleaning smudges from a map. It was all the armies of Atilla and Alexander packed into a tin can. And, most miraculous of all, it guaranteed peace.

William had watched the leader on the TV promise that everyone would lay down their arms and fall to their knees before facing the threat of his miracle bomb. The leader loved to show off how closely his finger hovered over the big red button. Enemies beware. All he needed was an excuse. Any excuse. He swore again and again he wasn’t afraid to use it.

And he wasn’t.

Maybe he thought the other leaders were bluffing when they said their fingers were caressing buttons the same size and same shade of red as his own. Hard to say, but the crater James and William are strolling through is not unique.

The leader was disappointed to be whisked away by his security detail to a remote bunker where he couldn’t see any of the flashes or hear any of the booms. It was all he ever wanted.

No one knows where he’s hiding, but they’re sure it’s someplace safe. Somewhere he doesn’t have to worry about guns or bombs or rain. He still speaks to his public through the rare broadcast. With a voice made of static, he thanks his citizens for all the work they’re doing rebuilding the beautiful nation, and he always reminds everyone how many lives the bomb saved. It’s thanks to him the war ended. It’s thanks to him there’s peace. Thanks to him.

Thanks to him.

#

William has no idea how far he and James have walked, but his feet are starting to blister and his clothes are already dark with sweat. The sun seems to be focusing all its attention on him, so he tells himself he’s lucky when a wisp of a cloud drifts overhead to offer some meager shade.

“I bet the one we dropped on the other guys was twice as big.” James says, stretching his arms out at his sides like he’s trying to push the walls of the crater farther apart. “Have you ever been to a city?” He asks William.

“Once.” It’s the most William has said in hours.

“Was it this one?”

“No.”

“I heard this one was all cement and steel. Was the city you went to like that?”

“Yeah.”

“With people everywhere?”

“Yeah. There wasn’t enough room on the sidewalk for everyone and we all bumped into each other.”

“Were the buildings as tall as they say?”

“Some of them.”

James surveys the empty space surrounding him and nods his head, appreciating a job well done. He bends down, scoops up a handful of dirt and pours it slowly from his hand. “How awesome is it that so much stuff can be gone like that?” He snaps his dirty fingers.

“Yeah. Awesome.”

James marvels for the rest of their long walk. They’re so deep into the Earth he bets if he dug a little further down he could reach whatever country rests on the other side of the planet and launch a surprise invasion.

While James daydreams about conquering his foes, William wonders what was inside the bomb. What could do this? His face is burning, but most of the heat seems to be coming up from the ground. The sun isn’t even visible from behind the clouds. Those aren’t the storm kind, are they?

They pass the next several minutes walking quietly. Each of them too engrossed in his own thoughts to speak. When the boys finally reach the crater’s center, neither one can help but frown a little. They don’t know what they were expecting to find, but they thought it would be something more than a circle of charred dirt. James thinks it looks like a period at the end of a sentence. This war is finished, but one day maybe he can start the next.

James grabs a handful of the black dirt, admires it for a moment, then stuffs it in his pocket, surprised to find the layer underneath is just as black. The layer under that looks just the same. So does the layer under that. He holds out his hand, offering some to William. “Souvenir?”

William shakes his head. It’s nothing but an old wound, a scar as deep as the Earth’s core.

James shrugs and shoves it into his pocket with the rest. “It’s a little disappointing though, isn’t it?”

William thinks his friend is talking about the dirt and agrees.

“Before the bomb,” James continues, “People got to actually run onto a battlefield and fight each other face to face.” He wraps his hands around a make-believe machine gun and aims it at William. Spit flies from his mouth with every ratta-tat-tatta and imaginary bullets spray from his fingertips. Usually when they play war, William will throw his hands over his heart, spin around and collapse with his tongue stuck out to the side. Today, however, he doesn’t feel like playing corpse.

James unloads his magazine and his shoulders sag. If William doesn’t feel like pretending then there’s no point in reloading. He drops the invisible gun, and leaves it there forever.

A moment later, James asks, “Did your brother get to shoot anyone, before he, you know, got shot?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t get to ask.”

“Bet you wish they’d dropped the bombs before he died. If the war had ended sooner, he might have been able to come home for good.”

“I guess.” William doesn’t want to talk about his brother with James. Not right now. “I think we should go.”

“Seriously? It took forever to get here. Let’s stay a little longer.”

“I want to go home.”

“We can leave in a few minutes.”

“Stay then. I’m going home.”

“Fine,” James groans and follows William.

Neither of the boys say much of anything on the return trip. James tries to ask a few hypothetical questions, like if William thinks they’ll ever have the chance to be soldiers themselves. William only ever shrugs in response, so James gives up trying to talk. William is walking faster than he has all day. The walk back to the crater wall takes half the time it took to reach the center, but the slope isn’t nearly as simple to go up as it was to go down.

It isn’t long before the boys reach a point where the slope’s curve becomes unclimbable. They hunch forward until they are scrambling on all fours, kicking and clawing, driving their fingernails as deep into the earth as they’ll go, but it’s pointless. There’s nothing to hold onto except a few loose rocks. Regardless of how hard they struggle, the boys barely manage to stop themselves from sliding all the way back to the bottom. Sweat carves trails through the dirt on their faces. Their clothes are so filthy they will have to be thrown away. Eventually, after sunset, they are so tired there is nothing left for them to do except sit down and give up.

William closes his eyes and hugs his knees to his chest. “Do your parents know where we are?”

“Nope,” James answers. “Do yours?”

William buries his head in his arms, “No. You made me swear not to tell them.”

“No worries,” James says. “We’ll get out.”

“How?”

“We just have to wait for rain.” He points up. They can’t see the stars. At night, the clouds make the sky look dark and empty. “The crater will fill up and we can float to the top,” James laughs.

William does not. He keeps quiet and rubs his thumb up and down the device at his hip. He flicks the switch. It seems louder than before.

“Is that an ox skull?”

The tourist guide looked up at the carved stone symbols I indicated and said, “I think so, yes.”

“Why is it there?”

“I’m not sure actually,” she said, before adding, “Perhaps it was part of the coats-of-arms of a rich patron.”

The answer was unsatisfying, and we continued the tour into the ship-like interior of the Basilica Palladiana. Walking up wide flat steps to the upper terrace revealed a view of Vicenza that gave a bird’s eye view of the grid of narrow streets I had been gradually learning the past two months. Dark clouds were building over the mountains to the north, like Giorgione’s Tempest. I bought a glass of red at the rooftop bar and stayed to enjoy the view. The tour was over.

In the piazza below the people were scurrying to and fro. I sent a text to my friend and fellow Army officer, Rachel, asking her to come up a join me. She said she was on her way. I pulled out my book but had to read each sentence three or more times. I was too distracted by people-watching to absorb the prose. There is always something seedy or secretly shameful about being alone at bar or restaurant with no apparent diversion. At least that’s how it feels to me; the families and couples at the other tables probably didn’t care if there was a young man sitting alone at the neighboring table. The book, like a newspaper-reading pensioner on a park bench, gave me an alibi. The wine and late afternoon sun relaxed me to the point that I entered a trance-like state for a few moments.

I looked up and saw Rachel approaching my table with her big, white, American teeth smiling. My heart beat faster.

“Hi, Drew. What a great place!” she said, turning her head to take in more of the panorama. “I’ve never been up here.”

“It’s my first time, too,” I said nonchalantly. “Did you just finish work?”

“Yeah, I had to sit through an interminable staff meeting.”

“Sounds like more fun than mine. I had to do a sensitive-items inventory all afternoon with the supply sergeant.”

Did any of the items get their feelings hurt?” she said with a little giggle.

“Ha ha.”

What are you hiding down there?” I lifted up the book’s cover to show her.

Oh, I loved that book!” she exclaimed.

“It’s alright I guess. I checked it out of the library because I liked the cover. It seems a bit childish so far.” I was keeping my cards close to my chest, as they say.

“It’s really good. Wait till you get to the ending. It’s so powerful that it actually helped me make up my mind to join the army.”

“Was it in English?”

“Obviously. I’m starting to learn a few words of Italian slowly. Ciao. Grazie. Vino Rosso. Anyway, apparently this Palladio guy was a really big deal. His buildings are all over town, and in Venice, too.”

“I know, I’ve heard a lot about him since I’ve been here. I love art but I’m not really into architecture too much.”

“Same here, but I am into history and cultural stuff. Did you know that Thomas Jefferson designed Monticello based on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda, which is just outside town?”

“That’s cool.”

“I’m going to go take a look at it later if you want to come,” I mentioned casually.
“Sure. Might as well see the sights.”

“Maybe this weekend then?” I inquired.

“Sure!”

I was feeling confident now, especially after having already finished half the carafe of a robust local wine.

“Look at those stone carvings up there.” I pointed at the friezes encircling the top of the building.

“What is it? A cow skull?”

“I think it’s an ox.”

“Really? How did you get to be an expert in bovine skeletal patterns?”

“I asked the tourist guide about it but she didn’t have any idea.”

“Not surprised.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know. It could be a secret symbol for something.”

“Obviously. There’s no point in just surrounding the top of a great Renaissance building with ox skulls.”

“Now that I think about it, I remember something from my art history class in college. There was an Italian artist whose name had something to do with oxen. Cimabue, I think it was.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He was the teacher of another artist, Giotto. His name meant ox-head, if I recall.”

“Giotto I have heard of. In fact, I think he did some famous paintings not too far away, in Padova. We should go see those, too,” I proposed.

“Ok, I’m going to try to see as much as possible in this country. And there sure is plenty to see around here.”

“Thanks for the tip on Cimabue, by the way. I’ll look into it.”

“So you’re really into this ox mystery.”

“I don’t know why, but it’s just striking. It gives me something to explore. It’s like a treasure hunt.”

“Hey, I know: maybe it’ll end up like a Dan Brown book where the ox was the symbol of some secret society that tried to assassinate the king,” she said giggling again. I couldn’t help but smile and break my cool facade to play along with the joke.

“The doge of Venice, possibly. Or the Pope. There was no king of Italy back then. Maybe Marco Polo was a member of the society and he brought back mystical knowledge of the cult of the ox from China. That book sounds even better than this one.”

“Don’t joke like that,” she teased.

“You want to go and find a pizza place? There’s a really good one just down the street” I queried  hopefully.

“Let’s do it!”

The streets around the center of town were almost empty at this hour, except groups of army soldiers running in formation. My platoon was doing squad-level training around the inside of the base, so I took the opportunity to do a long run outside with the company executive officer, First Lieutenant Mark Brodie.

As we left the asphalt and entered the cobblestone section of the old city center, I saw occasional signs of life in the form of street cleaners wearing high-visibility vests, a businessman in a three-piece suit holding a briefcase, and a delivery man on a bike pulling a cart full of packages.

“Let’s do a detour here towards the main square,” I said through my heavy breathing. We finished the last slight incline that opened onto the biggest open space in the city, surrounded by palaces, high-end shops, colonnades, loggias, and the Basilica Palladiana. We came to a stop next to a pair of columns in the middle of the square.

“How about a pushup contest?” asked Mark suddenly. I agreed and we dropped to our hands and knees on the dewy flagstones of the piazza.

“You ready?”

“Yeah.”

“Go.” We started pushing ourselves up and down in unison while counting out the numbers. At forty I was really starting to slow down while my colleague was still going strong.

“Forty-five…forty-six,” he said, while at this point I dropped to the ground and ceded him the victory. He did four more to make an even fifty. We were both gasping for air for a couple minutes as we shook out our arms and legs.

“Nice work, man. I’m out of shape, I guess.”

“No worries. You want to get back to the run now?”

“Let’s take another minute to stretch out here. It’s nice having this whole square to ourselves. I came through here a few mornings ago after P.T. and it was absolutely packed full with the weekly market.”

“Sounds like fun. Did you buy anything?”

“No way. It’s all a bunch of Chinese crap. Anyway, look up there,” I pointed up to the stone carvings. “What does that look like to you?”

“Stone carvings.”

“Of what?”

“Some kind of animal skull. Maybe a bull, or an ox.”

“I think it’s an ox.”

“What’s the difference between a bull and an ox, anyway?”

“I believe oxen are just castrated bulls. Probably made them easier to control when they had to do all the hard field work.”

“Sucks to be them.”

“And it also makes you wonder about the phrase, ‘strong as an ox.’ I doubt any well-built men would find it a compliment if they knew that oxen had no balls.”

“Let’s start saying ‘strong as a bull’ instead. I just won the push-up contest because I’m strong as a bull. You, on the other hand, are strong as an ox.”
“Thanks.”

“Alright, let’s keep going.” We started again at a moderate pace.

“I just thought of something,” said Brodie after a minute. “I’ve been reading up on Afghan history to get ready for the next deployment. They’ve got this fierce, independent streak that goes back to the time of Alexander the Great; it seems that they’ve never been conquered. Greeks, British, Russians, nobody could fight the mountain tribes in their own territory. I wonder if that’s what’s going to happen to us Americans next?”

“Who knows? Anyway, let’s not forget the Mongols. They conquered the hell out of Afghanistan and everyone else they encountered. They just slaughtered everybody and moved on.”

“Maybe that’s what we’ll have to do, too.”

“More like building schools and hospitals. We are trying to ‘nation-build,’ not burn everything down, Genghis-style.”

“The thing I wanted to mention was that Alexander the Great’s famous horse was called Bucephalus. Do you know what the name means?”

“No, but it sounds like a good name for a rapper.”

“It means ox-head.”

“Wow, that’s strange. Last night I showed Rachel the same stone carvings and she mentioned an Italian artist named ox-head.”

“So you’re seeing a lot of Rachel lately? Anything going on with you two?” he joked, half-seriously.

“Let’s race up to the top of this hill. If you win, I’ll tell you. If I win, you’re an ox-head.”

Later that evening I stopped by my apartment to change clothes and go out for another pizza. I met my landlord, Giulio, in the stairwell.

“Ciao, Giulio.”

“Ciao, Andrea!”

“Just call me Drew.”

“Everything is working in your flat?”

“Yeah, everything’s great. I’m almost never at home though.”

“Yes, I notice. You leave early in the morning and you come back late at night. Sometimes I see no lights in your flat for many weeks.”

“We do a lot of training events at other bases. Sometimes in Germany.”

“You take a drink upstairs with me?”

“Sure, thanks.”

“You help me practice my English.”

“I need to learn some more Italian, too.”

“Yes, you do! You drink red wine?”

“I love red wine. It’s so good and cheap here.”

“This is homemade, by my uncle in the country.”

“It’s delicious. Fruity, almost spicy.”

“It is called a new wine. The grapes were picked only last month.”

“Giulio, you must know a lot about Vicenza.”

“I am born here.”

“Have you ever noticed those stone carvings at the top of the Basilica?”

“Hmm. Yes, I think so.”

“What do you think they mean?”

“I am not so sure. Probably they are symbols for something.”

“That’s what I thought. The tour guide said maybe they were symbols of a rich patron.”

“I think not. Those would be different, more personal to each family. On the loggia going up to Monte Berico you will find many of those, for example.”

“We run up there at least one morning a week, but I never looked so closely. I’ll check it out tomorrow.”

“These animals were very important for ancient peoples, you must understand. It could represent something mythological.”

“Probably, like how Zeus turned into a bull to rape some mortal woman.”

“Yes, these metamorphoses were famous stories in Italy also. They inspired many great painters, like our Tiziano or Tintoretto. You have seen them in the Accademia in Venice?”

“I haven’t been yet. But I was just telling my friend yesterday that we should go see Giotto in Padova.”

“Oh, yes, of course. It’s very nice. You will like.”

“Do you know a lot about art, then? It seems like Italians are way more into art than Americans, or maybe any other country.”

“No, I studied letteratura. Literature. But we study many years of art in school.”

“Well, this was the center of the Renaissance.”

“Italy has a unique history. It has only been a united country since 1860, you know? Before that it was many different kingdoms and independent cities. There was much competition to make the best art.”

“I guess so.”

“And there was a different language and culture in each region. In fact, most people here today still speak Venetian dialect. Maybe you should learn this instead of proper Italian!”

“I don’t know about that. Maybe if I stay here for 10 years and become fluent in Italian, then I’ll start working on the dialects.”

“Yes, you should. That reminds me of a famous indovinello—that is, a type of mysterious word game.”

“A riddle.”

“Yes, so this riddle was the first written record of modern Italian language. That is, not Latin but the vernacular tongue. It comes from Verona and is about oxes working in the fields.”

“Plural is oxen, not oxes.”

“Ah, yes, of course. Oxen, like children.”

“Or women,” I joked.

“Anyway, the riddle was written by a monk who was describing the process of writing like plowing fields with oxen. There was even a type of ancient writing called boustrophedon, which means something like turning the ox. Instead of lines of text always left to right, the scribes would finish one line left to right and then start the next one on the right and move back left.”

“Wow, that’s interesting. And weird how oxen keep coming up. My friend this morning just told me that Alexander the Great’s horse was called ox-head, and there was an Italian artist also named ox-head. The teacher of Giotto, I think.”

“Yes, Cimabue.”

“Oxen were all the rage back then.”

“All the rage?”

“It means they were popular.”

“Certainly. Without them the people would probably die.”

“You’re probably right,” I said and gulped down the last of my glass. “Thanks for the wine. I’ve got to go get some dinner now. I’m meeting a friend.”

“You’re welcome and enjoy your evening,” he paused, and then added, “And don’t work like an ox!”

“Ha, nice one, Giulio. See you later.”

Two days later, a Friday, I found myself in the company headquarters on base, doing paperwork, shooting the shit with the platoon sergeant, and waiting for the company commander to give the weekend safety brief so we could all go home.

“Sir, did you see that leave request that Hunt and Faust put in for next weekend?” asked Sergeant First Class Rollins.

“Yeah, the commander already signed it,” I replied.

“What in the hell do two 19-year-old privates want to do in Greece?”

“Faust is twenty. I heard the plan was to visit Sparta. They’re part of the Spartan warrior fan club, I guess.”

“Ha! Hunt could barely pass sit-ups on the last APFT. Couple of knuckle-heads if you ask me, sir.”

“I don’t think they’ll find much to see there. They should stick to Athens.”

“I suppose you and the other LTs already been there on one of the last three-day weekends?”

“Yeah. Last November. What about you? Got any travel plans for the weekend?”

“I don’t get that big officer paycheck.”

“Come on, Sergeant. You must have plenty saved up from all those deployments.”

“It don’t go far after child support. Besides, got no interest in seeing more of this third-world country. Two years from now I’ll be back in Bragg.”

“You’re telling me you prefer backwoods North Carolina to this beautiful Mediterranean country with its ancient ruins and world-class art?”

“I didn’t go to college, sir. And I seen plenty of ancient ruins after we jumped into Iraq. This place ain’t much better.”

“What’s so bad here?”

“Roads are tiny, cars are tiny, coffees are tiny, buildings falling apart, shops never open, can’t find anything you want, nobody speaks English.”

“Yeah, but the food’s good.”

“I don’t go out to eat.”

“Not even to get pizza?”

“Had it once when I first got here. The crust was too thin and I had to cut my own slices.”

“You ever looked at the big building in the main square when we run by that way in the morning?”

“Sir, I ain’t got time to look at the architecture. I’m trying to keep tabs on my platoon, most of which are still half-drunk during P.T., including the squad leaders,” he said looking at me, and then after a brief pause, “And probably the officers.”

“What else are soldiers gonna do between deployments when you send them to Europe?”

“It’d be better if they weren’t allowed to leave the base. Stop a lot of the drunken fights downtown with locals every week.”

At this point the platoon’s four squad leaders walked into the office. “The guys are all in formation, sir,” said Staff Sergeant Garcia.

“Thanks, Sergeant,” I said.

The platoon sergeant sat back in his chair and propped his boots up on the table and said, “What’s the hurry? You boys don’t got nothing better to do than wait.”

“Listen, Sergeant Rollins and I were just discussing weekend plans and the relative merits of seeing the local sites. Let’s conduct a little survey: has anyone noticed any of the architecture in the main square?”

“I sure as hell know the bars!” said Staff Sergeant Courtney. “Galleria 15, Settimo Cielo, Grottino, Borsa.”

“There’s also those two columns, one with a lion or something,” added Garcia.

“Lots of gelaterias, too,” said Staff Sergeant LeBeau.

Sergeant First Class Rollins was smirking from his laid-back position of authority, and commented, “Bunch of jokers, sir. That’s an 11B for you.”

“Nobody ever noticed that huge building lined with columns and statues taking up, like, a third of the square?”
“Oh yeah, something with a ‘b’,” said Courtney.

“Big-ass building,” said LeBeau.

“Baghdad bomb shelter,” attempted Garcia, weakly.

“Basilica Palladiana,” said the previously silent Staff Sergeant Monroe.

“That’s it,” I said, while the other NCOs eyed him warily. “Have you ever noticed those animal figures carved along the upper level? Bulls or possibly oxen?”

“Not really. But carving animals on old buildings used to be pretty common. The Ishtar Gate of Babylon was full of lions and aurochs, which are the ancestor of modern cows and oxen, for example.”

Now everyone, including me, stared at Monroe for a long moment, mouths slightly agape. “Sometimes you seem dumb as an ox, Monroe,” exclaimed Rollins. “And then sometimes you come up with some shit like that.”

“Where did you learn that?” I asked.

“There was a replica of the Ishtar Gate in Baghdad built by Saddam. I saw it when we were there.”

“I was too busy trying not to get blowed up,” said Courtney.

“That’s it. Drop down and give me fifty,” said Rollins, dead serious though he was still smirking.

“Let’s all knock ‘em out,” I said. Everyone in the room occupied six feet of floor space in the cramped office and started doing pushups.

Just then, the First Sergeant walked by and said in his usual screaming voice, “What are you second platoon idiots doing in here?”

“Trying to get in some extra P.T. while we wait for formation, First Sergeant,” said Garcia, happily.

“Well when you finish, get outside and join the ranks. The C.O.’s coming to give the safety brief in five minutes.”

“Got it, Top,” I said.

“Don’t call me Top, LT,” said the First Sergeant as he left the building.

“Let’s go then, men,” I said. We all brushed off our hands and straightened our uniforms and started filing out of the room. I said to the group in general, “So, anybody going away this weekend?”

“I’m going back to Florence to try to find some American college girls,” said Courtney.

I met Rachel the next morning and we started a walk up a seemingly endless sets of stone steps outside Vicenza.

“Do you ever run up here during P.T.?” I asked.

“Sometimes. At Brigade HQ we don’t do as much training as you hard-charging Infantry types,” she said.

“We did five laps sprinting up and down these steps on Monday,” I said between increasingly heavy breaths.

“Sounds like fun,” she said flashing the wide smile I had been thinking about all week.
We finally reached the top landing where the path levelled off. From here there was a panorama of the city.

“It’s nice up here,” she said. “You can see all the way to the mountains up north.”

“Yeah, still snow on some of them.”

“I bet there are some great places to walk up there. Have you ever been?”

“We did a battalion staff ride up to Asiago last summer. It was mostly a chance for everyone to get drunk at the restaurant at the end,” I said. The intended joke didn’t come out as smooth as I had intended.

“You Infantry guys also seem to drink a lot,” she said still smiling, but with a more serious undertone.

“Can’t dispute that. Helps us feel better about being on the sharp end of the spear, I guess,” I said, before changing the subject. “Let’s keep going. We turn left up ahead to get to the Villa Rotonda.”

We followed a narrow cobble-stoned path down a gentle slope for a few minutes.

“Listen to this: yesterday I was asking my NCOs if they knew anything about Vicenza. It turns out that they only know about the bars, and probably strip clubs, to tell you the truth. Some of them never even really leave the base.”

“It’s probably intimidating for young guys who have never left their own towns and don’t know much about the world. From what I’ve seen, most of the guys in the army are more immature and naive than you would think, even the ones in their teens and early 20s,” she said while shooting me a quick side-eyed glance.

“Well, one of them, a silent, serious guy, knew all about the Basilica Palladiana and even started talking about the Ishtar Gate in Babylon. Apparently it was full of carvings of animals, including something called an aurochs. I had to look it up and it’s an extinct type of ox.”

“Maybe not all enlisted men are as dumb as you think, just because they signed their lives away in the army. No one forced us to sign up either, even if we’re officers.”

“Right. Seemed like a good idea at the time,” I joked, falling back on yet another tired cliche. “Anyway, I just remembered something about aurochs from Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. We had to read it in Latin at West Point. He talked about how the soldiers hunted them and used their horns as drinking cups. That’s what made me remember it.”

“Fascinating,” she said sarcastically. “I see you’re still into that oxen thing. You’ll be happy to know I solved your mystery with five minutes of research on the internet.”

“What is it?”

“The carved ox is called bucranium. It was common on ancient buildings to symbolize sacrifices to the gods. It was brought back during the Renaissance by neo-classical architects like Palladio.”

“Incredible, thanks.” I was fairly speechless and didn’t know how to continue the conversation, which seemed to be hopelessly stalling. “That just goes to show, I guess.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something. Anyway, you learn something new everyday,” I responded stupidly.

We arrived at a closed gate through which we could see the perfectly symmetrical Villa Rotonda sitting upon a grassy hillock under an azure sky.

“It’s beautiful,” she said sizing up the impressive edifice. “Too bad we can’t go inside.”
“I think it’s better-looking from outside,” I said quietly while looking at her. She was still looking up at the building.

We slowly circled around the stone wall to get a better view. There was silence for several minutes.

“So do you have any plans for the long weekend next month?” I asked.

“Actually, my boyfriend’s coming for a visit.”

I kept my stride and expression intact, while my brain furiously processed this new information.

“Oh. So what does he do?”

“He’s doing an MBA at Harvard Business School.”

“Wow.”

“That’s probably where my parents wanted me to be by now, too. It’s pretty boring hearing about business case studies all the time.”

“Right.”

“Anyway, he doesn’t want to go into the corporate world. He wants to work for an NGO.”

“Great.”

Silence again for a long moment.

“It’ll probably be hard to maintain a long-distance relationship while you’re deployed for a year or more,” I ventured.

“I’m not deploying to Afghanistan, Drew,” she said. I stopped walking and turned towards her to check if she was being serious. “As a logistics officer I’ll be on the rear detachment pushing supplies back and forth.”

“That makes sense,” I said as I resumed walking and looking straight ahead. “So you’ll have plenty of time to keep seeing the local sights.”

“I would imagine.”

“When we get back you’ll definitely know much more than me.”

“Most likely,” she said in a deadpan, before flashing her smile one more time.

“I must be dumb as an ox,” I added in a subdued tone.

“I wouldn’t say that,” she laughed. “Maybe just an ox-head.”

Excerpt from FREELANCE: A NOVEL

The HYPR Dryver Manual was clear: a Dryver should not, under any circumstances, touch a customer. Simon read and re-read the line on his phone, looking for an exception, something like a loophole that might help him remove the snoring man from his back seat.

They’d arrived at the destination two minutes earlier, but the man’s eyes were still shut tight, his head still leaning against the rear window. “Excuse me,” Simon said from the driver’s seat. He glanced at the phone on the dash to double-check the man’s name. “Thomas?”

The man coughed a few times, sounding like he was working through a winter’s worth of mucus, but never opened his eyes. Drool ran down a gin-blossomed cheek. In the few weeks Simon had spent working as a Dryver, he’d had to deal with drunk people; getting shitfaced was one of the main reasons people called a HYPR. Before Thomas, though, that reality had never been a problem. None of his previous alcoholics had fallen asleep.

Simon considered checking HYPRPPL, the forum he’d been lurking on since starting the job, but he knew it would probably offer little help—its users tended to talk tougher than they acted in real life. If there were an answer, it’d be in the Manual. He tapped “Find in Page,” typed “problem with a passenger,” and watched as his phone jumped to a possible solution: “If you have a problem with a passenger and feel like you are in danger,” it said, “contact the local authorities.” Simon imagined calling the cops, the smirks on their faces as they jotted down his concerns. This fat drunk scares you?

He didn’t need Thomas arrested; he just needed him out of the car. He needed to grab another fare. He needed to stop wasting time. “Thomas,” he said again. “Ride’s over.” The man shook his head and rolled onto the headrest, slathering it with his spit.

Simon returned to the wheel and stared at the crowded city just beyond his windshield, at the 2100 block of Market Street and its towering glass buildings. The people passing by his car were well-dressed. They were moisturized and manicured. They spent their days in cubicles, talking about slide decks and KPIs. He knew they couldn’t relate.

He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and counted to 10. The day before he’d watched a YouTube video called “Calm Down QUICKLY” that suggested these techniques created positive delusions; even if things were spiraling, the woman in the video had said, controlling your breath would tell your brain all was well.

When he reached 10, though, he didn’t feel any different. Thomas was still passed out and he was still stuck at the corner of 21^st and Market. He would have to wait for the man to wake up on his own. He imagined the lame excuses he’d offer: something about a restless newborn at home, an early morning at the gym, a long and trying history of incurable narcolepsy. Simon gripped the steering wheel and took out some of his aggression on the worn gray rubber.

Some passengers left tips as penance for their bad behavior, acknowledgments that Simon’s job was inherently shitty, that having to deal with this many people every day deserved more than what the algorithm paid. He wondered if telling Thomas about all the fares he’d missed out on while the man had been napping might subtly suggest one of these generous tips was in order. He knew that might be too soft, though. Maybe what the situation really called for was a threat. Thomas would be banned from the app—immediately, and permanently—unless he forked over a 50% tip. No, Simon thought, go bigger. It would have to be 60%. 50% sounded like a gamble, but 60% sounded assertive. 65% sounded even better. It would be 65%. The number was more arbitrary and, as a result, more official.

Now he just needed him to wake, then he would begin the blackmail. Unfortunately, he saw himself saying, there’s only one way out. He looked at the man in the rearview. He was still out, but he began shifting in the seat, a move that Simon thought might be the early start of his entry back into the waking world. Instead, he let out a titanic fart.

Simon squeezed the wheel tighter, until his knuckles ached. He stared at the flesh between them, amazed at how his white skin turned even paler than usual.

Then his eye caught the Subaru logo. The horn. Of course.

He pressed hesitantly at first, worried he might startle one of the office workers on their way to lunch. The car let out a soft chirp and Simon eyed the rearview mirror, hoping to see the man’s eyes creak open. It didn’t work. In fact, Thomas looked rather peaceful in his newfound California King.

It would have to be harder. It would require some real force. Simon leaned all his weight into his palm and held it there, determined to get the thing screaming. He began working the horn like a mound of dough, kneading it into an atonal mess. He smiled as people on the sidewalk stopped and stared.

Thomas shot up in a panic, demanding to know where he was.

Simon pulled back from the horn. “2100 Market,” he said. “Your destination.”

“Good,” Thomas said, and took a tin of mints from his breast pocket. He threw a handful in his mouth. Simon could see imprints of the headrest across his face.

“You were out for a while,” Simon said. He was laying the groundwork for the tip. The man would feel guilty, indebted. “It ate a lot of my time.”

The man stared at him for a beat. “And?”

“It cut into my other fares. I lost money.” Simon decided he would go with 40%. It was the more reasonable number.

“That right?”

Simon nodded. “And as a result of your actions—”

“—sounds like a shitty business model,” Thomas said, cutting him off. He left the car without another word, slamming the door behind him.

Simon took a deep breath and started counting to 10. He saw the woman from YouTube encouraging him to find the origin of his breath, to locate it deep within his chest and hold it there.

“Always, always, always place courtesy and hospitality above everything else,” the HYPR Dryver Manual said. He knew he would need to disregard Thomas’s words. He knew he could not afford to be in a bad mood for the next passenger. He would forget the entire experience. He needed to.

Simon’s phone vibrated in its dashboard holster. He assumed it was a notification from HYPR, an offer for a new passenger, an opportunity to make more money. The woman from the YouTube video would’ve told him to ignore this, to tune out the rest of the world until his brain was at peace, but he didn’t need to be Zen, he just needed to be calm. Calm enough. Calm enough to drive without jeopardizing any more fares.

The notification was from HYPR, though there was no mention of a new passenger. “Your Dryver Score has been updated!” the app informed him. For all his efforts with Thomas, he’d been awarded a single star. It had been the confrontation, he knew. If he had kept quiet, if he had just waited for the man to wake up on his own, he wouldn’t be dealing with a tanked average.

He put the phone back in its holster and took another deep breath. This time, he decided, he would count to 100.

Order a copy of Freelance here.

Wasi couldn’t sleep. He looked at the wall clock: four in the morning. He rubbed his stiff neck, wincing at a dull, persistent headache. He sat up in the dark, kicked off his blankets, stretched, and looked out the window to guess what the coming day would be like, sunny or cloudy, but he saw only stars, which he thought predicted a cloudless day. He listened to the rising chorus of birdsong as he felt the back of his head. The gauze bandage had come off in his sleep, and he touched a bare patch of warm skin and the tight line of ten stitches with the tips of his fingers. He was conscious of the wound, its need for protection. His naked scalp beneath the gauze, its exposure now with the gauze off. Healing will take time, the doctor had told him.

He walked into the bathroom, chips of paint from the water-stained ceiling sticking to his bare feet. He opened a drawer in the fractured vanity, pulled out a square piece of gauze, covered the stitches, and taped it as the nurse had done. Then he took two ibuprofen. Mindful of the doctor’s warning not to get the stitches wet, he washed his face and body with a washcloth instead of showering. He held a plastic baggie against the gauze with one hand to keep the wound dry while he shampooed and rinsed his hair. Glancing out the bathroom window, he noticed the stars had dimmed. Light frayed the farthest reaches of sky.

Coming into the kitchen, he adjusted the cracked blinds above the sink. He heated water for green tea, and put two slices of bread in the toaster. By the time he finished eating, the sun had risen, revealing a clear blue sky—just as he had thought—and he put on sunglasses and walked out of his apartment, pausing to put a mask over his nose and mouth. Shirts and pants hung over railings above him and he heard the voices of people from Syria and Iraq, who like him were refugees placed in the apartment complex by Interfaith Ministries of San Diego.

He opened a gate to the sidewalk and waited for a garbage truck to pass. It stopped and picked up a black trash bin with a mechanical arm, dumped its contents into the hopper behind the cab, and set it down. The noise bothered him. Wasi pressed a hand against his bandage to make sure it was secure and hurried across the street. A small dog yapped at him from behind a fence and its owner screamed at it, but the dog ignored her and the noise vibrated up Wasi’s spine until he thought he might burst. He clenched and opened his fists. The humid air weighed on him and fallen palm leaves, gray and dry on the sidewalk, broke underfoot and that noise, too, bothered him. 

He walked a few blocks into a neighborhood of single-story, ranch-style homes and noticed an elderly man sitting in his kitchen by an open window. The man waved. Wasi hesitated, and then waved back. In Kabul, he had done his best to avoid his neighbors. They would often stop and ask him what sort of work he did that took him from his home for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. Construction, he would answer. A company out of Dubai. It has a big project in Ghazni. He presumed some of his neighbors didn’t believe him, perhaps because they would overhear him speaking English when he received calls from the Americans at Bagram Air Base, and mention their suspicions to the Taliban. How else did the insurgents suspect him of being an interpreter? The pipe bomb he found outside his house one morning had malfunctioned, sparing him. He knew he had been lucky, but he also was certain he had been found out.

I see you every morning, the old man shouted.

I walk before I go to work, Wasi said. I drive for Lyft. It’s good to walk because I’ll be sitting most of the day.

I’m stuck in the house because of COVID. 

Are you sick?

No. Just social distancing.

Wasi removed his sunglasses and mask to show his face and not be rude.

I used to have a lot of business at the airport but now it is too slow, he said.

COVID, the old man said.

Yes, Wasi said, COVID.

He knelt to tighten the laces on his left shoe. The old man watched him.

What happened to your head?

Wasi looked up and then returned his attention to his shoe.

I’m sorry but I noticed the bandage. 

Accident, Wasi said, standing up.

I see. Something fell on you.

Yes, Wasi said. Something fell on me. 

Where are you from?

Why?

The old man shrugged and smiled.

Yours is not a Southern California accent. 

Does it matter?

Not at all. I’m sorry if I upset you.

Afghanistan. I was an interpreter for U.S. forces but I had to leave. The Taliban found out about me and it became too dangerous for me.

I am sorry.

I miss my country. In Afghanistan, the Americans paid me seven hundred dollars a month. I thought that was so much money but here it is nothing. Where are you from?

Touché, the old man said and laughed. I’m from here. I’ve lived in San Diego all my life. I’m retired now. My grandparents were Japanese. They emigrated from Japan to Hawaii, where my mother and father were born. When they married, my parents moved here. My grandparents spoke about Japan all the time.

The old man pushed up from his chair and stood.

Do you mind if I walk with you? I can’t stay in the house all day, every day. My wife wants me to, but I can’t just hate sitting here around.

Wasi shrugged. He preferred to be alone but he did not want to be impolite. He waited and put on his sunglasses and mask again. He recalled Kabul’s winters, when he would cover his nose and mouth with his hands to warm his face. He would stand still, watch his breath spread like gray smoke from between his fingers.

After a moment, the old man walked out the front door.  He paused on the porch and removed a mask from his pocket. Wasi pressed his bandage. He again felt the bump of stitches beneath the gauze and the warmth of the wound. The old man approached him, stopping a few feet away. 

I’m Mark Sato, he said. I’d shake your hand but we aren’t supposed to with the pandemic.

No problem, thank you. Wasi covered his heart with his right hand and bowed. Good morning. I am Wasi Turtughi.

Good morning, Mark said.

He put on his sunglasses and mask.

No one can see our faces, he said. We could be anybody.

Wasi started walking and Mark fell in behind him. Wasi listened to his steps, the steady pace of his shoes striking the pavement, and when he couldn’t take it anymore he stopped and told Mark he would prefer to follow him. 

I think you walk faster than me.

I don’t think so.

Please, Wasi said, waving him forward.

From time to time, Wasi and Mark got off the sidewalk to keep their distance from other pedestrians. They said hello, raised their hands, and some of those they met did the same while others hurried past or crossed to the other side of the street. When they reached the end of the street, Mark paused to decide which direction to take. I always go left, Wasi said. They began walking up a hill. A canyon of dry brush stood off to one side. Wasi leaned into the hill and stared into dry, rocky streambeds choked with weeds. Someone had used chalk to write, We Miss Seeing Our Neighbors and Smile This Will Be Over Soon, on the sidewalk. He stopped walking when Mark sat on a guardrail to catch his breath.

Do you always do this hill? Mark asked him. It’s steep.

Every day, Wasi said. It reminds me of Kabul. Just a little. The mountains outside the city and the fields beneath them where we’d fly kites and play fútbol.

Voices rose from the canyon. Three young men sauntered down one of the streambeds. They fanned out in a clearing and began throwing a Frisbee. They did not wear masks. They cursed without concern about who might hear them, mocking one another when one of them missed a catch. Wasi stiffened and felt his heart race. His breath got short and he couldn’t move. Then he stood and told Mark he had to leave. Without waiting for an answer, he began walking back the way they had come. 

What is it? Mark asked, hurrying after him.

Wasi didn’t answer. He pulled his mask down to his chin and wiped his face and sucked in air as if he had been holding his breath. He kept walking, finally stopping by a tree. A wrinkled, faded flyer with a picture of a lost cat hung nailed to the rough bark. Black and gray tabby. Whiskers. Call 619-874-2468 if you see her. Reward. Mark wheezed behind him. Leaning forward with his hands on his knees, he sucked in air.

What is it? he gasped.

I recognized those men, Wasi said, their voices. 

What about them?

I was walking last week, this walk, Wasi said. No one was around so I took off my mask. I’d gone up and then down the hill. I followed a nice little side street. Then I heard people running behind me. I thought they were joggers. I moved over expecting them to go by and I started putting on my mask. They started shouting, You fucking Arab! and that’s all I remember. I woke up in the hospital. A doctor told me I had been hit in the back of my head with something very hard, maybe a pipe or a bottle. I had a concussion.

Mark stared at his feet. He wanted to say, I’m sorry, an automatic response he knew would mean nothing. But he was sorry, sorry and grateful that these same men had never assaulted him on those rare days when he left the house. They might have. Many people blamed China for the pandemic. They considered—more like accused—every Asian person of being Chinese. They were someone to hate. Mark knew they wouldn’t care that he was born in San Diego. He would be Chinese to them because they would need him to be.

I’m sorry, he said finally, unable to think of anything better to say.

Afghans are not Arabs, Wasi said.

I’m sorry, Mark said again. Do you want to call the police?

No. I spoke to the police in the hospital. They said it would be difficult, too difficult to catch them without a witness because I did not see their faces.

I’m sorry.

I want to go home.

They began walking. It was hard for Mark to believe that such horrible people played Frisbee. Nothing was what it seemed. Poor Wasi. Mark felt bad for him while at the same time he could not escape a sense of relief that so far he had been spared.

When they reached his house, Mark stuck his arm out to shake Wasi’s hand and then stopped.

Sorry, he said. I always forget.

In Afghanistan, if we want something to happen, we say, Inshallah. It means, If God wills. Inshallah, these strange times will pass.

He covered his heart with his right hand, bowed, and said goodbye.

Mark watched him leave. Tomorrow, he would probably see Wasi again taking his daily walk. He would wave and say, Good morning, but he would keep his distance and not ask to join him. He did not want to catch Wasi’s bad luck. There would be no harm in saying hello, however, no harm in being pleasant.

Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures is available for purchase on Amazon.

Olly stood on a chair in his studio with a noose around his neck. “I’ll never love again,” he moaned. He stared at the blank canvas in front of him. I love my paintings, he thought. But they can’t love me back.

The empty canvas whispered: “Olly…”

He sniffed and slipped off the noose, deciding that he’d do the right thing by the canvas and paint it before he died. A last work to say goodbye to the world with. He trudged to his bedroom, tucked under the covers, and drifted off to sleep…

It was night in the forest. He looked around. How did I get here?

The sound of a lullaby echoed toward him from somewhere off in the distance. Now he was moving through the foliage towards it, and he came to a clearing in the woods, where a woman sang the childlike hymn while sitting by a pond which reflected the moonlight.

“Hello?” he asked.

Her song stopped; she turned around, revealing her face. Olly gasped and sat upright in bed. He looked around his darkened bedroom as he regained consciousness and the dream faded from memory. The sound of the lullaby persisted, though, echoing into his bedroom from down the hall.

He untangled himself from his sheets, followed the tune to his studio and switched on the light. A woman strolled around inside the empty canvas, singing the same song that had serenaded him in his sleep.

Olly was astonished. “Hello?”

She turned toward him, revealing a white mask with piercing eyes and red lips over her face. “Hello?”

“How’d you get in there?” he marveled.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “I’m Olly.”

“Olly,” she said slowly. “Sounds familiar. I’m Ella.”

“Ella,” said Olly, scratching his head. “I think I remember you, too. But I’m not sure where from.”

“What do you look like?” asked Ella. “I can’t see you.”

“What can you see?”

“I can see myself,” she said. “Through your eyes.”

“So we’re both looking at you…” Olly pondered. “Can you take off that mask?”

Ella struggled with the mask. “It’s stuck. What’s going on, Olly?”

“I don’t know. But don’t worry—I’m an artist. We’ll figure something out.”

Olly was at the exhibition opening the next day. The portraits of heroes from Greek myth adorned the walls. Orpheus, Aphrodite and Apollo stared into the room. Their eyes twinkled triumphantly, pompously, mocking the frail imperfections of their human onlookers from deified perches of immortality.

“What is it that inspires you to paint?” asked a journalist from the local arts intelligentsia.

“I paint in order to know myself,” said Olly. The journalist scrawled away in her notepad. “With every painting, I reach inside and take a piece of myself and transmute it through my paintbrush and onto the canvas.”

She laughed. “Nice metaphor.”

He nodded in all sincerity. “I’m serious. I picked up the technique by accident when I did my portrait of da Vinci, and apparently he used it on the Mona Lisa to paint a part of his soul onto the paint, and that part is still alive today, looking out at the crowds who come every day to admire and adore her.”

The journalist pointed at Aphrodite. “So, is there a piece of you inside this painting here?”

“As a matter of fact there is. There are several pieces, actually, comprised of both organic and ethereal materials, which—”

“Olly!” bellowed Bruno, lumbering boisterously in. He gripped Olly’s hand and gave it a shake. “Keeping well?”

Olly nodded. “I’ve got a new piece coming along.”

Bruno roared. “A new piece!” He smiled at the journalist. “Good for your head, but not for your soul. I asked about your soul. You, Olly, you. Are you keeping well? How is your soul?”

“That’s the thing I’m saying about this piece. I think I may have raised the transmutation process to a whole new level.”

Bruno laughed incredulously.

“I’m serious, Bruno, there is something about this new portrait. Otherworldly powers are at work.”

“That’s good,” said Bruno. “Now don’t forget, the Art Monthly interview’s next week, yeah?”

Olly lit up. “Yes!”

“Then the Arts Festival fortnight after.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot about that,” said Olly, beaming. “My mind’s been wandering, lately.”

Bruno clapped him on the shoulder. Rolled up shirt revealed strong biceps, he smiled nonchalantly, unsympathetic to Olly’s mental alienation. “Olly, my good man, step back and smell the roses once in a while, eh?”

Olly nodded. “Okay, I will. Thanks, Bruno.”

Olly burst into the apartment and raced into the studio.

“Olly!” cried Ella happily, and she danced a jig. “You’re home!”

Olly looked at her, still amazed at her appearance in his canvas. He’d half-expected her to not be here when he got home, that she was a figment of his imagination, created by his ego to counterbalance his manic depression and prevent the loss of hope. But here she was, right before his eyes in the canvas, with a mind of her own, completely outside the range of his influence. He looked at her in amazement. “I figured it out,” he said, slinking off his jacket.

“Hooray!” said Ella. “So tell me, what’s going on here?”

“Well, I learned this trick, see, where I can take a part of myself, like an emotion, or an ideal, and transmute it into the paint as it hits the canvas when I’m painting a picture of something, or someone.” He pushed the canvas containing Ella into a position where he’d be able to look at her and another portrait of Orpheus simultaneously. “See that portrait of Orpheus?” he said, looking partially at Orpheus, who was plucking his lute, and Ella, as he said it.

“Wow. Incredible,” said Ella softly.

“I’m going to put you right up next to him so you can hear it.” Olly turned the canvas around and put it against the canvas containing Orpheus so that they almost touched.

“Listen closely,” he said, pressing his ear up to the canvas as he held Ella close to Orpheus. Ever so faintly the music played; Orpheus plucked surreal melodies from his lute.

“Is that real?” asked Ella.

Olly nodded. “As I painted, I channeled my creative juices through a filter of musical inspiration and released them into every brush-stroke on that canvas. And as the painting emerged, I could see those bits of myself, those parts that I had infused into, over and on top of the actual paint, and I listened closely and could hear the basic tone of the lutes sound, the general rhythm of the melodies. And with that feedback it became easier and easier to tap into that same part of myself and get it out and onto the canvas, and so the music emerged.”

“What did you imagine when you painted me?” asked Ella.

“Nothing, that’s the thing, I never painted you. But the other night, I interacted with the canvas you’re now a part of. I loved it, in a way, loved it more than myself, which isn’t much, but it was enough to keep me going another day. Even though it was a canvas and incapable of love, and I’m a human, we were nevertheless equal.”

She walked around in circles in the canvas, processing what he’d said. “You’re brilliant,” she muttered, then she stopped. “So I’m the part of you that loves.” She spread her arms: “The best part of you!”

“I don’t think so,” said Olly.

“You said it yourself,” said Ella. “You put your last shred of love into me. Beyond me, there’s no love left in you.”

Olly searched his feelings. He raised his eyebrows. The pain was gone. And so was the love. There was nothing left of him on the inside. No more creative juices. He was empty. All that remained was his body, his outer shell. He patted his chest to make sure it was there. “You might be right,” he said.

Ella nodded sympathetically. “You must feel horrible right now, without me, without any of the good left in you. But even though it seems to you like you’re all bad, it’s not the way it is, because I’m the better part of you, and I love you more then you love me. See?”

“Are you talking in riddles, now?”

She smiled self-indulgently. “I’m good, aren’t I?”

Olly chuckled. “You are good,” he said, looking up at her shiftily, aware that she was watching him through his own eyes; she couldn’t see the evil expression growing on his face. “But the thing is, Ella, the thing is…everything happens for a reason, yeah? I think the reason this has happened is because, it’s like Bruno said, I need to focus on my soul. Do some soul work. And now that my feelings are gone, and I no longer care, believe it or not, strange though it may seem to you, I think I like it better this way. I freed you, that’s what I did―I freed us, both of us.”

“What are you saying?” she asked.

“I think we’re better off apart. It’s not you; it’s me.”

She was incredulous. “I am you. You are me. Which means that by loving you, you’re loving yourself. And by denying me, I’m denying me.”

He furrowed his brows. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Trust me, it’s true,” she said firmly. “You’re in denial. And besides, what about me? Spare a thought for me, Olly. What am I to do? Trapped in here, all alone, full of love, nothing to do.” She watched herself through Olly’s eyes as she tried to scratch away the canvas as a way of escape, to no avail.

“It’s not my fault you got trapped in there,” he shrugged. “Besides, you’ll be okay. I’ll take care of you, entertain you, like a pet. We’ll hang out together, I swear.”

She flushed with anger, furious at the turn of events. “It’s your fault!” It took all her will, went against all her instincts, to commit an act of emotional abuse against Olly and deliberately turn away from him and ignore him. As she did so, she lost her sight and simultaneously disappeared.

A lump caught in Olly’s throat. “Hey! Where’d you go?” She didn’t respond, and Olly felt queasy, on the verge of fainting, as parts of his soul were sucked into the empty space left by his unanswered question and forever lost in the void. Some kind of metaphysical connection existed between himself and Ella in the canvas, now. In order for him to be happy, Ella would need to be happy, too.

After a sleepless night, Olly entered his studio and approached the canvas, which he tapped with his finger. “Ella? Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

Silence. “I’ve figured out a way to fix this situation,” he said.

Ella turned around and appeared again. Despite the mask, she was beautiful. “Really?”

“Sure. I don’t know how to get you out, but I think I can transmute the rest of myself into the canvas as well.”

“You would do that for me?”

“I’ve realized that if you’re not real, then I’m crazy. And if you are real, then this way we can live together in perpetual bliss, untroubled by the cares of the world. Either way, it’s a win-win.”

Ella thought about it. “For you it’s a win-win. But I’ll be stuck here, inside the painting,” she said. “And it won’t be true love. We’ll only be loving our self.”

“You’ll be loving me, actually. I’m going to paint myself in as the landscape around you. I’ll be your whole world, your everything.”

“But it won’t be real!”

“Relax. You won’t know the difference. It’ll be like a dream for you, a beautiful dream.” Olly picked up his paintbrush and began filling in the landscape around Ella. He decided to paint her in a clearing in the forest by a pool. As he painted, his body was transported into the canvas. He started with the ground, and as it appeared on the canvas, his feet disappeared from the studio.

“There has to be a better way,” said Ella, panicking. “A way for me to get out of here and become a part of you again.”

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” said Olly. “To be together again?”

“Not at the cost of our identity! Don’t do it, Olly! You’re only trapping yourself.”

“I’ve thought about it,” he said as he painted away his legs into the painting. “And I’m happy to settle for ignorant bliss.” He began painting, singing the lullaby as he did, to help ease Ella into a state of narcosis.

Tears welled in Ella’s eyelashes as she watched herself through Olly’s eyes running around the canvas, looking for a way to escape. Before long the foreground, replete with a deep pond, was finished, and Olly began working on the thick foliage of the forest in the background. His legs had all but disappeared, and all that was left of him was his torso, floating in the air. He sang happily as he brushed away.

Ella couldn’t help forgetting what was going on; the world became more and more like a dream. She began to weep. The tears that fell down her face began to wash away the mask she wore in the painting, and her vision shifted from Olly’s eyes to her own, gradually immersing her into the world of the painting, where it seemed to her as if she was awakening from a dream that she couldn’t remember.

Olly’s arms had disappeared, now, and there was nothing left but his head. He put the paintbrush in his mouth to paint the last of himself into the canvas.

Ella looked around at the forest, dimly aware that something wasn’t right, that she had to do something, to take some action, to get out of here. The distant echo of Olly’s voice singing the lullaby momentarily triggered her memory, and she realized what must be done. She calmly went to the pond and knelt over it, seeing her face for the very first time. As she peered at the reflection peering back at herself in the pond, it all came flooding back, and she remembered how she’d gotten here in the first place, how she’d come to set the trap so she could be free, and it had gone according to plan. She smiled. She was no longer afraid. She leaned into the pond and waited till the final notes of the lullaby were being sung before falling in and immersing herself into the loving embrace of her own reflection.

Bruno swung his convertible around the corner and skidded to a halt out the front of Olly’s building. He grabbed his crowbar, marched up the stairs to Olly’s apartment and knocked. “Olly? You missed the Art Monthly interview, and the Fine Arts Festival. What’s going on?”

The light of the hallway flooded into the darkened apartment as the door burst open and Bruno stepped in. “Olly?” The apartment was silent. He turned down the hallway and marched into the bedroom. Empty.

He went to the studio, switched on the light, and was struck numb by the sight of Olly’s large face, which stared into Bruno’s very core from the reflection of a pond within the canvas.

Bruno clutched at his heart and dropped to his knees as Olly’s penetrating gaze pierced through the shell of Bruno’s frustration and wrenched every last shred of empathy from him. The air caught in his throat, rendering him incapable of breath, and he kneeled there on the studio floor suffocating for several interminably long seconds as his mind grappled with the painting’s incomprehensible beauty. Olly wore a singular look of sublime love that captured everything good in humanity. His eyes twinkled triumphantly, mockingly, from a perch of immortality, down upon Bruno, humbling him into a crumpled lump of self-loathing that trembled piteously on the studio floor.

Try as he might, he was unable to tear his eyes away. Tears came unbidden to his eyes as he saw how impossibly short humanity fell of the ideal represented by the integrity of the young man’s face in the painting. He thought about how he’d used Olly, how he’d taken him for granted, how he’d secretly despised him, when all Olly had ever tried to do was inspire people to build a better world for everyone. He was wracked with a bout of guilt that shuddered over him in heaving sobs, and he was swept away, far away from the present, carried across an ocean of forgotten emotion, and finally washed up on some distant shore, never to be the same again.

Bruno tore his eyes from the canvas and looked back upon the ordinary world, which appeared bland, lifeless, grim in comparison to the timeless splendor of the painting. He wheezed and wiped his tear-stained face with his sleeve as he took the necessary time to compose himself before taking out his phone and calling the authorities. “Hello, police? I’d like to report a missing person.”

Weeks later, Olly’s self-portrait hung on the wall of an expensive restaurant overcrowded with fancily dressed people who chattered gaily.

Looking out from beneath the surface of the pond and into the world beyond, he could see them all, dressed in their cocktail suits and dresses, oblivious to all that lay outside the boundless egotism of their own self-absorption. He heard the timbre of their voices, but the words were all the same: “Olly,” they mocked. “Olly-Olly-Olly-Olly-Olly.” Their faces, too, were unknowable to him—every single one wore Narcissus’ mask.

He called out to them, trying to help them to see true beauty, to know the real love that was here for them in these layers of paint, so they could escape from themselves and not need to hide their true faces behind the grandiose facades they wore. But the water muffled his screams, and the people laughed all the harder at their own wit, their joy increasing inversely in proportion to his suffering. He thrashed about wildly, trying to move, trying to change, trying to do something, but it was no use: he was unequivocally trapped beneath this watery grave, irrevocably framed within the borders of this canvas, immortalized indefinitely with this heroic expression on his face, unable to ever close his eyes, to look away.

He wailed in unfathomable agony, “Ella!” and yearned with all his might for the people he saw to give him even a cursory glance, to take in just a portion of his quintessence, and save him and themselves both. But they were so engrossed in themselves, so taken in by their own quintessences, that even when a pair of eyes chanced to look in his direction, they saw nothing of him beyond the parts that reflected themselves.

Does anyone knock anymore?

Even at a friend’s house, an office, or my bedroom, I would knock. No one can be too careful. Everyone was out for you. That was what the news told me. That was what was on my mind when this guy just walked into my new apartment unannounced.

“Hey, Cameron—”

He took one look at me and left. No apology. No explanation. I rushed out the door to find him heading for the stairs at the end of the hall.

“I’m so sorry, I—”

“You don’t just walk into someone’s place.”

“I know, I know.”

“You’re lucky I don’t have a gun.”

He shook his head and left. I hope he finds Cameron. Clearly he was willing to die to get to him, unlike me. Maybe it was time for that gun.

My mailbox was surprisingly full today—odd, considering I had just moved in a month ago. Letter by letter, the name ‘Cameron” was on each one. He must have forgotten to change his mailing address, or the post office was just taking its sweet time. With the number of problems I’ve had with the USPS, it would be the latter. I ripped up all the mail and threw it in the garbage.

~

It happened again the following week. My mailbox was full of junk mail and notices all addressed to Cameron. Each one got trashed immediately. Not my problem, Cameron. Better change your address before your paycheck hits my mailbox.

~

Goddamnit. Again this week. But this time, it was double the amount. Thirty letters. Nearly all of them were collection agencies. Cameron needs to stay on top of these things. It had been two months, and Cameron had yet to knock (or barge through) my door. Imagine having this many debt collectors on your ass. Sad.

After my ritual mail trashing, a nice, expensive dinner awaited me to celebrate having no debt. I worked hard to get where I was, unlike some.

~

Whoever this Cameron was, he was on my shitlist.

None of my personal mail was coming through, only Cameron’s debt collectors. A sticky note with my name on it next to my mailbox should seal the deal. They can’t be that incompetent.

~

Tax dollars at work. My mailbox was still overflowing with Cameron’s mail.

The post office never answered my calls. A while later, my phone rang, but it wasn’t the post office. It was a young-sounding woman.

“Is this Cameron?”

“No.”

“Well, I really need to talk to him.”

“Okay?”

“Can you put him on the phone?”

“He’s not here.”

“Do you know how I could reach—?”

I hung up.

~

Illegal or not, I was going to open Cameron’s mail.

Someone had to tell these senders that they were wasting their paper on me. On my kitchen table were two sorted piles: collections and junk—a total of 23 letters for Cameron.

The first letter in the collections pile was from A&A Solutions seeking payment of a late hospital bill totaling $309. Beyond all the basic debt-collector jargon, my hawk-like eyes found a phone number. Someone immediately picked up when I called.

“Thank you for calling A&A Solutions. This is Sylvester on a recorded line. What is your account number?”

I told him my name and my situation.

“Hmm, and you are saying that you are not Cameron?”

“Yes.”

“And you have no relation to him?”

“No. Please change the mailing address.”

“Unfortunately, I cannot do that right now. I will have to put in a ticket for you.”

“That’s fine.”

“Can you confirm that you are not Cameron and that you do not owe $309?”

What the hell kind of a question was that? “Just do as I say, people.”

He did not like that response.

The next letter was from Beswick Collections, this time for $712. No one answered, so I left a voicemail making sure to hammer in that there was no Cameron who lived at this address.

Another letter from The Jones Group was demanding $1,087. It was the same shtick as A&A, but this time it was voice-automated. No one has time for that nonsense. They’re stealing jobs, you know.

The junk mail pile was all pre-approved credit card offers. Some of these offers had high limits, too. Predators, all of them. Cameron’s credit score haunted my dreams that night.

~

Cameron’s laziness was pissing me off. I didn’t like the USPS as much as the next guy, but it’s not hard to change an address. I looked up his name online to attempt to contact him. There were a few Facebook profiles, but my account got terminated when COVID hit, so I couldn’t message them.

Beswick called me back. They said nothing. Literally. There was silence on the other line. This level of incompetence was getting too much. Why did I deserve this? I’m a better person than this scumbag Cameron who probably mooches off welfare. No phone number, no new address, and no picture to identify him. Now what?

~

The USPS worker approached the apartment’s mailroom. She took out one of her earbuds and listened to my problem: my once-clean apartment was now infested with Cameron’s envelopes and you guys needed to do something about it. She put the earbud right back in her ear and walked off.

We should have defunded them.

~

If I mailed a letter to Cameron using my address, would it go to wherever Cameron was?

~

My God, it worked.

~

Cameron responded a few days later.

Sort of. A small white box greeted me in my mailbox. No return address, but it had a name: Cameron’s. Sure enough, it was addressed here but with my name. It was almost strange seeing my name on a piece of mail now. After staring at the package as if it were a foreign language, I opened it to find a clear plastic baggie with a brown wallet inside.

Was I dreaming? Hallucinating? Dead? My finger was on my pulse when looking at the driver’s license inside.

It was my name but not my picture. It must’ve been Cameron. Then again, it could be anyone, but I wanted this to be him. He was so plain looking that he didn’t look real, and with all this talk about AI, he could be. Generic short black hair, flawless tanned skin, and that classic get-me-out-of-the-DMV blank stare. His eyes struck me, though. They were so dark they looked soulless. Pure evil. I knew it.

My first instinct was to use this license as target practice at the range, but I needed it as evidence for suing the daylights out of him. The problem was that the address on the license was mine, which was probably why it was shipped here. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

~

My phone was about to go into the toilet. People kept calling me, but not just any people—the truest scum of the earth. They didn’t care if I was Cameron or not. It was all about their money. How could they sleep like babies at night pestering me like this?

My phone rang again while cleaning my bathroom, sending me into another blind rage until noticing the caller ID didn’t have a random string of numbers this time. It was someone I actually knew. For once in my miserable life, getting a call from my doctor’s office made me ecstatic.

“Hello!”

From the silence on the other end, my readiness probably shocked the man on the phone. He asked if a certain person was there, and by God, he called me by my real name. Finally. After hearing the dreaded C name for so long, someone finally said my name.

“Yes, this is him.”

“Good afternoon, this is Dr. Cameron—”

My phone made a satisfying plop as it hit the water. Flush. Flush. Flush. My phone’s life blinked away and I was thinking about doing the same at this point. The news he was about to give me could make me end up like my phone, but I shouldn’t care if Cameron wasn’t going to either.

~

Even though my parents told me to do it daily, I prayed for the first time today.

“The world is giving me your battles. Your sins. I’m dying for you, Cameron. All I ask is that you return the favor now.”

I was becoming his Christ. Every day, every waking moment, the letters wouldn’t stop. The calls kept doubling. His name was everywhere around me. Others deserved this torture. Why me? This couldn’t be hell; my family were God-fearing people.

“Why, Cameron? Why?” The makeshift altar on my kitchen table didn’t respond. His driver’s license was face-up on a stacked throne of his letters, totaling at least hundreds. The blank expression on his face mocked me from beyond the grave. His eyes now looked pitch black. Cameron was Satan himself, but why target me? At least I wasn’t a baby murderer.

A knock on the door interrupted my prayer. At least someone had that decency. A flurry of papers shot through the door as I opened it. A lady in a tan blazer and bun was there one second and then gone the next. My trembling legs chased after her.

“Tell me who the hell you are before I call the police!”

“I’m legally allowed to serve. Please reply to your court summons in 20 days, sir.”

“You must be looking for Cameron, right? That’s not me. Please, you need to understand.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just that—”

The next moment, my hands were cuffed. Typically I support the police, but those bootlickers tried to lecture me on how no one should hit a lady doing her job. I wouldn’t say another word without a lawyer; good Americans like me knew their rights.

~

The United States government was setting me up, plain and simple.

Cameron was an experimental psy-op devised by the CIA and ATF to drive me insane. The government was just waiting for me to crack, to see how far they could push a man. It worked. Now that they had proved their experiment a success, they would practice it on a large scale next. Every single person in America was going to have their own Cameron and be driven insane to the point of reckless violence like me. Civil War II was looming, and I had to stop it. I would not wish this upon my worst enemies, not even the political ones.

Some would listen to this and reject it as a brain-dead conspiracy theory. How else could people explain my situation, then? From a good neighbor to sitting in a cold holding cell in less than three months. Explain that! This was a planned, coordinated attack. I may not have proof, but it will come after my inevitable release. I planned to leak the government’s plan to the media, but they were in on this, too. They always were. I had to move out of this beautiful country, my home—a country that was worth having people die for. I had to pick a new home soon before getting put on a No-Flight list. Even North Korea didn’t sound half bad.

~

Thanks to my lawyer, I was able to make bail. Maybe this country wasn’t so bad after all.

My apartment was wiped clean when my shaky hands opened the front door. My furniture, appliances, and altar were all gone. None of that bothered me one bit, though. What bothered me was the man standing in the living room with his back turned to me. He gave me a quick glance. It was him, that bastard.

“Are you Cameron?”

“Have we met before?”

“Can I see your driver’s license?”

“Are you a cop or something?”

He pulled out his license. I swiped it from him and burst out laughing. It had Cameron’s name but my picture.

“CIA or ATF?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Who put you up to this?”

“Let me see your license.”

I yanked out my wallet, but it wasn’t mine. It was the one that got mailed here. Cameron’s? Who knew at this point? It was the only thing in my pocket. He looked at my license and scowled.

“You need to learn how to change your address, asshole. Look at this,” he yelled. A kitchen drawer flew open and out came dozens of letters for Cameron, Cameron, and Cameron. My name. My identity. My new life.

“You need to pay your debt and stop getting things you can’t afford. Collectors keep calling me asking for Cameron, Cameron, Cameron. You’re what’s wrong with this country. Why should good people like me take the hit for people like you? And what the hell are you thinking? You don’t just walk into someone’s place!”

He moved his hand carefully to his side but stopped when he saw my body sink to the carpeted floor. I then did the very thing a man shouldn’t do, according to my dad: cry. He put his hand on my back as I put mine on his. It just felt right to do. Our touches felt lovingly like two souls becoming one. Someone might walk in and think we were lovers, which I wouldn’t be caught dead doing, but so be it. When our eyes met, he didn’t have that demonic gaze. They were full of life in front of me, not a blank expression on a piece of plastic. We smiled at each other.

“We need to defund the USPS, don’t we?”

Finally, someone who understood. We carried ourselves out to the hallway. Our bodies tumbled and hit the stone-cold pavement. Speckles of blood painted the grey canvas. Our soulless eyes met. We had a good belly laugh about the gun he was reaching for on his side and my hands wrapped around his throat.

“Does anyone knock anymore?”

The little mountain-village known as Sheen Bagh sat right on the border. So exact was the placement that the people in the village often did not claim either country that surrounded their home, but simply stated that they were from Sheen Bagh and that the borders had been built around them and not the other way around. Regardless, a tattered Pakistani flag waved from one of the walls surrounding the village, though it could never be certain who had placed it there and when. No local had ever cared enough to take it down.

Sheen Bagh and its people did not simply live in the space between borders, they also lived in the middle of countless conflicts. Twenty years ago, the government in Pakistan had decided that this region was where radical militants were based. This decision led to their allies also agreeing that this was, indeed, the area where their enemies must be. And in a turn of cruel fate, the militants they were looking for decided that since this region was frequented by several different enemy troops looking for them, it was the perfect place to engage them.

No matter whose decision was more foolish or ill informed, the countless villages, townships, and other localities suffered as a result. Sheen Bagh, along with most of the valley and borderlands, had been torn apart by fighting. The land lay barren for the most part since continuous bombing and skirmishes had blasted apart the meadows and valleys, leaving them upturned and a dry brown, with only the skeletons of the oldest trees left standing. When the winters came, the fighting was stopped, since nobody but the people living in the mountains knew how to traverse the dangerous terrain in the snow and bitter cold. And come springtime, when the valleys thawed out, as the first flowers started poking through the cracks in the ground, the bombs would begin falling once again and smother them before they could fully bloom.

Even the Pakistani flag that hung on Sheen Bagh’s wall was not green, but black from years of ash and dust settling on it. Only the crescent moon and star symbols on it retained a bit of their original white color under their now mostly brown hue.

As jarring as all of this was, none of this was the strangest thing about Sheen Bagh. The strangest thing about Sheen Bagh was a man named Ghamay Jaan, who was living in a crumbling and abandoned building that had once served as a jewelry shop. Ghamay Jaan was a man who was deeply in love but, to the people of Sheen Bagh, he was utterly insane. A tall, lanky man in his early forties who wore a dirty, gray turban wrapped around his long, mostly white hair and who dressed in a simple, blue tunic and shalwar. His boots were torn and their color was unidentifiable and on the middle and ring fingers of his right hand he wore two silver rings with faded, black stones.

The older townsfolk could recall the man’s childhood, back when he was as normal as anyone else. A quieter but still happy child who played football and went to school and raced horses just like the other children. When he was around fourteen or so, both of Ghamay Jaan’s parents fell ill and within that year, both died. This left Ghamay Jaan to be herded around to different relatives for the next two years until he wound up right back where he had started, in Sheen Bagh. A cousin of his mother’s had moved back to the village and had agreed to take the boy in on the condition that she be allowed to find him a wife when he turned seventeen.

The death of his parents had already triggered the beginning of what everyone would label as Ghamay Jaan’s insanity. He hardly spoke back then and if he did, it was never more than a few words at a time. Despite still being a young boy, his hair had begun to whiten at the ends and this showed in his sparse, new facial hairs as well. ‘Grief can color deeply sometimes,’ an elder had remarked one day to a friend when they saw the boy walking home from the store.

He was also seen talking to himself quite often and after a couple of years of living with the aunt, Ghamay Jaan developed a habit of wandering off without any warning. Word of this, just like word of anything else in a small town, spread rather quickly and people began to regard Ghamay Jaan with a mix of pity and mild fear. All of this served to eliminate any chance of his aunt marrying him off to anyone from the village and so she spent another year or so trying to find prospective brides in other towns and villages in the region. Nothing ever came of these efforts; the families of the young women would find out one way or another about the young man’s afflictions, or they’d see them firsthand if they made it to the point of meeting with Ghamay Jaan in person. There was no hope to be had and so Ghamay Jaan’s final guardian simply packed up and left Sheen Bagh, leaving Ghamay Jaan behind, for a return to a less difficult life in the capital city.

It was shortly after this that the fighting began, and Sheen Bagh fell victim to the continuous violence, that Ghamay Jaan’s insanity took complete hold. Nearly every night, bombs and rockets and gunfire went off on the outskirts of the village, shaking the surrounding fields and lower mountain ranges. Shouts would echo through the night in vibrating tremors of Pashto and Urdu and English, all blending into the same dull ringing in the ears. And every few days, the destruction would breach the walls of the village and bring death with it. Bombs and rockets would explode in the center square; stray gunfire would rip through the stones of the wall and the stones of buildings and houses; the locals would scream and run and duck for cover. And they would pray: the loudest of the prayers being shouted out by those who found themselves engulfed in flames from an explosion, or blasted in several different directions from the force of a bomb, or torn through a dozen different ways by hot gunfire.

Sometimes, the militants in the region would storm the townsfolk, accusing them of helping their enemies, of betraying the Almighty, or simply because they needed to rob the locals of their supplies. It was like this in all the towns and villages of the region, not just Sheen Bagh, and it became a new cultural norm after several years for everyone, boys, men, women, and girls alike, to be taught how to swing a sword. This was not to fight off the militants, but simply to behead them as they entered through the gates. The locals learned the hard way that to shoot them as they entered came with the risk of setting off an explosive strapped to a suicide bomber.

Every morning, after the violence settled, the locals would tend to their dead. Ghamay Jaan would stumble around helping, just like everyone else. He would carry the mangled remains to the mosque so they could be buried, and he would grab a clean cloth and a bucket of water and go around the village, wiping blood off walls.

One evening, around the time the shelling and firing would usually start, he saw a glimpse of dark hair from a rooftop right above him. Shielding his eyes with one hand, he looked in the direction of the distant, fading moon. It was right past the edge of the rooftop and he saw another glimpse of hair. It was fleeting, but curiosity urged him on and Ghamay Jaan reached up to the wall and then grabbed the edge of the rooftop. He pulled himself up to where he could just barely look over the edge and, in an instant, he fell in love. Letting go of the wall with a laugh, the man fell backwards onto the ground and lay there laughing and smiling up at the evening sky.

He had moved into the building that very night, hoping the woman would come down eventually, and this was where he had been ever since. The old jewelry shop, housing the village madman who fell in love at first sight.

The villagers, at first, could not figure out what woman had taken to the man enough for him to fall in love and apparently move in with her. In the moments of calm between the violence of their day-to-day lives, they asked each other; they listened for rumors, gossip, anything that might tell them the truth of this curious matter. A few men asked Ghamay Jaan himself one day when they saw him at the market, singing loudly to himself while he bought fruit. ‘Let us meet your new wife, Ghamay Jaan. Let us congratulate her and welcome her to the village,’ said one of the men.

Ghamay Jaan simply laughed loudly and said, ‘FOOLS! Do you think a beauty like Ghamay Jaan’s is around all the time to meet the likes of you? Ha! Ha! No, no, she’ll come at night. She only comes at night!’ and he pointed up into the sky and the men along with some of the marketgoers glanced up into the air.

‘What’re you talking about, you madman?!’ cried one voice.

‘Last night her face was half hidden! Veiled! She was so high up, how could none of you see?! You’re all blind, BLIND! My eyes always find her, always!’ and Ghamay Jaan laughed, throwing a few coins at the fruit stall owner before dashing out of the marketplace.

The villagers spent a few hours in confusion, convinced that Ghamay Jaan had lost his mind entirely and was now simply at a new point in his mania. Some of them wondered if the constant fighting and death hadn’t finally shattered whatever remained of the man’s psyche. It wasn’t until the sunset prayers that one of the villagers pointed up in the air and cried out ‘Look!’ And immediately, everyone understood. ‘The fool thinks the moon is a woman!’ these words rippled through the village and, by nightfall, everyone was touched with a mixture of alarm and amusement.

‘Maybe someone should see about getting that man to a hospital in the city,’ said one of the elder-women of the village with concern in her voice.

‘Oh please, Khala Jaan. This is no issue; we have bigger problems! We have to survive here, don’t we? How can we worry about carrying some mad fool to a city? If he’s happy, let him love his moon-woman. So long as he doesn’t hurt anyone or get in anyone’s way when we’re trying to survive all this fighting,’ said a young man who had realized the truth of the matter after prayers. Everyone else murmured in agreement and so it was decided, Ghamay Jaan would be left alone, as usual.

But Ghamay Jaan himself couldn’t care less what the villagers decided to do; he was content. He would whisper snippets of poetry while laying on his back, gazing up at the moon every night. In his eyes, she turned her head and pushed her long dark hair back, blushing and smiling at his words. Sometimes she would even reach down from high up in the sky and touch his weathered cheek. ‘I love you so much, my Ghamay Jaan,’ she would say. And this would cause a warmth strong enough to make Ghamay Jaan think he could sit through the entire winter with ease.

The problem became apparent to everyone the next time the village fell victim to shelling from the mountains. As usual, everyone scrambled for shelter. And Ghamay Jaan, laying in the jewelry shop, suddenly saw something bright fly out of the Moon’s hands to the Earth below. He ran from the shop, heading in the direction of the fire and panting hard before someone tackled him around the knees and pinned him to the ground. ‘Where are you going?!’ cried the man who had tackled him.

‘Let me go! Let me go!’ cried Ghamay Jaan, ‘She has sent a gift for me! She has! I have to go get it!’

‘You’ll be killed you fool!’ But Ghamay Jaan would not hear it; he struggled and fought the man on top of him before the man swung his fist into Ghamay Jaan’s face and knocked him out.

A few others were called over and together they all dragged Ghamay Jaan’s unconscious form to the mosque where all the corpses were. ‘The madman thinks his Moon is throwing gifts down for him!’ said the man who had tackled him.

‘What are we meant to do now? Is someone supposed to watch this lunatic every night now? Don’t we have enough troubles?!’ roared another

‘Let him die! So what?’

‘Ya Khudaya! Fear Allah, Ghamay Jaan is his creation like the rest of us. He cannot help what he is. You would just let him die?’ said an elder who had known Ghamay Jaan since childhood.

The village people argued back and forth while they tended to their dead that night. Half were set on leaving Ghamay Jaan to whatever fate awaited him, the other half thought to shake the man out of his latest bout of insanity. So absorbed were they all in their dispute that they didn’t notice Ghamay Jaan get up and limp back to the jewelry shop. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he sobbed, staring up at the sky. Moon was not out yet, shadows of stars were beginning to peek through, and somewhere just beyond the lowest clouds, Moon was descending to her perch. Ghamay Jaan could not see her yet; he hobbled over to the ancient sink in the corner and washed his face and performed his ablutions. He prayed in the corner and by the time he finished, he could see her in the sky again.

Ghamay Jaan knew what he would do; he snuck out of the shop and circled the village, walking near the outskirts and watching as candles were lit in people’s homes and fires in their courtyards. He knew they were preparing for the night, bracing themselves for what might happen. He knew the sandbags would be piled near what remained of the front walls to try and hold back any damage. And he also knew that the villagers all now kept their horses in an old building towards the back end of the village, as far back from the usual areas of damage as they could without setting the beasts free entirely.

He approached the building slowly, pulling some old sugar candies out of his pocket. It took him a little while to find a horse that didn’t rear its legs up at his approach; it was a small, dark brown horse. And Ghamay Jaan spoke to it quietly, holding the candies up to its mouth and waiting for it to eat them before he reached out and patted the muzzle. Once the horse bowed its head, Ghamay Jaan led it out of the little hut and swung his legs over the back. He held the reins and looked up at the sky, waiting.

Moon turned her face to look at him; her head rested against her hand and she smiled, her lips parted, and she called out ‘Ghamay…’ and Ghamay Jaan felt his heart beat so furiously that he could taste it. She nodded her head, beckoning to him, her lampshade earrings bobbing between the stars in the sky. Ghamay Jaan praised Allah and squeezed his heels into his horse’s sides; they began to trot along and Ghamay Jaan urged the horse along, flicking the reins with both hands. The horse began to run with Ghamay Jaan crouching down low in the saddle. He sped through the village, alarming everyone who quickly dove out of the way or stepped out of their homes to see who was going by. Before the villagers could finish calling out his name, Ghamay Jaan sped through the village entrance and onto the dirt road leading through the mountains.

When he glanced up at Moon he could only laugh with triumph and he could see the bemused expression on her face as well; she knew her Ghamay was heading towards her. ‘A gift! I want a gift! I want whatever you’ll give me! I want you forever!’ he cried up to her with happiness as he tore through the valley.

A short distance away, perched on one of the cliff edges holding the caves that surrounded Sheen Bagh and the rest of the valley, an American soldier held his rifle up to his gaze. Through the scope, he could see a man riding along on a horse at quite a pace, but it was a strange sight, for the man had no weapons on him that he could see. No ammunition or explosives at all either. The soldier’s finger rested on the trigger and he glanced back at his commanding officer, who was busy some feet away going over a map of the valley with a translator. Was this worth getting the commanding officer’s attention over? He looked back at the figure on the horse as it rode into a thicket of trees; he might have sworn he heard a voice crying out and saying something but there was no way to be certain. The moment had passed, the figure was gone.

The soldier took his finger off the trigger and shouldered the rifle. No threat at all, it seemed.

Each night our mascot—a black and white cat—sneaks into the base searching for a warm lap and scraps of food. Tonight our reconnaissance unit joins an elite group of combat fighters. These guys volunteer for their unit with the promise of death missions into enemy territory.  I wonder why the cat isn’t afraid of these men, their lack of fear, so thick it sets me on edge. Our orders are to confiscate cars and drivers’ licenses from local farmers. This allows us to drive through villages undetected and gather information about terrorist activity. I know what hasn’t been said. I know these guys in my ranks feel untethered, buzzing with adrenaline at the implicit license to do whatever it takes.

“Be careful tonight,” our captain warns. “When you get back there’ll be hot chocolate on the stove.”

Darkness falls. We set ourselves into ambush formation and wait for our prey.

I sometimes think I was crazy to sign on for this.

“Get out of the car and hand me your license,” the commander barks.

“By whose authority,” the farmer says.

“Fuck you—that’s whose authority.”

He slowly gets out of his car and looks into the commander’s eyes. “If I give you my car I can’t get to work, if I can’t get to work I lose my job, if I lose my job I can’t feed my family—no, I can’t give you my car.”

The commander waits for him to finish and then cocks his gun and points it at the ground.

“If you don’t give us your car you lose your foot,” he says.

The farmer looks at the ground where the commander is pointing the rifle and says, “I can’t give you my car.”

Suddenly there is a rustle in the bushes and the little cat appears, a flash of black and white. For a moment his meow breaks the tension and there’s nervous laughter from everyone —except the farmer and the commander, locked in a staring contest.

“Let’s return his license and move on,” I say.

He looks at me as if I am less than a soldier—but agrees. He gives the farmer his license and slams the butt of his rifle into his stomach. The farmer doubles over and falls to his knees.

We return to the base before dawn, sip hot chocolate and sit around recounting the mission. Suddenly there’s a noise in the nearby woods—the commander tells everyone to get down and be quiet. Our mascot comes prancing into our party, rubbing his body against the commander’s leg. We all break out in laughter. He looks at me with a forced smile, cocks his rifle and with one shot silences the cat forever.

Somehow I knew this would happen. I knew the cat’s lack of fear was strange.

I panic at the thought of what else I know.

I. Valley of Quest

Before what happened to Christine, before arriving in Iraq, before even leaving Nebraska, all we knew for sure is that there would be violence and sand. We began by trying to solve the wrong problem. And although wearing our gas masks in sandstorms was almost certainly the most sensible way to avoid breathing difficulty and probably eye damage, the memory of her exiting a port-a-potty in one, sand swirling around her, still chills me. So much can hide in the sand when it’s like that—some things you want to conceal and some you later try desperately to uncover. And I guess some that you’re just not sure about.

I remember lying and sweating on my cot, mask in place outside our tent where I slept to get some privacy, my head hanging over the edge so that she was upside down in the haze walking toward me, her uniform covered in the white ragged circles of salt from her sweat. It was only Christine, but with the fog creeping inward on my mask’s lenses, she seemed like an astronaut on Mars. And in the mask, she looked like the rest of us. Like nothing special at all.

***

She came from another unit, somewhere far away like Maine. I don’t know why she was transferred, but someone said she’d been a stripper there. Her unit wasn’t deploying, and ours was—and in need of military police—so I guess that was it; it definitely didn’t have anything to do with stripping, if that was even true. She didn’t seem like the type.

The rest of us weren’t MPs, the rest of us girls, I mean. I was an admin clerk, but the others were medics and food service. Four of us altogether. Well, five if you counted Christine, but we never really did. She slept in the female tent, but she rarely talked, and, yes, I have to say it, even though no one else did, she was startling. I mean that in the literal sense, that her beauty was so strange it startled you. I won’t describe her; it wouldn’t do her justice. Just picture what you will. Personally, I always thought of her as a bird I’d seen on the cover of National Geographic from one of the donation boxes that came in every week: a grey crowned crane; it has a halo. And dignity, like her.

Her face made her less welcome in our tent, where we sat around, breathing in burn-pit fumes, sweating with IVs in, courtesy of the medics, and watching Sex and the City on scratched and skipping DVDs. And being less welcome in our tent meant being vulnerable. We weren’t the only ones bored, and we were far outnumbered.

We had a plan, and in our defense, we did try to tell her. It was when we were washing our uniforms. We only had two because this was the beginning of the war, what we all later called the Wild West, when units of untrained reservists were handed M16s and sent to do infantry work, regardless of their actual job. All that meant, when it came to uniforms, was that we had to wear one and wash the other in buckets with grey water every so often.

When it came to everything else, it meant innumerable things. Like, we took the plates out of our vests on patrol because it was so hot, they were heavy, and it made more sense to us to carry snacks in there. Like, we took pictures with ammo we found out in the desert and explored old bunkers as if this was summer camp. Like, we didn’t have armored vehicles, so we put sandbags under our feet to slow rolling over if we hit IEDs, and we actually thought it would work.

Nonetheless, uniform-washing provided a good opportunity to talk. And Christine, perfect as she was, still had to wash her uniform. So, pastel wash buckets in a line next to the water truck, we orchestrated a casual intervention, like hyenas luring our crowned crane to the watering hole.

“May I join you ladies?” Peterson asked, but we were prepared for this.

“Hey, we need to chat about something. Would you mind coming back in twenty?” I said, walking him away. “And tell your friends.”

Christine looked up at this. “What’s going on?”

Monica, the only sergeant among us, but still just Monica to us, said “Let’s take our buckets over there.” She pointed to sand far enough from the water truck to avoid overhearing.

“Look,” I said when we’d started washing, water warmed by the sun battling ineffectually against salt stains and dust. “You have to choose someone.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, but I knew she had to understand.

“You have to pick a guy,” Nikita said. “Anyone want an IV?”

She hooked Jen up, and I said, “I can’t believe we have to explain this, but the reason you are constantly fending off guys is because you haven’t chosen one yet. And it’s not just about you, you know. We don’t want random MPs creeping around the tent all the time.”

“You mean like the dudes you guys are fucking?” she asked. “I’m not into them creeping around either.”

Monica, perhaps due to the emotional escalation, jumped in. Though, the truth was that even though Monica outranked us, she wasn’t really into leadership. “Look, having a boyfriend at home isn’t enough. You need to have someone here who they respect enough to leave you alone,” she said, kind of too quietly, I thought.

“Christine, they will keep hounding you until you pick one of them,” I clarified. “Simple as that.” My hands were getting pruney, but submergence in water was a luxury, and I didn’t want to be done. I watched the bubbles spread to the edges of the bucket and slowly dissipate, and I wanted to put my face in the water and stay there forever.

“I don’t want a boyfriend here. I’m not going to have sex with someone so that you guys feel better. None of this is your business.” Christine wrung out her uniform, dumped her bucket, and walked away.

“Hey, we tried,” Monica said. “Right? Victoria?”

It was shocking how quickly the moisture left your body here. My hands were dry, not a wrinkle on them now. I nodded. “There’s only so much you can do,” I said.

“And you know she was a stripper in Michigan, right? Maybe she knows what she’s getting into,” Jen said.

“Maine,” Nikita said.

“Right. Well, I’m sure they have strippers there, too.” Jen said.

Nikita looked at me, waiting, and I said, “Tell the guys to keep an eye out for her anyway.”

She nodded, satisfied, I guess, and we got up to leave. The trouble was that our guys were not MPs, so our guys were never close enough to keep anyone safe but us.

II. Valley of Love

I had a secret. I was happy on that deployment, really happy. I loved being part of a team, being valued. I hadn’t fit in in high school, mostly because I was too smart for the normal classes and too poor for the gifted ones. But here, my poverty was an asset. I used tenacity and ingenuity to solve problems, the way only someone with a lifetime of training could. I was used to dirt and hard work and sleeping on the ground and eating terrible food or going hungry. I didn’t have to waste time becoming adjusted to our situation or wishing I was somewhere else. When we couldn’t get enough water shipped in, some of the girls wasted what we had washing their hair, but I cut mine off. In Iraq, the guys called me Sunshine. For the first time, I flourished. Obviously, I pretended I hated it, but secretly, it felt like home.

Christine had a secret, too.

III. Valley of Knowledge

I spent the day Christine was raped with the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran—the MEK, eating biscuits made from chickpeas called nan-e nokhodchi and drinking dark orange tea heated with their samovar. I was the only female who worked in the command tent, mostly filling out forms and fending off the Major’s childlike advances, so I got to drive them to the meeting. The MEK was still a terrorist group then, but borderline, in possession of things we needed, and, importantly for me, mostly matriarchal. So, I joined the officers in the Humvee on an adventure outside the wire to represent all American women, though I’m not sure that including one who was so inferior that she was driver, note-taker, and photographer all in one sent the message they thought it did. They were certainly annoyed when the female generals addressed their questions to me and served my tea first.

But that story is always tainted in my memory by the worst sandstorm we saw on that year-long deployment and what happened to Christine when it kept the officers away from camp for so long. It rolled in like waves of a waterless ocean. The tent shook, and the MEK covered their mouths with their hijabs. Less prepared, we pulled our shirts up over our mouths and noses as professionally as we could. But the wind was too strong, and sand stung our faces through and around the tent walls, so one of the MEK soldiers shoved blankets in our direction. I helped cover the officer nearest me, but we’d run out of blankets by then. The youngest general came to me and covered us both. Our faces were side by side, and we smelled like sweat and dirt and tea under the blanket.

I suppose it was obvious I was terrified from my shaking, so she told me a story muffled by the roaring wind, by sand simultaneously pounding and peppering the tent, by her accent, and by her hijab.

It was about birds. The birds didn’t have a leader, so the wise hoopoe thought they should find the most righteous and courageous bird to lead them—the simorgh. She lived in the middle of a sea in a tree that held all the seeds of the world. When she flew away, a thousand branches grew, and when she came back, a thousand branches broke, and the seeds fell into the sea.

To get to her, they had to cross seven valleys, each with its own peril. Along the way some of the birds died from fright or thirst or violence, until only thirty were left. When they reached the tree in the sea, they learned that the simorgh was their reflection, their shadow: si: thirty, and morgh: birds. But not all along; the simorgh was the thirty birds who crossed the seven valleys, not the untested ones that began the journey.

It was dark under the blanket so I couldn’t see much of her face while she told the story, but suddenly, the tent, which had been flapping wildly, partially dislodged, and we were exposed to the storm. The wind beat us down, and my young MEK general—I didn’t remember her name—pushed me to the ground and covered my body with hers. Sand cut into our skin through the blanket, and then I saw something I never expected. Lightning. So bright, I couldn’t mistake it even through tightly woven wool. Lightning without rain, breaking up billowing clouds of sand in brilliant, ragged lines. Although dwarfed in significance by what followed, it is still the most magnificent event I’ve personally witnessed.

***

It was night by the time we could leave. We picked ourselves, and what was left of our military bearing, up less gracefully than our hosts, who were presumably used to such intrusive acts of God, and drove dazed and shaking back to camp. But before we left, they agreed to provide us water and internet, so the Major said all in all, it was a successful journey.

IV. Valley of Detachment

A farmer from a family of Quakers, the Major maintained that attaining water rendered the mission a success, “because, Sunshine, we can’t live without water.” But he didn’t sound as convincing when the doc visited the command tent with news from Christine’s examination. Of course, the other officers didn’t notice I was there, but the Major sent me outside. The thing is that a tent only blocks eyes, not ears.

“There’s considerable damage,” the doc said.

“Definitely forced? Or borderline? What’s she saying?” one of the officers asked.

“I mean, I can’t say for sure, but it looks bad. She’s saying forced.”

“Who was it?” the Major asked.

“That’s not really my department. I think you should ask her.”

I didn’t finish listening because I decided to ask her for him. And for her. Our camp was in shambles from the storm, so almost everyone was helping rebuild it. Returning to their owners personal items scattered across the sand and re-erecting tents in groups of four or so. If I didn’t know better, this could have been the scene from any missionary trip—college kids setting up an area to feed refugees or provide medical aid. Because we were college kids; almost all of us joined the reserves to pay for school and left it to play soldier. Though, I guess, some took it more seriously than the rest of us, testing the line between machismo and misogyny.

I took a deep breath. How much she must hate us to go to the doc alone, to feel safer without the only other females in camp. I knew there was something wrong with us, something damaged. Why else would we have abandoned her? It was the only explanation. We were broken.

V. Valley of Unity

Before I even found Christine, everyone was unified in the narrative. Nothing else we did was particularly efficient or organized, but in the face of a threat, suddenly we were the dream team. Hers was a voice shattering what we wanted to believe in. That we were the good guys, the civilized ones, doing something worthwhile. It was a lie, I could see then, that made it bearable for them. I didn’t need that lie; I just wanted to belong to something, and, at the time, I didn’t think I cared if it was something good.

Christine was behind our tent, on top of a shipping container, staring out into the world beyond the concertina wire. I climbed up, sat down next to her, and handed her my water. From the container to as far as I could see there was nothing but sand. Nothing. “So, everyone knows?” she asked.

“No. Only you know.” 

I was watching the nothingness, not her, so her sob surprised me. She crumpled next to me, and I wrapped my arm around her and pushed her head onto my shoulder. “I’m supposed to be a cop,” she said through tears. “I can’t even protect myself.”

“No. He’s supposed to be a cop. You’re supposed to depend on your battle buddy to watch your back, not assault you. What a piece of shit.”

“I can’t go down there.”

I nodded. “Then I’ll bring you food up here. She hugged me and drank the rest of my water. 

“Are you scared?” I wanted to ask, but I didn’t, and I didn’t say: “You have to turn him in. He can’t be allowed to go around hurting people. Was it Martin? DeMazzo?” I just hugged her back. 

But she was scared, so we stayed on top of the container where she could see anyone who approached. And I could feel the unit holding its breath to see what damage Christine was going to do. What she did was tell me her secret.

“Did you drink with him or was that just something else they made up?” I asked, still not knowing who him referred to.

She shook her head. 

“Do you want me to tell them that?”

She stared at the desert. “No. It doesn’t matter.”

“It might help—” 

“It doesn’t matter, Victoria. People have consensual sex without alcohol every day.”

“I’m just saying that it might make it more likely—”

“Victoria,” she interrupted quietly. “Can I trust you?” 

“Of course,” I said. “Look, if you tell me that you made the whole thing up, I will take it to my grave.”

“What? No. The reason it couldn’t have possibly been consensual is because,” she breathed out. “I’m gay.”

So, I finally understood. “And he knows.”

She nodded. She didn’t have to tell me that it was worse to be gay than raped in the Army in 2003, when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was still enforced. And she didn’t have to tell me that she could be kicked out and unable to pay for college. “I’m so sorry,” I told her.

She looked at me, and I think she understood what I meant. She handed me the hot sauce from her MRE. She hated it, and I loved it, so it worked out well.

I looked at the little glass bottle. It seemed so out of place in an MRE. “You know, I’ve never met a gay person before,” I said, the way only an eighteen-year-old from Nebraska two decades ago could.

She laughed. “I bet you fifty bucks that’s not true.” 

After a day or so, the rest of the girls started taking shifts watching while she tried to sleep, stockpiling MREs, taking her to the latrines. And slowly we all moved up there with her, our cots in a row with her in the middle, and she slept again. Through the whole night. 

VI. Valley of Wonder

The other girls still had to do their jobs, so they left during the day, but the Major strongly implied that my mission was to watch Christine ; whether to keep her safe or to keep them safe, I never asked. So, I brought up binoculars to make her feel like she was contributing to security, and when I returned with more MREs and some magazines from care packages, she said, “Come here.”

She handed me the binoculars and pointed in the direction of the MEK camp. It was still beyond sight, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to see. “Are you at the horizon?” she asked.

“Mmhmm.”

“Okay, down three inches and two to the right.” She waited. “Do you see it?”

“The rock thing?”

“Yes! It’s a fulgurite! From the lightning the day of the storm.”

The thing I was looking at was like a weird coral rock, ragged and crooked and thin. But it was strange because there was nothing else out there at all. “How do you know that? Are you sure?”

“I was a meteorology major. And I guess I could be wrong; it’s pretty far away, but I’ am pretty sure. It’s glass. Glass formed by lightning hitting the sand. Isn’t that amazing?”

“Like a sculpture,” I said. “Out there, in the middle of nothing.”

“People used to call them fingers of God,” she said.

I looked through the binoculars again. It was pointing toward us. “Let’s go see it,” I said, and she smiled.

Borrowing a Humvee was easy at that point because the officers were terrified of her. When the Major gave me the keys, extra ammo, and a walkie talkie, he just said, “It’s a four-seater, so fill all four seats. And be careful, Sunshine.”

He knew that she would never leave the wire with a man, and I like to think he also knew that she needed this. Still, I had to say, “Could you call me Walters, Sir? Victoria is okay, too.”

He nodded and looked tired. “Be safe, Walters.”

VII. Valley of Death

We all went. There were four seats and five of us. Jen said, “I can’t believe this is happening” from the back between the medics. I drove, and Christine directed. The cool thing about nothingness and an off-road vehicle is that you can drive in a straight line, and it was actually safer than roads there because no one plants IEDs in the open desert. All you had to worry about were landmines from the Gulf War, and most of those were probably too old to blow up.

The fulgurite was about twelve feet long, curved like an elderly finger toward our camp. It felt like hollow rock, and when we were finished touching it and gaping at it, we sat down under its crook. Christine started laughing and couldn’t stop. We exchanged looks that were somewhere between worried and hopeful and waited. When she caught her breath, she looked at us and wiped her eyes. “I told him I wanted to see the lightning, so he came with, and we had to hide in the shipping container when the storm got bad.”

“The container we’ve been living on?” I asked, shocked. I could not believe we moved onto the place she was raped, that she had wanted to stay there.

But she didn’t seem to hear me and said, “And here it is. A fulgurite is petrified lightning. It would have waited for me forever.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But you’d never have known if you weren’t sitting on top of that container with a pair of binoculars.”

She looked at me for a second and ran her index finger across God’s. I looked up at the glass suspended by a force I hadn’t even known about and saw a tiny clear spot that reflected my eye and nose and some of Christine’s face, too.

Dr. Maldonado fiddled with the picture of his hot wife and blonde sons, making sure I noticed. Hot professors are rare at Christian universities. They’re mostly Anglican, for some reason. Such a character. I was happy for him.

“I’m thinking about grad school,” I said, taking a seat and crossing one leg over the other. “I suspect this could be my calling.”

Christians take this idea very seriously. Dr. Maldonado raised his eyebrow and rotated his coffee mug on his desk. It had a picture of his wife on it also. Her hair was done up in little ringlets. She looked like she had good theology, good ovaries. “Your calling,” he reflected. “Well, Lauren, your work thus far has been… general, I’d say. So I’d be inclined to ask what specifically you’d want to study.”

Ouch. I thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”

“Well, do you have a topic for your paper? Grad apps would be due in, what, a year? This would be a good opportunity to get some research together.”

“Dr. Maldonado,” I said, touched. “Thank you.”

A few minutes later he said he had to get ready for class. “Perfect timing,” I told him. “My grandpa’s funeral is about to start.”

He looked at me funny, then decided I was joking. “See you in class, Lauren,” he said. From his breast pocket he pulled out a small cloth and began polishing his lenses. His face was round and pale without glasses. He looked as blind as a mole. The spell was broken.

I walked across campus to my dorm. Around me the elect 2,000 bumbled along. Most of them were homeschool kids, weirdos. Unfortunate I would end up at this backwards school, but my grandparents were paying for college. Or I guess just my grandma.

Alone, I sat on my bed and FaceTimed into my grandpa’s funeral, which was down in California. I guess not a funeral, per se. He’d been a marine, so some soldiers would shoot their guns in his honor. My dad answered my FaceTime and directed the camera toward the proceedings. I was in Gram’s backyard. Two men in blue uniforms and crisp white hats appeared. My family stood off to the side. The marines folded the flag into a triangle with precise, robotic motions. My grandma accepted the flag with a bow, ran her hands along the fabric, then, with gravitas, held it out in offering. For a moment I thought it was coming to me, but then I remembered I was only a phone. My brother reached into the frame and accepted the Old Glory. He hugged my grandma and saluted the marines. He was in uniform also. A few hours later he’d be back in Texas, where he was stationed.

Afterward, my dad’s face appeared. “We were bummed you couldn’t be here, sweetie,” he said. “Mom and I are going to stay with Grandma through the weekend if you want to come down. She’d love that.”

“No thanks,” I said. Not a chance. It would be nice to see my dad, but not worth it, even with how boring my weekends had been. At Calvin the only thing to look forward to was the biscuits and gravy they served for the Sabbath. Everyone just hunkered down and tried not to masturbate until then. Luckily there was the prayer chapel when one inevitably failed. Nothing makes you want to jack off like a Christian university, I swear. Except your childhood home.

“Are you sure?” he said. “There’s a greyhound coming down tomorrow morning. Grandma said she would pay for it.”

“That’s very kind of her,” I said.

Shortly after we hung up, I heard the fateful footfalls. Two sets. One heavy, one light. So it was both. Brooke and I had dormed together just over a month; it was the end of September. Brooke was one of the few people I liked at Calvin. The problem was that she came with Wes, who sucked. Brooke opened the door and peeked her head in. “Oh, Lauren. I thought you were out.”

Before I could respond, Wes shoved his ogreish frame into the room. “Hmm,” he said, squinting at me. He had a round and pale chin, and wore a hat with an assault rifle on the front that said “OreGUNian.” I don’t know what he thought I was impeding. At best they would’ve made out. Brooke is super Christian.

“My grandpa just died,” I said flatly. Not technically true, but I was losing control.

“Oh!” Brooke said. “I’m so sorry! We can go somewhere else.”

Wes blew air from his nose and dropped himself on Brooke’s bed, his camo pants monstrous on the pink duvet. “We can’t go to my room,” he said. “Mike’s in there with the chick from Dead Sea Scrolls.” Brooke winced. “He said they’re going to be in there all weekend, so.”

“Okay,” I said. “Yeah, you guys can be in here, sure. I’m actually going home this weekend. I meant to ask, Brooke, could you take me to the greyhound station tomorrow morning?”

“Killer,” Wes said. “Yeah, she can take you. Mike is gonna be stoked.” He rolled his eyes lustily around the room. I had a vision of him urinating in my pop-up hamper. “That your brother?” he asked, settling on a framed picture on my desk.

The picture in question showed me hugging my brother on an airstrip at dawn—him in the marine getup, me in a hoodie. “Why,” I said.

“When you see him, thank him for his service,” he said bravely. “My uncle is in the army.”

The idea that there was some similarity between Wes’s convictions and what my brother was fighting for—which I understood to be nothing—made me want to puke.

“Aw,” Brooke said. “You’re so sweet.” She nuzzled beside him on the futon. He grunted and lay back like a fat lion. They lay side-by-side, shoulders touching like cloud-watchers in a field—so chaste it was dirty.

~

Brooke took me to the bus stop the next morning. “I think Wes might be a fascist,” I told her.

She turned the heater up all the way. “I’m not a political person,” she said.

I looked out the window. “Well,” I said, “thanks for dropping me off.”

I sat on a gum-crusted bench. The Chehalem Mountains sloped behind me, and in front the road ran out where the valley opens to the sky, which was thin blue at the top but yellow over the hills. Somewhere, my grandpa was looking down at me and this wide cold country, thinking about immigration and Reaganomics and law and order. Not heaven, but somewhere.

It was late evening when the bus reached the city. My dad’s hatchback was in the parking lot. He was a shortish man with fair hair that gleamed in the streetlight—a black sheep among the Italian eyebrows and thick black hair of the de Lucas, my mom’s side. He was a middle school teacher. I’d always had a soft spot for him, but over the years that softness had morphed into a kind of pity. He couldn’t pay for college, which seemed to diminish him. Still, I was glad he’d been the one to come.

“Welcome back, Lo,” he said, and hugged me and took my bag.

“Who’s at Grandma’s?” I asked as we pulled onto the freeway, heading into the suburbs.

“Just me and Mom. And Grandma.”

“How’s she doing?”

He gave me a blank, knowing face. This sort of frustration had been our secret language among the de Lucas—the solidarity of outsiders. “She’s Grandma,” he said. “How are you handling things?”

“Fine,” I said. “Grandpa was a tough guy, so.”

He shrugged.

The lawns were trim; the lanes were lined with poplars. Mansions of orange glass stared down from the hills. The gate swung open, and we drove to the top of the hill. We parked in the driveway of my grandma’s formidable house and walked up to the huge double doors, which were made of smooth red wood and latticed with glass like chapel windows.

My grandma threw open the front door. She seemed taller, thinner. She palmed the air for my cheeks. I let her grab my face. The smell of instant coffee, perfume, and wine washed over me with kisses. “It’s so good to see you, baby,” she said, then grabbed my hand and led me to the kitchen table. She pushed me into a chair and, seeing my parents shuffle in behind us, asked them to get me something to eat, I must be starving. I felt the empty rooms and hallways. My grandma sat with her back to a pair of tall windows. I ate microwaved chicken parmesan and said yes to the Chianti she offered.

“How have you been, Grandma?” I asked once I’d settled in.

“Carrying on,” she said. “It does get lonely. Though I’m on Facebook now,” she said, then laughed like it was the craziest thing in the world. “So, it’s been nice to connect with old friends. But how are you? How’s school?” I told her it was going fine. “Sociology, huh?” she asked. “Like your father? I just hope I’m not paying for you to make lattes once you graduate,” she said, then laughed.

My dad laughed softly. What infuriated me was the sense that my father’s deference was a tithe, his laughter a thing owed in lieu of money he, we, would never make. Because I am not my brother, I decided not to pay. “What’s your degree in?”

“Lauren!”

My grandma’s face went smooth. “It wasn’t an option for me,” she said coldly. “The only reason you’re able to go is because Grandpa spent his life 30 feet up a powerline. Public service. It’s the schools now, they don’t teach you kids that,” she said. “Though your brother seemed to pick it up somewhere.”

I looked at my dad. I waited for him to say something in my defense, but he stared into his wine glass, impotent. We shrunk back into a soured small talk. After a few minutes I said, “I think I’m gonna go to bed. Long drive.”

“Oh, but we forgot to toast!” my grandma said. She raised her glass. The three of us followed without enthusiasm. “To Grandpa,” she said to my mom and dad. “And to your brother,” she said to me.

My grandma, generous in victory, offered me any bed in the house. I chose the couch. Everything else felt dirty. I laid in musty quilts and cried. Then I got angry, and passed the time simulating arguments in which I smoothly dismantled my grandma in various political debates. But I would’ve been up at that all night. So I went to the kitchen for some water. I halted before the entryway. Someone was around the corner, breathing. I peeked around the wall. My grandma sat alone at the kitchen table, scrolling her iPad. Beside her was a cup of wine, filled to its brim, black in the darkness. She raised the cup to her lips. Her face seemed doubly wrinkled in the iPad’s soft blue light. I could see the tiny muscles of her face twitch to what she was reading: an elongation of lips, a flare of eyes, a crease along forehead, a plunge of brow—these gestures flashed across her face, signs meant for no one, formed in darkness. Like a malfunctioning robot. On her face was a secret despair at a country which had left her behind, and out of that, tiny celebrations of meaningless victories. Her breath was raspy like a snore. I crept backward with averted eyes, to hide the shame.

~

My dad dropped me at the greyhound stop early Sunday morning. The idea had been brewing all weekend. Gam was the symbol of a collapsing generation, a perfect case study of the mentally vulnerable, and the ideal intersection of my personal and sociological interest. I was eager to get on the road. As we drove, the sun rose over the long, grassy plains of Northern California, and I texted Brooke: “Can you pick me up at the bus stop tonight?”

“I don’t think so, I’m gonna be at Wes’s tonight. We’re watching Prince of Egypt.”

“I’m sorry I called Wes a fascist.”

She took a while to reply. “It’s okay. I get what you mean.” I wasn’t sure what she meant, but it sounded hopeful. I told her I’d buy her a coffee if she would pick me up. She said okay. With that taken care of, I set to work. The first thing would be to create a fake person with whom I could interact with my grandma. Who would she respond to? Not me, certainly. Someone like my brother. So I googled “American soldier” and scrolled through my options. I settled on a picture of a man wearing Oakley sunglasses. He stood in what looked to be a hot, dry place, surrounded by dusty green tents. He wore camouflage. Gam would love him. I used an old email address to make a Facebook profile. What should I name him? Colonel something. Colonel Sand— Colonel Sandro, I typed. I birthed him in 1964, and made him from Oklahoma, a respectable state. Then I plugged in the picture of American Soldier. I paused and admired my work. There he was, a tabula rasa, waiting for his breath of life. Colonel Sandro. At ease, soldier.

I set to it, giving him all sorts of strange biographical information. The Colonel, since his honorable discharge after two tours as an Army Ranger in Kuwait, had found work as an underwater electrician. He was a very serious snowmobiler, and in fact even built his own snowmobiles—sometimes underwater. I gave Colonel Sandro all the nuances of a flesh-and-blood human being, which, for the conservative patriot I was making him to be, could be fabricated in less than half an hour. Once the Colonel was online, I reposted a bunch of conservative content on my—our?—page. Little sticky traps for my grandma. Then I searched Elena de Luca, and there she was: her profile picture was of her and my brother, hugging tenderly the moment she handed him my grandpa’s flag. And there, in the background, was me: the phone in my father’s hand, a dark lens. I hit “Add Friend” then slept until Oregon.

~

The following afternoon my grandma became my friend. I messaged her. “Hi Elena,” I typed, voicing each word as a man’s in my head. “I’m sorry to hear about Bob. He was the best of us.” I grimaced and hit send. A few minutes later, the ellipses popped onto the screen.

“Hello,” she wrote. “Thank you for the condolences. How did you know Bob?”

“From work,” I said. “We met at an electrician’s conference in Tucson. He took me under his wing at a time when I didn’t know why I was doing it anymore. Bob was a great man.”

“I don’t remember him going to a conference,” she responded. “But there was a lot I did not know about him.”

Alone in my room I felt insane. I read her message over-and-over. “The men of this country bear such a terrible burden,” I wrote, my hands flying on the keys. “Especially of his generation. Feels like there’s not a single man like Bob these days.” I bit my nails and clicked send.

“I know,” she said. “My grandson gives me hope. He remembers the things this country was founded on. He is in the army too.” This was accompanied by an emoji of a terrifying grin.

“Well God bless,” I said. “Maybe I know him. I was in Kuwait just a couple weeks ago.” That felt stupid immediately. Kuwait? Sure, I’m there all the time.

“Probably not,” she responded. “He’s stationed in Texas. Lance Corporal Jimmy de Luca, 187^th Infantry. Is there a name and rank I could pass along to him? I’m sure he would love to talk with someone who knew Bob. The passing has been hard on him.”

I panicked. “Colonel James Sandro,” I wrote, “Army Ranger in the 101^st Airborne.” I hit send and began another message: “Bob did not seem like a man who kept secrets, but if he did, I’m sure he had his reasons.”

The ellipses were up for a long time. “Bob was a great husband,” was all she said.

~

I waited two days; I didn’t want to seem too eager. In the meantime, I drafted more focused lines of inquiry regarding Operation Catfish My Grandma. I decided to relocate my dear grandmother from the relatively banal Facebook into more extreme right-wing internet spheres, and basically just see what happens. Was I hoping to turn her blue? Of course not. People over 40 don’t change their minds. But neither did I want to mindlessly enact a political conflict for its mere drama. Instead, I would study it. Scholarship legitimized the whole endeavor.

On the morning of the day I was to message my grandma, just after my first class, I walked into my room and discovered Wes and Brooke sitting in silence on the futon, not touching. Brooke’s eyes were red.

“You’re still up for coffee, right Brooke?” I asked, as if we had plans.

Brooke looked up and nodded, smiling sadly. Wes stood and pulled his shirt down over his gut—the libertarian snake uncoiling—and walked out, giving her a look. The door shut. We released our breath simultaneously.

“What was that?” I asked.

“He’s not a bad guy,” she said. “I know you think that, but he’s not. He’s complicated.”

She looked so innocent. I empathized with her—both at the mercy of Republicans.

“Do you want to see something?” I asked. I sat down at my desk and opened Facebook. Brooke pulled her chair up behind me. “Hello, Elena,” I typed, thinking in the man-voice, then hit send and pulled up the Colonel’s profile.

“This is for my sociology class,” I told Brooke, scrolling up and down. “I made a fake person to talk to my grandma about her beliefs.”

“That seems—weird.”

“I’m gonna tell her, of course. Once I have the data.”

“Data on what?” she asked, but I just shrugged.

It took my grandma less than ten minutes to respond. “Hello, James,” she said. “I worried I’d never hear from you again. How have you been?”

“Check it out,” I told Brooke, then typed, “Oh, just fine, Elena, just fine. And yourself?”

When I was writing like that, I had a vision: the Colonel beside a grill, hairy toes tan in my flops, smell of charcoal and cut grass, a brew in my left hand, silver tongs in my right. Just fine.

“I’ve been mostly alright. A little lonely.” Then in a separate message she said, “It’s been very nice to find some old friends, but they don’t fill the house, you know.”

“This is kind of sad,” Brooke said.

I squinted. “Once, for Christmas, my grandma gave my brother $100, and me $50.”

Brooke raised her eyebrow. “You’re doing this for sociology?”

“I’m doing this for a lot of reasons.” I cracked my fingers then typed, “Nothing’ll replace Bob, but I know some folks he would’ve loved to meet. Folks who aren’t on Facebook.” To Brooke I said, “I’m trying to see how she’d react to a site like Reddit.”

“Wes is on Reddit every day,” she said. She looked at the screen with more interest.

 “Yes, I’ve liked some of them!” my grandma replied. “You know, I thought it would be harder to find level-headed people on Facebook. California is so Democrat I forget we are actually the majority.”

I took a screenshot and scribbled some notes. “I’m trying to see how people like her, and Wes kinda, end up as they do. Or how they get worse.”

“You mean conservatives?”

“No no,” I lied. “It’s both sides.” Then I turned back to the screen.

“Hell, don’t I know it,” I typed, feeling saucy. “And Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re everywhere. Can I show you a place that’s even better?”

“Will you be there?” my grandma responded. This time the emoji winked.

~

That’s how I got my grandma on Reddit. Making a col.sandro12 profile was no problem, and then there she was: ElenadeLuca1945. I spent some time beforehand mapping the conservative Reddit sphere. The best place to start was r/CollegeRepublicans. Most redditors there espoused old-school right-wing politics, deregulation and stuff. I explained the site to my grandma beforehand—how you went to a r/ page, how you posted comments, how the voting system worked. She picked it up in no time.

“It just blesses my heart to see the youth like this,” she wrote me following an exchange on how political correctness is modern Nazism. “On the news it seems like all kids care about are vaping, video games, and transgenderism.”

Gam was ready for the deep dive.

But I was wrong. When we moved on to the more intense r/Anglosphere, she was appalled. “This is awful, Jim,” she told me. “I don’t even know what ‘cuck’ means. My husband would flop in his grave if he knew I was on here.”

I panicked. “You can’t think of it like that,” I said, channeling the Colonel’s militancy. “No offense, Elena, but you come from a time when politics were civilized and rational. You’ve got to have grit! Just think what’s at stake.”

Grudgingly at first, then curiously, then zealously, she grew a pair of big Reddit nuts. I took meticulous notes. Over time we fell into a schedule: every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon we met on Facebook, moved to r/Anglosphere to bolster our traditional values, then made our way to r/politics to hash it out with the snowflakes. After six weeks I had compiled extensive field observations on the capabilities of my grandma to not only adopt the idiosyncrasies of incel speech, but even to generate and spread neologisms. Her language became violent as well. “If they don’t wanna work, shoot ‘em,” she wrote in one post. I encouraged this. It estranged her into the thing I hated. It felt like I was in the vanguard of sociological research. My grandma was my prodigy, and as time went on, when I pictured the Colonel by his grill, I imagined my grandma there as well: her toes brushing the surface of the swimming pool, looking up at me expectantly, waiting for the tri-tip. We’d never been closer.

But my research was constantly interrupted by Wes and Brooke. They fought so much they were comfortable fighting while I was in the room. I was spending so much time in Wes’s world, I felt like I understood him, too. As the weeks went by, more-and-more I heard Brooke crying in the dark, after Wes had gone.

I finished my paper just before Thanksgiving. At the time, I felt I’d conclusively demonstrated that the root of conservative thought was a sort of vestigial sociopathy left over from the toddlerhood worship of the father, and that only the senile, repressed, rich, or stupid—or some combination of the four—were susceptible to this kind of politics, but also that the senile, repressed, rich, and stupid constituted an alarming portion of the population, indeed even sometimes a political majority. I wanted to slap Dr. Maldonado on his juicy Anglican ass. I was an academic. I turned the paper in with a wink and a flourish. Perfect timing: back to my grandma’s for Thanksgiving.

The night I was to head back to Sacramento—Wednesday—I walked into my room after class to pack my things. Brooke was lying face-down on her futon, sobbing into the duvet. I set my backpack down and dropped to a knee beside her. “What did he do,” I said.

Brooke rolled onto her side to face me. Her mouth was all quivery. Spit webbed between her lips. “Are we even friends?” she moaned.

I leaned my head against her shoulder. “Of course,” I said. And I was happy.

After a few stabilizing bouts of tears, Brooke stood and wiped her eyes. “He’s such an asshole!” she said, pacing the room. “And don’t say anything.”

I put my hands up, hopeful at her use of the word asshole. “I would never,” I said. “What happened?”

Brooke sat down on my bed. She wiped her eyes with both hands outward toward her ears. “I broke up with him.” I waited. “And he said ‘no.’”

“No?”

“No. And said if I forced his hand, he would tell our bible study we had sex.”

I understood why that was a big deal, but it was still somewhat difficult to empathize.

“Jesus,” I breathed. “What are you going to do?”

“We’re gonna talk after I drop you off at the greyhound station.”

We didn’t say anything on the ride over. When I got out of the car, I told her that yeah, it would be tough if she lost her friends, but that I’d be there etc., etc. She just nodded. Then I left.

The bus rolled through the countryside. I couldn’t sleep. It was only after we rolled into the city, after I got into my dad’s car, that I finally slept, and hard.

I woke on my grandma’s couch in the late afternoon. The autumn sun was warm on my face. The voices of the de Lucas sounded from the kitchen, along with the smells of Thanksgiving. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. When I opened them, my grandma was standing in the hallway. “Hey, baby,” she said, then hugged me warmly. “So good to see you. Come say hi to everyone.” My mom and dad bustled around in the kitchen. The air was thick with the smell of food. With a wink my dad poured me a glass of wine, something bold and Californian, and because I hadn’t eaten, my cheeks flushed and my blood warmed. Conversation came easy across the generations. My grandma was glowing, happier than I’d ever seen her. And it was not so much a revelation I had, more like a voice I heard—my own—that asked what the fuck am I doing catfishing my grandma? In my head I executed Colonel Sandro by firing squad and felt much better. I swilled wine and schmoozed.

The doorbell rang just before dinner. My brother stood in the doorway. He was in fatigues, a bag slung over his shoulder. “Hello?” he called. The four of us swarmed him, my mom kissing his cheeks, my dad pulling him into a bear hug, and my grandma, tears in her eyes, resting her head on his chest, saying, “I missed you.”

“Hey, little sister,” he said, grinning, after they had cleared.

“Hey,” I said. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

He held me at arm’s length and looked up and down my face. “So you’ve got a nose ring now,” he teased. “It looks awful.”

“Haha!” I said, because it was stupid, because it was him. Disarmed without meaning to be, I wrapped him in a big hug. There was a sort of comfort, I realized, in the acceptance of differences—a playfulness on both sides I’d ignored. No matter what, I was one of them. I looked over and saw my dad smiling at us. I smiled back, home at last.

Before dinner we placed our phones in a wicker basket under the windowsill. De Luca tradition. As we took our seats, the basket filled with iPhones and Androids and Grandma’s tablet. Then we ate and had a good time.

“So, I’ve got some news,” Grandma said afterward. Her voice was high and thin from the wine. “I’ve met someone,” she said.

My blood went cold. I studiously rearranged green beans on my plate.

“Mom!” said my mother. “It’s only been a couple months.”

She waved away the criticism. “It’s not serious,” she said. “We’re just messaging online. And I’ve been so lonely. And Tommy,” she said. “He was in the Army, too!”

After a second, my dad said, “Good for you, Elena,” and my mom reluctantly echoed, “I’m sure Bob would understand.” But that was all. Conversation awkwardly resumed. I was quiet.

My dad filled the sink with soap and water for dishes. “Will you dry for me, Lo?” he

asked.

“Sure,” I said, and got up and grabbed a towel.

“I can help too,” Tommy said, but my grandma grabbed his arm.

“Hold on, Tommy, I want to show you something. Go fetch me my iPad, will you?” she said, putting on her reading glasses. “I want to show you a picture of Jim.”

I watched as Tommy took the iPad from the basket and brought it to the table. Grandma used her index finger to open Facebook. Her eyebrows popped over the top of her reading glasses, as though this were a thing which required great concentration. Finally, she managed to pull up the Colonel’s profile. Tommy squinted at it. “Well,” she said. “Do you recognize him?”

He laughed. “No, I don’t,” he said. “He probably served before me. What division?”

She swelled with pride. “Army Rangers,” she said. “101^st Airborne.”

He laughed, again at her ignorance. “I doubt it,” he said. “That’s not a special forces unit.”

Grandma frowned. “Well that’s what Jim told me. Here,” she said, scrolling up through our messages. “Look, Jim said ‘Army Ranger in the 101^st Airborne.’” Her voice was stubborn, assured. Out of touch. Like any grandma. I was drying off a saucepan and listening, blurry with anxiety.

“Let me see,” he said, taking the iPad. He went to the Colonel’s profile. “Grandma,” he said severely. “How long have you been talking to this person.”

“Oh, I don’t know, a couple months?”

“This profile was made a couple months ago,” he said grimly. “There’s only one picture. Have you given out any information to this person? Credit cards or anything?”

“Goodness no,” she said, shocked. “Why would Jim ask me for that?”

“This is a fake account,” Tommy said.

“What do you mean, fake? A person can’t be fake. Give me that,” she said, taking back the tablet. “I’ll message him right now.”

I dropped the pan and cut toward the basket. Too late: my phone buzzed, impossibly loud, rattling against three other phones. Tommy looked at the basket, then at me. His mouth fell open at the panic on my face. Grandma was still focused on Facebook. I snatched my phone out of the basket just as she sent a second message; it buzzed audibly in my hand. Then she looked at me, her eyes narrowed. She sent another message, then another. Dumbly I gripped my buzzing phone.

“Lauren?” she asked.

The confusion in her voice broke my heart. There was no explaining. I slipped my phone into my back pocket and looked at my socks on the tile.

“Is this you?”

The question contained a number of dimensions, not a single one of which I was prepared to answer. “I…”

“Excuse me,” she said. She stood, an old woman, and pushed in her chair. She went upstairs.

“What did you do?” Tommy said.

I looked around. My mom and dad were watching me also. “I’ve been messaging her,” I said. “For a school project.”

My mom followed upstairs without a word. I stood in the same place, not sure where to go, what to do. I turned to my dad, but he just shook his head and gravely said, “Lo…” Tommy got up and followed my mom. I sat on the couch, looking dumbly again at my feet. My dad finished the dishes in silence.

Finally, my mom came back downstairs. I anticipated anger, but she took one look at me and broke down crying. “What?” I begged, but she walked right past, into the kitchen where she began to speak to my dad in a low voice.

I walked upstairs. The bedroom door was open. My grandma sat in the easy chair, my brother at her side, silent. She stared at me. I stared back. An odd look of triumph was on her face.

“I’m sorry,” I said. What else was there to say?

Her voice was measured. “If you’re so intent on being this, this outcast, then you can do it without my help.”

What did that mean? I looked at my brother, but his face was a mask. I left.

Downstairs, at the kitchen table, I sat across from my parents. My mom wiped the tears under her eyes. “So,” she said weakly. “Grandma’s not going to pay for college anymore.”

I felt weightless. “What?”

“What did you do, Lo?” my dad asked. His voice was so… tired.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just… it was a school thing. For a paper. She’s really doing this?”

My mom nodded, very slowly.

“I’m not moving home,” I said. “Dad, please.”

“Please what,” my dad said. He grabbed my mom’s hands, then lay his head across her knuckles.

~

My brother took me to the greyhound station early the following morning. “Are you alright, Lo?” he asked in the parking lot.

I wanted his anger, not his concern. “I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks for the ride.”

I boarded the bus and curled up in the back. The bus took off into the plains. Up ahead Mt. Shasta rose against the ice blue horizon, into which the sun had not yet risen. I wished it wouldn’t. A few rows ahead, a little boy peeked around his seat. He stared at me with black eyes. For a long time I stared back, us two alone awake in the lawless dawn.

By the time we rolled into the Willamette Valley, I felt strange: hollow but intensely perceptive, my mind quick and sharp. I did not want to leave, I realized. Brooke picked me up. I asked if she wanted to get a drink, and was surprised when she said yes. It seemed we both were reluctant to share how the weekend had gone. We drove to Lumpy’s on the edge of town. She asked me what she should get. I said I’d handle it, and came back with an armful of dollar gel-o shots. We took a booth and used hairpins to scoop out the muck. At first Brooke puckered at the taste, but after three or four, she put them back easily. I waited until I felt the alcohol, then asked her what happened with Wes.

“If I tell you, can we still be friends?” she asked.

The word friend almost brought me to tears. “Yes.”

“We’re back together.”

“Fuck, why?”

“It’s just easier,” she said. “You don’t have friends like ours. They’re not very… nice.”

I put my head in my hands. “Fuck, fuck,” I said, then groaned.

“What? What is it?”

“My grandma found out about the Colonel. She said she’s not paying for school anymore. I might have to move back home.”

“How did we both—? How come neither of us could—?” She looked away, embarrassed.

The bar became rowdy around us. A fly landed in one of the cups and rubbed his little hands on a nuclear green bit of gel-o.

“Do you want to play ping-pong?” I asked.

The liquor hit while we played. “You’re good,” I told Brooke, wobbling.

“Church camp champ,” she said, then pounded a topspin off my side. It bounced into a nearby pitcher of light beer. “I’m sorry!” she said to a couple of old drunks, then caught the ball back and served it past me again.

After a couple of games, neither of us could drive. We sat in the dirt at the edge of a vineyard. The wind rustled the vines in the light of a full November moon. I was happy.

“How are we getting home,” I asked lazily.

“I can text Wes,” she said. The thought made her giggle.

“Yeah, yeah. Do it. That would be fun. He doesn’t drink, does he?”

Brooke recoiled and shook her head dramatically. “No way,” she said. “What’s he gonna do, break up with me?” She pulled out her phone and texted him.

“I have a plan to stay here,” I told her. “I want to stay. With you. Not like, I don’t know, but I want to stay.” I felt myself blushing.

Maybe I loved her. Maybe I did. But that is beyond the scope of this paper.

She just laughed. “I want you to stay, too.”

We were quiet for a while. We watched the valley. The moon was so bright we could see the hills rear up against the night, their slopes covered with vines and thatches of fir. Moonlit clouds rose up flat in the darkness behind them. It was not too cold. A pair of headlights flashed into our faces. We shielded our eyes. A car door opened. It was Wes.

“You guys smell,” he said.

“Shut up,” Brooke told him.

~

“Do you remember a few days ago,” I told Brooke at breakfast the next day, “about that Navy veteran in Portland? Who shot and killed that protester?”

“Wes was talking about that,” she said warily. “Why?”

“He’s facing 25 to life,” I explained. “Conservatives are riled up about it.”

“So?”

“So my grandma’s been watching that,” I said. She waited for me to explain. “You’re a computer science major, so you know how to set up websites and stuff?”

“Why?”

I told her my idea.

She frowned. “No way,” she said. “That’s fraud.”

“It is,” I said, “but all you have to do is show me how to do it.”

“Won’t they know it was me who helped you?”

“Who’s they, Brooke? Come on. I need you. Don’t you want me to stay? My life is fucked if I have to leave. I’ll end up living in some crackhead apartments. I’ll become a prostitute. Please!”

So Brooke taught me how to build a website. Basically, the idea was to create a fake fundraising webpage for the Navy veteran’s legal team. www.right2selfdefense.law. I did some research and filled the site with a lineup of conservative legal experts, then surrounded them with American flags and right-wing adages. The donation fund linked to a stealth PayPal account that Brooke helped me set up, which I could route to my own account. Then I posted the website link on 4chan at the local library under a card I faked using a school ID I took from the lost and found. It was a professional quality job. I posted the link on all the old Reddit threads. After the post was up, I changed Colonel Sandro’s name and profile picture so I could repost it on Facebook where my grandma would see it. Then we were live.

We made two grand in the first week. When I opened PayPal and saw the number, I ran across campus to our dorm. Brooke started shaking when she saw it. That night we went to Lumpy’s and bought the whole bar a round of Rainiers. By three weeks we had $11,000. A popular far-right blog had kicked it to their social media. But I had no way of knowing if I’d bagged the trophy buck. Had my grandma even seen it? I called my mom. “Can you ask Grandma something for me?” I told her my question.

“What is this about, Lauren?” she asked skeptically.

“Please, Mom. You know how difficult this time has been for me.”

“No. Are you moving back home after this semester? We cleared your brother’s room.”

“I told you, I’m staying here.”

Then it all fell apart. A few days later, the Navy vet hung himself in jail. The tithes stopped coming in. Desperate, I started a fundraiser for the funeral expenses, but it didn’t get the same kind of attention. We’d already made over $17,000 dollars. Although this felt like a great sum, it wasn’t even enough to pay for one semester. My days in God’s kingdom were numbered.

“Brooke,” I said, “How committed are you to your education?”

“What?” She looked up from her phone. “I don’t know, very?”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get an apartment in the city. Let’s be cocktail waitresses at some fancy restaurant.” Brooke gave me this heartbroken look. She sat beside me on my bed and squeezed one of my hands. “What?” I said. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Stop,” I said. “You sound like my brother.”

“What do you mean?”

I couldn’t explain it, so I told her I was gonna go talk to financial aid. Instead I went to Dr. Maldonado’s office.

“Are you looking for your sociology paper?” said the old humanities secretary when I came in. She eyed me warily. “It should be in your mailbox.”

I shoved into the mail room. A white-haired prof was waiting for the coffee maker to finish. After one look at my face, he left. A thin sheaf of paper rested in my cubby. I pulled it out. There was a big red D on the top. Underneath it said, “Unfocused, unorganized, unethical, un-Christlike.” I wanted to scream. I held it up with two hands and bit the corner as hard as I could. I cast it, mutilated, into the recycle bin, then stormed up the stairway to Dr. Maldonado’s office.

“Oh,” he said when he saw me in the doorway. A student was in a chair across from him. The twerp swiveled around, startled.

“Please give us the room,” I growled.

“Lauren, you can’t—”

“It’s fine,” said the boy, clearly shaken. I moved to let him pass, but stayed on my feet.

“That was very inappropriate,” said Dr. Maldonado.

“Are you happy with your wife?” I said.

“Lauren!” he said. “I’m going to politely ask that you—”

“I’m going to have to drop out,” I rushed. “My family won’t pay anymore. And what is that going to do to my calling?” The levee broke; tears spilled down my face.

He sighed. “Sit down,” he said. I did. I tried to stifle the sobs, but that just made them sound broken and gross. Dr. Maldonado handed me a box of tissues, shut the door, then sat and waited for me to compose myself. I arrived at a breathy calm. “What’s going on,” he said.

“I’m fine,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I’m not one of those girls who cries in their professor’s office. I’m sure you have other things to worry about,” I said, nodding toward the picture of his family.

“I’m not sure what you mean by that.” He angled the pictured frame away from me. “But I do have an obligation, financially and biblically, to be here. So. What is it?”

“My life is ruined, that’s all. I’m dropping out. I’m not gonna get a degree. My family wants nothing to do with me. I only have one friend. And I guess I’m no good at sociology, even.”

“Your paper did show promise at times. Certainly it was inventive. Perhaps I graded you to the standard of graduate school,” he said gently. “Regarding the other stuff, I’m sure a campus therapist would be happy to meet with you during your remaining couple weeks.”

“You mean the faith healers?” I sat back and crossed my arms. “I’m good.”

He sighed. “If your dream is really in higher education, then you’ll figure out how to make it happen. There’s community college, scholarships, plenty of resources. If you feel you’ve actually been called, then the matter is settled: nothing can rescind it. Do you believe that?”

That was the last time I saw Dr. Maldonado. I did leave his office feeling a little better, but it faded the moment I saw Wes and Brooke in the room, the same as ever. Nothing changes. I stopped going to class. As winter break approached, I kept feeling like the FBI was gonna bust down my door and throw me in lady prison. But no one ever came. Nervously I began to transfer some of the money from PayPal into my bank account. $17,000—I could live for a year on that. I took a room at the Rivercrest Apartments, a shitty complex across the highway. Brooke helped me move. Sometimes she comes over and we eat Chinese food. I didn’t go home for Christmas. My mom and dad called that morning, but it was awkward. It snowed that day—rare for Oregon. Of course nothing stuck. That evening I sat outside my door, on a plastic chair provided by the apartments. Me and all the other old smokers, lined up outside like gargoyles.

Me, I just sat there and thought about what Dr. Maldonado said before I left. About how you can’t be uncalled. I know what that means. It means some people are never called at all.

~

Danny Llewellyn hadn’t shit himself since he was a toddler, back when nobody minded. Since then, he’d joined the Army, gone to war, left the Army. He was, by most people’s estimations, a man, especially because his exit from the service had been hastened by injuries sustained in combat. All the pain meds during his hospital stay had stopped him up, and things down there never quite got back to normal. That was part of the reason the accident took him by surprise—in those days, each bowel movement was a protracted trauma of its own.

It happened at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Overland Park, Kansas. The VFW had a bar room. The bar room had a vinyl floor, and the walls were covered in photographs, unit insignia behind glass, and certificates of appreciation for good works in the community. The bar itself was u-shaped, made from teak like the deck of a boat, light and polished. It was the nicest bit of anything in the whole building, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

The winter sun had just set. Friday. Danny walked the mile from his apartment to the VFW through wind and gray slush. He had plans to get blind drunk, and he didn’t want to drive home. When he arrived, there were three people in the bar room. Two of them, both men, sat next to each other in chairs on the right side of the bar. Their backs were mostly to Danny, and he couldn’t see their faces, but they looked older. There was white hair and wrinkled necks and the broad, uneven shoulders which become under the weight of a hard life lived.

Only the bartender saw him come in. She was in her forties, and she didn’t take good care of herself, but she had great big tits, and she wore low cut shirts because she knew the fellas liked something to look at. She pitied most of them for what they’d seen and done.

The bartender told him to have a seat anywhere. The man in the chair nearest to Danny swiveled to see who she was talking to. He had a bushy gray mustache and wore a ball cap that identified him as a Gulf War veteran. Danny limped to the side of the bar opposite the men. The limp was the result of the explosion that had sent shrapnel up and down the right side of his body. The damage to his thigh and hip was especially bad. The doctors said he’d probably limp for the rest of his life, even as the pain got better.

Danny took off his jacket and sat. He ordered a Miller Lite while trying not to stare at the bartender’s cleavage.

“What’s with the hitch in your giddy up?” It was the mustache in the Gulf War hat. “You get that over there?”

Danny nodded. He hadn’t yet figured out how to talk about what happened to him, and he didn’t like to lie, so when people asked about it, he said as close to nothing as he could.

“Iraq or Afghanistan?” This time it was the other man asking. He was a head shorter than his friend, so he had to lean over the bar to be seen.

Danny told them Iraq.

The bartender brought his beer in a smudged glass. There was a lot of foam. Danny went for his wallet, but the bartender waved her hand.

“First timers get one on the house. Thank you for your service.”

Danny looked down and thanked her.

The old guys held up their drinks, so Danny did the same. His hand shook, and a little foam spilled over the edge of the glass, but the occupational therapist at the VA had told him he had to practice if he ever wanted the tremors to get better.

He took a big gulp of the beer and came away with a foam mustache. He wiped it off, willing himself not to think about shit-burning detail, but the sensation of something on his upper lip brought him right back with such force that he could practically feel the rough edges of the metal picket in his hands.

Before higher headquarters dropped the chemical toilets, his unit had been shitting in wooden outhouses. Each one had a hole in the floor positioned over a 50-gallon drum. The setup worked, but something had to happen to all that waste. Pour in some jet fuel, light on fire, stir. Danny always seemed to draw shit-burning detail. It wasn’t so much about the odor (jet fuel masks the smell of shit as well as anything), but his cackling squad mates had photographed him more than once with the Shitler mustache that inevitably takes shape under your nostrils after breathing in the smoke. All the while, other guys were out on the glamorous missions.

The two old vets were back in their conversation now. The first guy, the one closest to Danny, was doing most of the talking. He spoke with an intimidating energy. Intense. Fatigueless.

The bartender came around and asked if Danny wanted another. He said he wanted two. The fast talker was out of his chair now. He had the body of a marathon runner and the shiny cheeks of someone who still shaved every day. He was telling a story about a helicopter crash in which he’d been the pilot. He described the sound of bullets piercing the cabin, the feeling of losing control of the stick, the centrifugal force as the Kiowa plunged spinning towards the ground.

“I was sure I was going to die, of course.” He put both hands on the back of his chair and leaned. “In flight school, they tell you right off that helicopter crashes only have a twenty percent survival rate.”

The pilot had actually been in two crashes. The second one was during a training exercise. Mechanical failure. Danny didn’t know any of this, nor would he have been able to do the mental math on the odds of surviving two crashes, but he was still enthralled. His focus was the result of admiration and jealousy. Look at his joie de vivre! This was what happened to soldiers who never pulled shit-burning detail.

Danny was astounded that the bartender and the other veteran seemed bored. She was looking at her phone. He was paying more attention to the rim of his glass. Even if Danny assumed—as he did—that they’d heard this story a hundred times—as they had—it still deserved reverence.

Danny drank fast, and the beer sat heavy in his stomach. Foamy, so foamy, on top of whatever else had built up in there over the last few days. Panda Express. Frozen pizza. More Panda Express. He groaned a little, enough to draw attention.

“Say—” The pilot was looking at him. “What’s your name, young buck?”

Danny said his name.

“I’m Sal. This is Glenn. And the lovely Tina, of course.”

Danny said hello.

“What’d you do over there, Danny?”

Again, Danny did his best to avoid the question. Rather than say what he did, he told them what he’d been trained to do. Often as not, that’s what people meant when they asked about war. He told them he was an 11 Bravo. Infantry.

Sal’s expression brightened. “Glenn, you’ve finally got another knuckle dragger to talk to.” To Danny he added, “Glenn thinks infantrymen are the only real soldiers.”

“I hate it when you speak for me,” said Glenn. Sal the pilot shrugged.

Glenn stared straight ahead and took a drink. Truth was, he believed that anyone who volunteered to serve deserved as much reverence as a Medal of Honor winner. Heroism was mostly a question of circumstances beyond any soldier’s control. He’d won a Silver Star in Vietnam—his was one of the decorations hung on the wall of the bar room—and the citation read like a Hollywood script. But so what? He didn’t like talking about what he’d been through either, though his reasons were different from Danny’s.

Now on his fourth beer, Danny slid right past tipsy and into drunk. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast when he’d poured some questionable milk over a bowl of Raisin Bran.

“Got any war stories?” Sal asking again. “Good ones get another beer on me.”

Danny looked down. The pattern of the wooden bar was lovely, soft waves of amber and tan and brown running lengthwise along the planks. They reminded him of Iraqi dunes, which made him think of the day he’d been blown up. He’d been in and out of consciousness, but the view of the windswept sand out the door of the MEDEVAC chopper stuck in his memory.

Danny told them there wasn’t much to tell.

“There’s a story behind that limp.”

Tina the bartender sucked her teeth. “Sal.” She seemed to have some power over Sal, because he sat next to Glenn and was quiet for a while.

Of course, there was a story, it just happened to be one that Danny never wanted to think about, much less tell to a couple of war heroes and a bartender whose tits he planned on thinking about while he jerked off later.

But could he omit the embarrassing details without inviting more questions he’d have to avoid? Probably not. The embarrassing parts seemed like the whole thing.

They’d had the chemical toilets for about a week. A week of shitting in luxury—no risk of splinters in your hamstrings, flies kept mostly at bay by the thin plastic box around you, the smell of other soldiers’ waste muted by the blue concoction in the tank below. A little hot, maybe, but so was everything else. So was shit-burning detail. And now that was done forever. Danny had begun lingering in the new toilets. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Locking the door to the stall was like shutting out the war.

It was the middle of the night, and Danny’s bladder woke him up. Before, he might have just pissed into an empty two-liter plastic bottle and gone back to bed, but now the new toilets beckoned. He took an issue of Hustler from the stack under his cot and grabbed his rifle and stepped out of the sleeping bay.

The sand of the unimproved road looked blue in the moonlight. The concrete Texas barriers, too. It was a short walk to the row of chemical toilets, newly laid gravel at the edge of camp crunching under his unlaced boots.

None of the toilets were occupied. Danny chose one at the end of the row, because even though the likelihood of a midnight rush was low, he liked the idea of not having guys on both sides of him while he did his business.

Danny stepped into the toilet and closed the door. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness before dropping the black PT shorts to his ankles. He took an effortless shit. His last one for years. From the sound, it must have knifed into the water below like an Olympic diver. He sighed. He opened the Hustler and stared at the glossy body of a girl with curly red hair.

That was the last thing he remembered until the fractured visions from his evacuation to the hospital in Balad. No matter how many times his squad mates told him how gruesome, how badass his injuries had seemed when they found him, Danny could only ever imagine himself strapped to a litter in the MEDEVAC chopper with his t-shirt on and his dick flapping in the rotor wash. The psychologists told him that was probably because of what he’d been doing when the mortar hit. Knowing hadn’t yet helped.

Danny’s stomach made a sound like a bullfrog. He was too drunk to care about the current of discomfort that shot through his groin. Besides, he was used to ignoring pain. He ordered another beer and drank it and ordered another one.

“You’re not driving are you, hon?” asked Tina.

Danny told her he wasn’t. He smiled, but he could tell the smile was crooked. Tina gave him the beer anyway. It was nice that she trusted him.

Sal was talking again. Danny didn’t know about what. He heard a few words here and there, but his drunk brain was busy trying to overwrite his memories. Maybe there was a way to change his perception of the past. Then there wouldn’t be any dishonor in lying.

Through the densifying haze of his vision, Danny saw Glenn’s eyes. They were focused on him. Unnervingly focused. Glenn got up and walked over to Danny. Sal was still talking. He didn’t seem to mind a mobile audience.

“Not my business, I know,” said Glenn, “but that’s a lot of beers in not a lot of time.”

Sal was still talking in the background. Danny nodded his agreement.

Glenn patted Danny’s shoulder like he was afraid it might break.

“Just to say, we’ll be here all night, you know?”

The pain that swept through Danny’s gut gave no warning. It stabbed at his stomach, puckered his asshole. Sweat erupted on his forehead. He sprang to his feet, and his chair toppled backward. It smacked the floor—Bang! Glen started to ask what was wrong, but Danny was already waddling to the door where he’d come in, only to realize he didn’t know where the bathroom was.

He stopped in the middle of the room, holding everything tight, afraid if he opened his mouth for directions, he would fall to pieces.

Tina, Sal, and Glenn looked at each other. They all thought he was going to vomit.

Tina said, “Go ahead, baby. It’s alright.”

Danny collapsed to his knees. Release. The heat of it running down his hamstrings, spreading across his skin and soaking his jeans. He could hardly believe the stench.

“Stay back,” he said.

And then a new memory, a clear one, struck him in the middle of the forehead like a sniper shot. He’d said the same thing, or tried to, when he felt the hands of his comrades on him, lying in the wreckage of the chemical toilet, cut and broken and dying. What if another mortar fell? What if people died because he’d lingered after a satisfying shit?

They ignored him of course. They lifted him up, uncaring about the smells and the stains his blood put on their clothes. They carried him for hundreds of meters to the helipad. They reassured him the whole way.

You’re not going to die. We won’t let you.

They hoisted him into the chopper and strapped him down and told him they’d see him soon. They squeezed his good hand.

He remembered all this for the first time, sitting there in his own filth. And then he was levitating again, as Sal and Glenn hoisted him to his feet. They guided him toward the bathroom.

“Thanks,” said Danny.

They agreed it was no trouble at all. Danny had his arms around both of them, and he thought that Glenn was sturdier than he seemed, and that Sal had a more tender touch than he’d expected.

Tina waited until they’d gone out of the bar room before she pulled another pint for Danny. She set it in front of the chair next to Sal’s seat. She figured that’s where he’d be sitting when they returned.

The terrorist sat down at the cafe at a quarter to one. She had always been punctual. Beneath her clothing was a bomb improvised from ammonium nitrate. The bomb was uncomfortable. She kept thinking things that didn’t matter, like: ripping off the tape will be painful, or, it’s going to leave red marks on my skin. She raised her hand and ordered a cappuccino and a chocolate croissant. Why not a little pleasure? Someone had left a newspaper at the table. She didn’t feel the need to read it. She knew all about what was happening now, here and all over. She looked around the cafe at the other people eating and drinking. She didn’t feel much of anything. It was difficult to imagine, really, that anything would be different in just a few minutes. She’d been in a hundred cafes just like this. A thousand! Nothing strange had ever happened before.

She looked down at the newspaper on the table. The sports section. How about that? She’d thought it was the news, but it was just sports. She didn’t know anything about sports. Everything going on in the world and there was just sports happening and that’s what people chose to read about. She looked around the cafe. All these people care about sports! she thought. She picked up the section and flipped through the games, reading the box scores carefully. This is what people care about, she said to herself, as if trying to understand something. She flipped to a page that printed the scores of local high school games. She hadn’t known newspapers printed high school games. She found her high school and read through the names of the varsity basketball players and how many points they had scored. She recognized a last name: Ramakrishnan. She had known a Ramakrishnan in high school. It wasn’t a very common last name. His son, maybe. She checked and saw that he had scored twenty-eight points, the most in the game. A surge of pride went through her, so strong and sudden it made her anxious. What did he have to do with her? Nothing.

Her food came. She paid and left a very big tip. Why not? The waitress smiled at her. A lesbian maybe. Go ahead, what did she care? That wasn’t the type of thing that mattered to her. She took a bite of the croissant and sipped the cappuccino. Ah. Very good. She would miss this. What a funny thought. She wouldn’t be able to miss anything. She laughed to herself. What a funny time to be funny! Her heart was beating very fast. She felt calm, but her heart was beating very fast. As if it were someone else’s heart. Wouldn’t that be something. The bomb goes off and this old man across the world dies because she’d actually had his heart all along. That’s who I would apologize to, she thought. I had no idea, she would tell his widow. It wasn’t supposed to be him.

She checked the time. There was a clock above the cash register and another by the door. Everyone had their phones out, and their phones were also clocks. There were clocks everywhere. She thought the world had done away with clocks, but she was wrong. There were clocks on the coffee machines. Timers beside the ovens she could see through a glass window into the bakery. Clocks that everyone thought would go on forever, but really they would stop. A clock strapped to her chest. Oh no officer, she thought. I’m sorry for the confusion. As you can see, that’s just a clock.

Just a few minutes now. Not one o’clock, actually, but twelve-fifty-nine. A little joke to herself. They would all expect it at one on the dot. But no, it was twelve-fifty-nine. As good a time as any! she wanted to scream. She pictured a hero from a movie, running computer programs in some dark basement, cracking the code. At twelve-fifty-five the program would blink—they’ve got her. At a cafe just down the street. The hero checks the clock (there’s always a clock nearby). We’ve got five minutes! he yells and rushes out the door, and as he’s running as fast as he can, he knows he has just enough time to stop her. Five minutes, the exact right amount, and he throws open the cafe door, just over a minute to spare, just what he needs, and then, boom. Twelve-fifty-nine. Ha!

The clock above the door crowed. She looked up wildly, heart pounding. Was it time? But the clock was five minutes fast. She let out a breath. She hadn’t been scared before, but now she was. Stupid clock. It should be illegal to have the wrong time on a clock. There should be someone whose job it is to go around to all the clocks and arrest the people putting the wrong time on them. She looked at the clock again, and this time she was surprised to find the clock was not just a clock, but was actually the belly of a wooden rooster. Cock clock, she thought, which calmed her. Then she looked around and saw all sorts of other things she hadn’t noticed: paintings of cardinals and shakers shaped like crows and napkin holders that looked like hummingbirds. It was a bird cafe! Ten minutes she’d been here, and she hadn’t even realized it was bird themed. Some old lady must really love birds, she thought, and for some reason this made her feel very sad. All those goddamn bird decorations that would be broken. That woman’s whole life collecting bird decorations and one day she starts this cafe and thinks, these goddamn bird decorations are just too darn special to sit cooped up in my dusty old house. The public needs to see all these freaking birds. So she puts them in the cafe. Bird mugs and bird napkins. Close up photos of beaks in tulips. Signs with bird sayings like, Toucan Do It!, and Flock Off!

Flock off! she wanted to yell, but didn’t. All of you, just flock the flock off!

She touched the lump under her shirt. There was no button. Just time. The clock would reach a certain time, and then it would happen. This made it easier. She didn’t have to press anything or do anything. It was almost like it was happening to her. She just showed up at this place and it happened. If you zoomed out far enough, she thought, there was no difference between her and any of them. She had been a normal woman and then, at some point, the circumstances of her life had led her to this particular cafe at this particular time and the bomb had exploded and she had died. Just another victim.

Would anything change? She didn’t know. She wasn’t really concerned with that part. She was concerned with doing something. She was concerned with being heard. They would hear her, alright, this time. What they did after, well, that was up to them. There was danger, always, in telling people what to do or how to feel. That’s how people end up in situations like hers. People always telling them what to do and how to feel until one day they turn around and say, No! This is what I am doing and this is how I feel!

She had always known there were bad things in the world. It seemed to her that all the people who tried the hardest to fix them only made it worse. There was a book she liked that said, All our worst crimes are committed out of enthusiasm. Yes! she had thought. That’s exactly it. All these bad things in the world because people think they know the answer and want to get there. She had lived her life with this in mind. Skeptical. Questioning everything. Always knowing everything that was wrong but never knowing anything that was right. Then, years later, she had reread the book and noticed another line: skepticism is the rapture of impasse. And she thought, Yes, that’s exactly it. All these years of questioning, she had done nothing. She had been skeptical, so she had done nothing. Then all the things she had been skeptical of just happened. Better, then, to commit a crime with enthusiasm!

So she had made the bomb. Improvised explosive device. That’s what they called it in the news. Not that anyone would know that, only reading the sports section. It was an evocative name. It made it sound desperate and spontaneous. It demonstrated creativity. That’s not a very good bomb, a professional bomb maker might say. Well, I had to improvise!

She had taken an improv class in college. She had hated it. She had hated it because the people were awful. The people were awful and they stared at her when she didn’t know what to say and they were always saying things like, The first rule of improv is always say, Yes! No one seemed to know any other rules. They just repeated that rule over and over. Once, when it was her turn in class, she got on stage and her partner said, Wow, what a crazy day at the zoo! What a stupid thing to say, she thought. Even if it had been a crazy day at the zoo, she would never have said that. She didn’t know how to respond to something so stupid. So she just said, Yes. I can’t believe what the chimpanzee did to that tiger! Yes, she said. The zookeeper is going to have some trouble cleaning up! Yes, she said. She said, Yes, over and over until the teacher had said, Alright, that’s enough, and she was allowed to sit down again.

She looked around at the cafe and suddenly it felt to her as if she were stuck again in a terrible improv scene. That everyone around her was trying poorly, desperately, to seem natural. Off-the-cuff. She took another bite of croissant and closed her eyes, imagining herself on stage. There’s a bomb in the cafe! Yes, she said. Everyone is going to die! Yes, she said. Yes, yes. She squeezed her eyes. Yes, yes, yes. She squeezed as hard as she could. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Even the word eyes was made of yes. Yesses everywhere. Yes, yes, yes. Eyes closed yes. If her eyes were closed when it happened, it was like she wasn’t there. If her eyes were closed when it happened, it was like she wasn’t there. If she closed her eyes when it happened.

Yes.

But she couldn’t make it. She peeked. She had always been a peeker. At Christmas, tearing the corners off wrapping paper to see what was hidden inside. That’s how she felt then, in her final seconds, squinting through one eye at the people around her. Sticking her eye to the dark hole she had ripped in the paper and hoping it would let her see some new world that had not yet come to pass. But it was just the same. Just people. Yes. And she realized with a start that each of these people had their own lives, and that those lives were about to end. But that, of course, was the point.

I wasn’t going to tie flies tonight because I’d been invited to the ballet.  The performance was at the Wilma and it was a formal affair.  I had gone through my drugs, auditioned them each in my imagination, and made my decision.  The invitation came from my new friend Colleen, the Arts & Culture Reporter for the paper.  Colleen had a boyfriend.  He was significantly older and was a wine buyer, or a wine rep.  Something with wine.  He was at a soft opening, which was why Colleen had invited me.  Also attending was the Arts reporter from the Daily Chronicle in Bozeman, who had been Colleen’s college roommate.  All of this was in my texts; I’d avoided replying more than one or two words at a time.  I still found myself playing hard-to-get with Colleen, and I begrudged her for the way I imagined she saw me.  This was not a case of her wanting to be friends and me wanting to sleep with her.  I believed that she saw me as a kind of backup or practice love interest.  Our interactions were flirty, but safe.  She roughhoused with me.  I was more age-appropriate as a partner and I guessed that her relationship with the wine guy was stifling and that she used me to play-act how it would be to date someone in her demographic.  There was no threat of our consummating this phantom relationship, because at the end of the day Colleen was old fashioned.

I folded up a Vicodin into a piece of tinfoil and put it in the coin pocket of my corduroys.  In terms of dress, I had decided on Evening Noir: midnight blue everything with a black cashmere watch cap and my silver watch.  The ballet was as close to a cultural event as we got around here, besides neo-traditional bluegrass and fishing film festivals.  I didn’t know anything about it, except that Colleen’s friend had traveled across the Divide to cover it, and there had been an unusual amount of traffic downtown this morning when I biked past.

According to the marquee above will-call, the performance was sold out.  There were men in tuxedos, and a row of idling black Suburbans in the bus lane.  I cruised the milling crowd and caught sight of the promotional poster.  It featured a black-and-white portrait of a craggy-faced man staring grimly into the camera.  Many of the assembled patrons were wearing dress scarves: silver-haired men and women looking formal and somber, no one smoking.  There would be a long line at the bathroom during intermission.

I was meeting Colleen and her friend at the distillery.  I wished I’d left time for myself to get a drink-before-the-drink somewhere sleazier, but I was going to be exactly on time.  I paused against the brick wall before I reached the plate-glass façade and fished out the foil packet from my pocket.  I bit the pill with my canine and it split into pieces.  I dry swallowed and made a face and then stepped out.

Colleen and her friend were inside with drinks; both women were beautiful.  Colleen is a freckled hippie with a face made up of flat broad angles, all upturned, like they were designed to catch sunlight.  She can do motorcycle mama and she can do flower child.  Tonight she was dressed like an art teacher, in corduroy overalls and a turtleneck, with a paintbrush ponytail.

“You know Jessica,” Colleen said, though I didn’t, and I reached across the table and held out my fist to a ghostlike figure in all black.  She had her arms crossed across her chest and a long thin neck and a pop of red lipstick. With squinted eyes and pursed lips she reached out a slender wrist and gave me a fist bump that sounded like a Pop-Pop going off.

“Wassup,” she said.

I ordered and then waited for my cocktail.  I already knew I’d drink it too fast.  The problem with cocktails here is that they’re too delicious.  It was better to order something hostile, like an aquavit martini, than one of the tasty tiki drinks with a hole in the bottom.  My internal metronome was calibrated to beer.  Then the drink came and it was delicious and I relaxed.  My tablemates were nourishing to look at, and because I’d dressed elegantly and knew that I, too, was nourishing to look at, I felt comfortable drinking them in: everyone wanted to be looked at tonight and the pleasures were all reciprocal.

The girls filled me in on the context of the evening’s performance.

The ballerino, Jugo Lypynsky, was a Ukrainian national who’d trained under Ratmansky.  Among many principal roles, he’d danced Siegfried in the Bolshoi’s Swan Lake.  In his early thirties, as his body began to show the gravity of his age, his work took on an inverse levity: in a solo piece for the radical Un-Bolshoi, he danced both Odette and Odile in a marathon performance that crescendoed with a flawless, turbulent, breathtaking, and utterly masculine interpretation of the famous thirty-two fouettés.  It was the company’s first and only staging of Swan vs. Swan.  To hear Colleen and Jessica tell it, interrupting each other in their excitement, and obviously familiar with the same sources and opinions, Lypynsky was an artist of the highest order, a technician, classically trained but not a hidebound traditionalist, whose attachments to the Bolshoi and the old order more generally, strained already, were severed at the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.  Lypynsky’s talent, his leftist upbringing, and above all his sense of humor and experimentation had already drawn him from the grand halls and theaters of the old school into the thin air of avant-garde dance, and now, as the sun set on his body but (in his words) rose on his soul, he stepped forward into his grand pas: political action on behalf of the Ukrainian people.

It was then that he suffered the attack.  Lypynsky was—

Colleen pursed her lips and glared at me.

“It’s French for ‘whipped’,” Jessica said.  “The past participle of fouetter.  It’s a one-footed spin.”

“Thank you, Jessica,” I said, smiling annoyingly at Colleen.  Our second drinks arrived.  Everyone readjusted themselves and waited for the server to walk away.

It was then that he suffered the attack.  Lypynsky was back home in Odessa, an area thus far spared by the bombings, closing down the black-box theater where for the past three weeks he’d been hosting open-mics, 24-hour plays, poetry readings, one-acts, bake sales, AA meetings, food drives, and every other kind of gathering he or anyone else could think of to keep morale high and to bring high-net-worth civilians into contact with artists and organizers.  At ten PM, after he ushered out the last of the laypersons, he put on a fresh pot of coffee, turned off the house lights (except for the traditional single bare bulb over the stage: he wrestled with the logic of this, and ultimately conceded to superstition), and retired to the basement office, where he waited for his second wave of visitors to trickle in.

For the past few weeks, these had been the members of what used to be a recreational club for building and piloting drones.  They slipped in through the delivery entrance carrying milk crates and cardboard boxes filled with tools and padded cases containing their enormous drones.  These were high-school students, engineers, tinkerers, grandfathers: a group of dorks, in sweatpants and Velcro shoes, with tiny toolkits and headsets with retractable antennae.  They were retrofitting the drones to carry bombs.  Their leader was an obese, straight-edge lesbian with a streak of pure white in her hair.  Lypynsky had requested only that they not bring the bombs themselves inside.  At first, they’d giggled at him, these dorks, who had no access to bombs, but lately he’d sensed a new seriousness in the room, and he believed they’d made contact with someone in the military.  He preferred not to know; his role was as a facilitator, as a host, as a fundraiser, and as a benevolent countryman.

During these sessions, Lypynsky leaned against the kitchenette counter drinking coffee and thinking about the dancers he knew in Russia.  Once upon a time he’d believed that art had a moral value: a rightness conferred by the universe on that which was beautiful to look at.  Then he spent time in ballet companies.  He’d seen what these beautiful people did to each other.  They were backstabbers, they were gluttons, they were wolves.  Now he wondered if, when the circle met back up, it wasn’t beauty and cruelty that touched at the ends.

The members of the drone pilot’s club were not the beautiful people of the world.  But night after night they sat around this table chatting quietly about each other’s lives as they built incredible machines.  It seemed inevitable to Lypynsky that, before long, one of these pilots would be directly responsible for the killing of Russian soldiers.  In all likelihood, it would be the boy Petr, whose robot was the best of all: a bulky and sinister machine with a trapdoor on its belly that could drop a bowling ball onto the floor with the push of a button on Petr’s enormous remote control.  Petr was in high school.  He had a brother with Down’s Syndrome, a condition that made Lypynsky emotional.  He couldn’t pass one of these people in the supermarket or on the street without his chest tightening.  He was the same way with the blind.  If it was an obese person who was blind, or, God forbid, a person with Down’s Syndrome, it affected him extremely.  Or, a person with Down’s Syndrome who had very thick glasses, or a person with glasses who had a lisp.  He wasn’t proud of this.  He was afraid it was a kind of fetishization; he believed it probably had to do with his own beauty and physical robustness.  Nevertheless, he felt it, and when he saw the reporting of his countrymen under attack in the Donbas and elsewhere in the east, and when the victims were, for example, a person with Down’s Syndrome, this was when he felt the pathos of the war most acutely, which was to say, this was when he became the most fiercely defensive of his country, and when he became thirstiest for revenge.

Petr was among the downtrodden.  He wore dirty track pants too short at the ankle and slippers that he clearly borrowed from his mother.  He had government-issue glasses and he flipped his hair off his forehead like a girl.  He had a bird chest and soft shoulders and he bounced on the balls of his feet when he walked.  When he got excited, he shook his hands like he was trying to dry them off.  But he had good teeth and a strong jaw, and Lypynsky would glance over to see the boy leaning into his huge robot, his arms buried in its guts, with a screwdriver and pen light clamped in his mouth, and Lypynsky would swell with pride.  Lydia, and Masha, and Grandpa, and Petr, who would someday kill (someday soon), and the silent black dog with no tail and ears like a fox, and Mama Inna, who ordered a pizza to the basement (Lypynsky could have killed her), a pizza for them all to share: these were soldiers.  These were heroes.  Even Lypynsky himself, a soldier, leaving that bulb on upstairs and sneaking down into the basement on sore feet to put on coffee, and who in his extreme boredom found his muscles twitching into just the suggestion of plié, then relevé, and his arms going through the old progressions, now closing his eyes and feeling his body fill and lift, the muscles firing, though he was only barely moving, more thinking than doing, though the thought of each movement flowed into the next just as the movements would, and his breath matched the thought of each movement as it would the movements themselves, dip, turn, breathe, lift: the old steps, the classical steps.  And then a gasp from the audience as he spun, his buttocks never leaving the counter of the kitchenette, but each muscle of his body responding, preparing on six-seven, his right leg à la seconde, lift to releve, close to passé, his body whirling in place—passé, passé, passé—and he opened his eyes to see everyone in the room staring at him, though he hadn’t moved, hadn’t made a sound.

It was after one in the morning when he locked up, taking out the folded pizza box under one arm.  The alley was empty.  It was a bright night and the horizon shimmered with what he’d come to think of as the glow of war.

To have the alleys of Odessa to himself on these shimmering nights was the small gift of this conflict.

He opened the lid of the dumpster and quietly shoved the pizza box inside.  They were still collecting the garbage, still washing the streets, and still the stoplights changed from yellow to red, and red to green, and the cranes stood over the shipping lanes like huge birds drinking from the sea.  The Sailor’s Wife, his favorite: walking once with Felix and Felix’s son, only a year old, and the child had leaned out of his father’s arms to suckle from the statue’s breast.  Lypynsky grinned at the memory.

There was someone behind him.  A heavy step: Mama Inna, having forgotten her keys again, perhaps.  Lypynsky turned.

“Good evening,” Lypynsky said.

The stranger continued toward him: a man in a ski coat, the kind the slalomers wore, with the collar zipped up to his nose, his hands in his pockets, and the little spider logo glinting back the glow of war.

“Good evening,” Lypynsky said again.

The man pulled a bottle from his pocket.  The aura between them blinked from red to green, and Lypynsky saw that the man was wearing medical gloves.  A drunk, discharged from the hospital.  Or, a doctor, and therefore a patriot.  Lypynsky’s thoughts accordioned together.  He stepped backward to let this man pass.

“Eat shit, swan,” the man said.  He flung the contents of the bottle into Lypynsky’s face.

“Three months in the hospital,” Jessica said, making full-on eye contact with me.  She licked her lips, and glanced sideways at Colleen.  She lowered her voice.

“Sulfuric acid.”

“Full body burns,” Colleen said.

“Liquid fire,” Jessica said.  She took a sip of her drink and puckered her lips as though the drink itself were acid.

“He nearly died,” Colleen said.  “It went through his clothes, all over his face and neck, his hair, everything.”

“It pooled in his underwear,” Jessica whispered.  “You know what that does?”

“Fuck,” I said.

“Like Play-Doh,” Colleen said.

“His eyes melted,” Jessica said.  “Like egg yolks.  He swallowed some of it.”

“You’re a sicko,” I said to her.  She wiggled her eyebrows at me.  I had forgotten Colleen.  Colleen who?  I was now in the thrall of Jessica.

“So, but, wait,” I said.  “This is who we’re seeing?”

“Yes,” Colleen said.  “He hasn’t been seen since the accident.”

“He’s been in the hospital the whole time,” Jessica said.  “They had to reconstruct his face.”

“And his dick,” Colleen said.

“But, so, it’s like a talk?” I said.  “On Ukraine?”

“It’s a performance,” Jessica said.  “Lypynsky dancing, full orchestra.”

“Why here?” I said.

“Dunno,” Colleen said.  “Apparently there are a bunch of world leaders in town, so it kind of makes sense.”

“Why are there world leaders here?” I said.

“To see Lypynsky, probably,” Jessica said.  “And they’re going fishing.  Shouldn’t you know that?”

I blushed.  I did know.  There was a group of VIPs who’d been on the river all week and I wasn’t one of the chosen guides.  From what I heard they were having a blast and catching lots of fish.

“All proceeds go to the war effort,” Colleen said.  “We don’t know what the ballet is.  They won’t say.”

“But—” Jessica said.  She looked to Colleen, who gave her a smile and a small nod.  “We heard a rumor.”

“We heard…” Colleen said.  They both leaned in, their smiles witchlike over the tea candle at the center of our table.

“He’s reprising the fouettés!” they said in unison.

They waited for my reaction, staring at me, barely containing their glee.  Each was beguiling; together, they were an enchantment, like twins from a fairy tale.  It wouldn’t have surprised me if, under the table, they were holding hands.  The Vicodin was working.  I was protected from their power; or, I should say, I shared in their power.  In my smart midnight outfit, in the bloom of my late-season tan, with my rowing muscles and two cocktails and the undivided attention of these extraordinary companions, these ballet experts.  I felt commensurate, I felt up to the implicit challenge.  I felt ready for an evening at the theater.

The fabrics of our outfits interacted with the fabrics of the outfits of the people already seated in our narrow row as we made our way to our seats.  It produced diverse sensations: camelhair on corduroy (sticky), camelhair on cashmere (very sticky), camelhair on puffer coat (frictionless, loud), camelhair on dark wool stockings (so sticky, and so pleasurable, I almost forgot to say sorry: I just grinned like a jack-o-lantern as I peeled myself off the poor seated woman).  We were in the middle, fourth row, very posh for the press.  It was the same theater where I’d attended fishing fundraisers, but transformed: velvet seats, a huge velvet curtain, and a scaffolding of lights the size of five-gallon buckets.  I checked my pockets, smoothed my pants, adjusted my socks, hitched up my belt, folded my coat, and was careful not to spill my drink as I settled into my seat.  I was outside right, leg to leg with Jessica, and I looked at her and acknowledged this leg contact, which was unavoidable and intimate, and she reached down and put three fingers on my leg, briefly, wonderfully, and I quit fussing with my pockets and just sat for a moment soaking in the creature comforts of my velvet seat at the theater.

The people in front of us kept turning around to watch something going on upstairs on the balcony.  I turned to see.  Instead of ushers, there were several large men in suits directing a procession of old people, some in suits, some in stylish and colorful button-up coats or robes, and one guy in military fatigues.

“What’s going on?” I asked the woman in front of me.  She was in her 50s, short hair, turquoise brooch, Prue Leith glasses.

“It’s the delegates,” she said, looking past me.

“The what now?” I said.

“The UN,” she said.

I pivoted and watched a tall man with a short white afro and a carved cane take his seat.  Next to him, already seated, was my friend Dane.  Dane was wearing a collared fishing shirt and sunglasses on croakies around his neck.  He must have guided today.  I tried waving to him.  He and the old man locked hands and came together in a brotherly embrace.  Then Dane lifted his feet and pantomimed like he was falling out of a boat and the two of them cracked up.

“Dane!” I hissed for a second time.  Probably he couldn’t hear me.

The crowd was excited.  Everyone was talking to his or her neighbor, old people were using their outside voices, and there was the swish and crinkle of fall clothing, and the tuning of string instruments from the pit in front of us (it wasn’t a real pit, just an orchestra assembled in folding chairs before the stage), and the whole room surged with activity, except for us: we were silent and still, brimming over with our own private excitement.  Then the lights flickered once, and twice, and it was like water hitting a hot pan.  A player drew his or her bow across his or her instrument.  The velvet curtain shuddered, as though the curtain operator was testing the controls.  For once, I did not have to pee.  Colleen reached into Jessica’s lap and squeezed her hand, and Jessica leaned her shoulder into mine, and I pressed my leg into hers, and she squeezed Colleen’s leg.  The string player bowed another note, this one long and clear, and ended with a flourish.  The lights went down.

They came up on the red curtain; the curtain opened on a plain black stage.  Someone cleared his throat.  Two rows in front of us, a hearing aid blinked, illuminating a woman’s pearl teardrop earring.  The silhouette of the orchestra shifted and resolved against the black stage as the players readied their instruments.

There was a murmur in the room as something appeared stage right: the knees and feet of a person in a wheelchair, pushed by an invisible assistant.  The chair came to a stop and with great effort, haltingly, the figure lifted himself to his feet.  He took a single jerky step forward onto the stage and the wheelchair receded from view.  It was Lypynsky: it couldn’t have been anyone else, though he no longer looked like the man in the poster.  His face was gone.  There was a general din in the room as people whispered and other people shushed them.  I would have been surprised if Lypynsky knew or cared: he had no ears.  He wore a skull cap over his waxy, featureless egg head.  The hat was the same off-white cotton as the rest of his outfit.  He moved across the stage with short staccato steps, favoring his left leg, his ballet shoes scraping the wood as he moved, and when he reached center-stage he turned to face the room.  The skin of his face was a shiny mottled camouflage of skintones but missing key features: no eyebrows, one eye completely gone, covered by what must have been a graft, the other eye hooded and searching.  His nose was two snakelike slits.  Where his upper lip should have been were beautiful tall white teeth that shone under the stage lights.  The scarring continued invisibly into his shirt and down his billowing pants.  One of his hands looked fine, with a halo of light catching the dark hair on his wrist; the other was shiny and clenched.

The first violin struck a plaintive note and the room went silent as though we’d been struck with a magic hammer.  I certainly felt that way: my limbs were floating and I kept glancing down to make sure my arms were still on the armrests.  I counted to five so I wouldn’t keep inhaling forever.  The orchestra began to play, and Lypynsky stood unmoving, or close to it, though when the music began he went from standing still to standing still with purpose.  His bearing shifted.  He was in a dancer’s pose: feet shoulder-width apart, arms at his side, neck taut, his one eye scanning the audience, finding the balcony, and then coming to rest on the stage in front of him.  His shoulders were hunched and his good arm hung lower than the disfigured one.  The strings filled in.  We were very close to the orchestra, and I could feel the vibrations from the bigger instruments.  The music rose, and shadows on Lypynsky’s shirt shifted as he took short shaking labored breaths.  And then the shaking halted and he became perfectly still.  The orchestra paused, leaving one high violin alone.  It trilled and fluttered, searching for a way down, and, finally, fell, and as the other strings swelled to catch it, Lypynsky extended one foot, and began to dance.

He moved slowly and carefully, progressing through what I assumed to be the basic positions of ballet.  He made his feet into an equals sign, with his arms at his hips.  He lifted his arms slightly and separated his feet.  He brought his right foot forward and made a hoop with his arm.  He lifted his arm and extended his foot, which through his ballet shoe looked like a cameltoe.  He began to raise his other arm, and faltered, blinking hard: he couldn’t lift the damaged arm fully over his head.  The music slowed, as though waiting for Lypynsky to recover, and he did, bringing his extended foot back into alignment with his first.  He exhaled and returned to a neutral stance.  The music looped, and Lypynsky moved through his positions again, more surely this time, still unable to get his arm all the way up in Fifth (Jessica whispered the positions now as he advanced through them), and when he finished the progression a third time, he began to move across the floor.  He still looked down at the stage, and as he moved, haltingly, apparently without much strength in his left leg, he seemed to be rehearsing steps in his mind: he stepped across the floor gesturing with his arms and legs, moving his head and neck with the music, though not quite dancing, moving his good fingers as though conducting a ballet in his mind.  He drew into a clumsy pirouette, pivoting on both feet, dipping no more than an inch, moving his jaw with the music, and returned to his mark at center stage.  The music restarted, and he resumed the same sequence, more committed now, though he still paused and faltered before the pirouette.

“He’s rehearsing,” Jessica whispered.

“It’s the White Swan,” Colleen whispered.

Jessica nodded, her eyes never leaving Lypynsky, who was advancing through the steps more fluidly, his fingers suggesting grand movements as he worked in a half-circle around the stage.

“It’s Odette,” she said.  “B-minor.”

Now the music stopped almost completely, except for one oboe, who sounded lost in a dark wood, and continued searchingly as Lypynsky returned to his position at the center of the stage, and, finally, lifted his gaze toward the audience.

“He’s a performing a rehearsal for Swan Lake,” Jessica whispered urgently into my ear.  Her breath was hot and smelled like red wine.  She could have been reciting the alphabet, or serving me court papers.  I nodded in total agreement.  Jessica turned and whispered the same thing to Colleen.

This pause was longer than the others, the oboe still searching, and then the rest of the orchestra began to play.  It was the same theme, but fuller than before.  Lypynsky began his circuit, this time not only gesturing with his good fingers but lifting his arms (the right still higher than the left), and, in a moment that elicited a gasp from the audience, lifting up onto the toes of his right foot.  The right stayed stubbornly down, and something like pain crossed his waxy face.  He lowered to the ground and completed the circuit and, as though he were in a hurry, began again, and the orchestra quickened to keep up.  He reached his mark stage right, lifted his arms, extended his chest, and rose first onto the toes of his right foot and then, with a sound like a seam ripping, onto the toes of his left.

Colleen made a squeaking noise in her throat, and someone behind me said, “Oh, god.”

Lypynsky remained en pointe, arms hooped asymmetrically over his head, and then slowly lowered himself back to the stage.  When his heels touched, he seemed to lose all strength: his arms dropped and he collapsed forward onto his hands and knees.

The orchestra abruptly stopped playing, and the room filled with voices.  Someone in the first row tried to stand and was pulled back down by his sleeve.  The curtain to the left of the stage rippled.  Through the back of Lypynsky’s shirt, drawn tight, I could see his dancer’s muscles.  There was a scratching sound that seemed to come from everywhere, and then I saw the fingernails of his good hand, scraping the wooden stage as his hand clenched and unclenched.

“He’s mic’d up,” Jessica whispered.  “His body’s mic’d up.”

Lypynsky drew himself up, first kneeling, then to his feet.  He held out a finger to the orchestra and gestured for music.  The oboe was the first to play, slowly at first, and he was joined by the strings, and now, with music again, Lypynsky resumed his circuit across the stage.  A dark stain bloomed just above the cuff on the left leg of his pants: blood, and something colorless around it.

Whether it was the adrenaline from his injury, or the new range of motion from whatever had torn, or just the choreography, he now broke from the circuit he’d been following and crossed the stage with long, sweeping steps.  He rose to point and began teetering on his toes back toward the front of the stage.

“Bourrée couru,” Jessica whispered.  “He’s flying.”

Indeed, as he flew, he lifted his arms and began to move them like wings, down at the elbow, the fingers of his good hand pointed, and the effect was like when you jiggled a pencil and it seemed to bend.  He flew past the orchestra, and began to flap harder.

“Oh, don’t do it,” Colleen said.

He did a small jump, extending one leg behind him, landed hard on his heels, made a swimming motion with his arms, and there was another sharp tearing sound.  He fell to his knees.

The orchestra stopped, the room stirred, and again Lypynsky got to his feet.  There was blood and the other wetness now blooming on his shirt from his left shoulder, and the fabric on his pant leg clung to his ankle.  He gestured to the orchestra, and they resumed playing.  He moved to the back of the stage, rose up on point, and again began tittering on his toes toward us, his arms moving in a pantomime of wings, and now he jumped, landed, swam forward, and rose elegantly on one foot with his arms and leg pointing behind him, his chest and chin extended like the figurehead on the prow of a ship.  From the audience came scattered applause.

And now he flapped harder, and jumped, and stumbled and fell.

His shirt clung to his body, dark with blood, and several people in the audience rose in the dark and made their way loudly toward the aisles.  Lypynsky danced, and fell, and the orchestra kept irregular time, slowing as he struggled to get up, and quickening as he flew and spun, leapt, and fell.  The spotlight stayed on him.  He danced more freely now, without some of his skin to stop him, and his smart jumps and spins earned him scattered applause, and then the shushing and scolding of the applauders.  How long had it been—ten minutes?  Not even.  And already the crowd had split into factions.  Even the orchestra seemed conflicted.  Only the spotlight operator remained loyal to Lypynsky, never taking his beam off the dancer, who left a slick of blood and something else—the word that occurred to me was “plasma”— as he danced and stumbled across the stage.  And now the beam operator held his light perfectly still at center stage as Lypynsky, his clothing dark and draped wetly on his body, stood breathing hard, his feet a perfect equals sign below him, and the left arm he’d been fighting with half-bowed above him.  With great effort, he lifted the arm higher, and higher still, and two seats down from me Colleen closed her eyes.  The oboe player, alone again, increased his volume as though trying to protect us, or himself.  And still we heard it, a sound like an inkjet printer, and Lypynsky’s mouth opened silently and his left arm lifted finally into a perfect oval above his head, fingers touching the outstretched fingers of his right.

“Fifth position en hout,” Jessica whispered.

From the orchestra came the sound of vomiting.  There was a pulse of light and low voices behind us: the large men guiding delegates out through the balcony door.

Jessica gripped Colleen’s knee.  “It isn’t Odette!” she whispered urgently.  She hadn’t taken her eyes from the stage.  “Look… listen!”

Colleen didn’t respond.  Her chin was to her chest and her knee was jiggling.  Jessica put her hand on my wrist.  Her palm was sweaty.

“It’s the black swan,” she said.  “He’s dancing Odile!  Listen… Look at his clothing… Oh, my god.”  She squeezed with her nails.  “It’s the fouettés!”

Lypynsky had returned to the front of the stage, breathing hard, his shirt hanging darkly from his chest like a wet sail.  The orchestra struck a jaunty melody, led by the symbols and the big strings, and Lypynsky waited, his arms bowed before him, one leg extended behind him.  As he stood, something changed in the music: the sound curdled, dropping from major to minor, oozing down in tempo until the jaunty melody had become a dirge, sticky and dragging, percussive still with the symbols, but staticky, the way a storm might sound from a sewer.  The lights dimmed around the lone spotlight.  Lypynsky drew his rear leg forward, lifted his arms, bent slightly, and whipped his arms into a spin.  He rotated on the toes of his left foot, extending his raised leg, and as he bent the leg into a triangle and drew in his arms he accelerated into a tight spin that took him off balance.  He slipped in his own blood and fell hard to the floor.

The orchestra continued playing.  Lypynsky lay still on the ground, only the toes of his pointe foot curling and uncurling in pain or some electrical misfire.

An audience member rose from his seat and, loudly saying “Excuse me” over and over, moved to the end of his row and marched down the aisle toward the stage.

“I’m a doctor,” he said.  “I’m a doctor.”

He got to the steps at the front of the stage and paused, as though waiting for someone to stop him.  Where were the ushers?  The doctor took an audible breath (the whole stage was mic’d up) and stepped up the short staircase.  When he got to the top, the curtain beside him rippled and the arm and head of a big man in a black shirt emerged and blocked the way.

“I’m a doctor,” the doctor said, and his voice was projected throughout the room.  He startled, and shrank from the stagehand or assistant, whoever he was, and the stagehand beckoned him close.  Lypynsky was still on the ground, and the orchestra was grinding out its heavy dirge.  The stagehand whispered something in the man’s ear, and together they withdrew into the curtain.  It was the last we saw of the doctor.

Lypynsky recovered his strength.  He slid himself over to a dry part of the stage and rose to his knees, then his feet.  His face, smeared with blood, had the exaggerated contours of a Halloween mask.  And he again drew up his arms, and bent at the knees, and whipped himself into a spin, extending his leg, now drawing it into a triangle, accelerating, and then extending his leg and arms again, spattering with fluid the orchestra and the several remaining audience members in the front row.  The music plodded along as though it were coming from somewhere deep underground.  Lypynsky slipped and fell.

The door at the back of the room was passed from hand to hand.  Beside the doorway, a man in a tuxedo, his coat over his arm, chugged a glass of beer as his date pulled on his elbow.  The door opened all the way to let out a wheelchair and I thought I saw the reflected lights of an ambulance.  On stage, Lypynsky got slowly to his feet.  Less than half of the audience remained in their seats.  Colleen stood up and looked down for a moment at Jessica, then me, and turned and walked quickly down our empty row.

“That’s twelve,” Jessica whispered.  She reached out and took my hand.  Hers was hotter than mine.  Lypynsky found a dry patch of stage and drew his arms into an oval.

“Thirteen,” Jessica said.  “Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen…”

A droplet of something hit me in the eye and I lifted my non-Jessica hand to wipe it off.  There was a wet thud, and for a moment we were backlit as the house door opened, let out a body, and closed.

Jessica and I were having sex when Lypynsky died.  We were in my easy chair; he was in an ambulance on his way to the ER.  We’d left in a hurry after the fouettés, when the curtain finally closed, passing with the rest of the thin crowd through propped-open double doors into the lobby where various uniformed medical personnel stood waiting around a stretcher.  Thanks to the Vicodin, I had incredible stamina.  Afterwards she got out her phone and googled Lypynsky.

“Confirmed,” she said, her face ghostly in the light of the screen.  She was sitting in my chair with one leg over the armrest, naked except for white ankle socks and her silver watch.  There were red marks all over her pale body.  I was lying on the carpet, covered in bits of feather and thread and brown chenille.

“Bummer,” I said.  We were in the front room, facing the street.  My window shade was askew and I was convinced we’d been watched.  With the new urban camping ordinance the bike path by my house had become a thoroughfare for tweakers and the homeless.

“Pronounced dead at 11:07 PM,” she said.  She checked her watch.  “Injuries sustained during a ballet performance,” she read off her phone.  She squirmed in the chair and exhaled loudly.  She scrolled with her thumb.  “Dancer suffered…” she closed her eyes for a second, letting her knee fall to the side.  I watched; I couldn’t move.  “…Severe injuries from an attack in 2022,” she said, “when an assailant… Mm, fuck.”  She swirled her middle finger and closed her eyes.  She exhaled through her nose and opened her eyes and had to lift her phone to her face to unlock it.  “Yada, yada, yada,” she said, scrolling fast.  “Mumford & Sons show scheduled for Wednesday night has been postponed and the Wilma closed until further notice.  This reporting is trash.  I’m going to write the fuck out of it.  Do you have any Adderall?”

“I have Ritalin,” I said.  I could feel my voice vibrating in the floorboards.

“Regular or time release?” she said.

“Time release.”

“Yeesh,” she said, checking her watch again.  “Alright.”

I guess she stayed right there, working on her phone.  I don’t know.  She radiated professionalism.  I took a shower and brushed my teeth and then brought her a glass of water and disappeared without saying anything weird.  In the morning she was gone.  I checked the Arts page of the Daily Chronicle but there was nothing posted yet, and anyway it was behind a paywall.

Every two or three months Jon and Steven would meet  for lunch at the McDonald’s outside the town center where Main Street met Route 1. Jon was married and Steven was single. Steven had been married before, but his wife caught him cheating. Now he was divorced. The divorce had not interrupted their tradition of meeting for lunch, though it had limited its frequency for a couple years while Steven sold his half of the house and packed up his college fraternity mug, cashed out his stocks to split 50/50 with his ex-wife, and, after some consideration, finally bought a dog.

The tradition had sprung up because both men enjoyed McDonald’s, particularly the quarter pounder with cheese, and neither man’s wife (ex-wife, in Steven’s case) had appreciated their enjoyment of McDonald’s.  Jon’s wife, in fact, was offended that he preferred McDonald’s fast food to her meals. He wasn’t unreasonable. If you asked Jon, even if his wife was nowhere to be seen, he’d tell you that she was a great cook. Every once in a while an irresistible urge arose in him to buy and consume one or two quarter pounders with cheese, plus a medium fries and a Coca Cola to wash it all down.

In addition to the guilty pleasure of the food (if that’s what you’d call it. They did),  the men also enjoyed one another’s company.  Jon was a lawyer and worked at a firm in the city nearby. Steven was a developer, also in the city. They had met on the train during the middle of President Obama’s first term, as young men. The friendship they formed had lasted all that time.

It’s unusual that men form significant emotional bonds in adulthood with anyone besides family, and it would not be fair to say that Jon and Steven were close friends. Steven had never invited Jon and Jon’s wife to the Christmas parties he and his now ex-wife had held when they were still together. Jon had never invited Steven over for Sunday football with his neighbors. Still, they enjoyed the respite their occasional forays to McDonald’s provided from domestic life. So they had entered a small conspiracy together, which consisted primarily of talking about local and state politics or whatever extraordinary event was driving the news cycle, and eating fast food.

One day late November, they’d made plans to meet after the presidential election. The election had gone mostly how the previous election went: too close to call, with contested vote counts everywhere. A foul mood had settled over the state, as it had just about every state in the U.S.  and probably the world.

The two men met in the parking lot, pulling in at almost the same time. Steven greeted Jon with a wide grin that Jon returned, and the two men shook hands with their right hands, and hugged with their left arms. Even out here in on the pavement the men could smell that they were in the right place for fast food, the air greasy and warm.

Jon and Steven ordered their meals and paid for them both (they’d settled into a casual reciprocal rhythm years ago), then grabbed an order number and found a booth looking out over the road. It was mostly empty, just past the usual lunch rush hour.

“How are things looking? Feeling ok about the election? Still worried it’s all going to fall apart,” Jon said, reclining in the hard plastic seat.

“Not good amigo,” Steven said.

“Cheer up! Things happen, people are used to disappointment,” Jon said. “Unless the economy is truly fucked—  and it isn’t! Most people have a place to live, and food to eat! — you won’t find people desperate enough to pick up arms and fight. The French Revolution was started by starving peasants, not by annoyed nobles.”

Steven shook his head.  “You’re underestimating the anger out there, Jon. People are upset, not just about the economy, but about culture. All this DEI and woke stuff. And this is a middle-class country. So it has middle-class worries. Culture’s something that middle class people worry about, how to be a good citizen and neighbor. That’s always to the American been as important as food.”

Jon crossed his arms and leaned back. “I don’t know man. I get what you’re saying,  we’re a bourgeois country with middle class values. It’s just… you’re gonna pick up a rifle and maybe die to own the libs? Or because there’s a black family living down the street? Doesn’t it sound ridiculous? You’d die because of something imaginary some rich guy made up with a bunch of suits he paid for advice?”

“Me and you wouldn’t die, no, but we’re not everyone,” Steven said. “I know people in my world, you probably know people in yours, who sincerely believe every Democrat is a far left radical Marxist who’s going to ruin America. I’m not even talking about the conspiracy nuts, the ones who believe Democrats are pedophile groomers harvesting the adrenaline of children. I’m talking about normal people who feel the ‘progressive’ centralized federal bureaucracy is out of control. People who lost their job or some crucial opportunity because of a woman, or a minority. They know, and you can’t tell them different, that the most important thing is to ruin that federal control by any means necessary .”

“I guess the question is whether they’re ready for die for that, and — again — I don’t see it,” Jon said.

“Well I hope you’re right,” said Steven. “Look at that, right on time — the food!”

A heavyset woman who spoke with Spanish-accented English brought out their meals  on trays. “Enjoy!”

The men thanked her and tucked into their lunch. Steven ate more deliberately, chewing each bite and seeming to savor the meal . Jon devoured his food. He was finished with his second burger before Steven was through his first. Jon leaned back in the booth and spread his arms out.

“Ahhhhhh,” he exclaimed. “That hit the spot”.

“Why do you eat the burgers first and not the fries?” Steven said between mouthfuls.

Jon looked at his tray. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s how I saw my dad eating.”

“I’m the same way,” Steven said. “Burgers first, fries second. You know Ellen, she always ate fries or salad first. Never understood eating the burger beforehand.”

“The fries, also, I’d say, they’re more sortable. You can eat some of them. Much harder to eat ‘some’ of the cheeseburger and save the rest for later. And that goes triple for fast food. Maybe I’d do it differently if it was a restaurant burger. But I wouldn’t say it’s a deliberate thing. It’s just sort of how I eat.”   He paused. “Hey man, what’s going on?”

“You see that?” Steven pointed. “What’s that?”

Jon turned to the window.  Outside, about a hundred yards away at the intersection, there was some sort of commotion. Three pickup trucks had just pulled up and blocked the intersection. Armed men were getting out of the backs of the trucks or exiting the cab, about a dozen of them in total. They were carrying rifles, and wearing helmets and body armor. One of the people reached up and affixed a red light, like a police light, to the top of the middle cab. Several of the others were unloading materials from the backs of the trucks — orange construction cones, sawhorses.

“Is something happening? Is that police?”

“Must be FBI,” Jon said, thoughtfully. “Police have different uniforms. This looks like — I don’t know what it looks like. Can’t be police, though.”

Steven pulled out his phone and searched for information.  “Don’t see anything about it on the news.”

“Well, you know what they say,” Jon said. “If it’s not on the news, make the news. Film it.” He leaned forward. “Wait a minute. I think I know one of those guys. Yeah… the short heavy guy, over on the right. That’s his pickup truck. He goes to my church!”

Steven had begun recording the checkpoint. Lines were beginning to form at all roads. The intersection wasn’t busy at this time of day, which meant there wasn’t much of a line, but that’d change, this was a big road. Some drivers turned around. One driver traveling toward the McDonald’s in a Subaru Outback had rolled down his window and was gesticulating  at the men. Two armed men walked over and talked with him, then waved him through.

“I guess it’s a checkpoint,” Steven said. “Look, he’s turning in here — if he comes inside, let’s ask him what’s going on.”

“Are they wearing balaclavas? They’re wearing balaclavas, look. That’s not police, or FBI,” Jon said. “No way man. That’s a militia.”

The man parked the Outback. He got out and walked into the McDonald’s. Wearing a ballcap, boots, jeans, and a plaid shirt, he looked like he could’ve been a lumberjack — which is to say, like most of the people who lived in the area.

Jon flagged him down. “Hey, sir — sorry to bother you. Who are those guys out there? Do you know what’s happening?”

“Didn’t say much except that the road was closed. I told them I was just here to grab a bite to eat, and then needed to get home. Didn’t hassle me none.”

“Did you recognize anyone? Are they local? Police?”

“I don’t think so,” the man said. Turning to the self-order kiosk, he indicated that the interview was over.

Steven continued to film the men, some were setting up concertina wires, others continued to block traffic. “Call the police,” he said. “Let’s figure this out.”

“Already on it,” Jon said, his smartphone at the ready. “I’m on hold.”

“Did you call 9-11?”

“No, I can’t see as it’s anything urgent — I mean what if it is the police, or deputies, or something. Then I’d just be clogging up the emergency line. Someone might be out there hurt or dying.”

“Makes sense,” Steven said, still watching the checkpoint.

By now all but one of the cars had turned around. That last car, an electric Chevy, was being driven by an older woman, as far as they could tell. It was hard to see from this distance exactly what was happening. But the two men near the car were gesturing , and seemed to be exchanging words with her. Finally one of the men walked back toward the center of the intersection, and consulted with a group of the men who were erecting some kind of booth or room. Jon pointed at the phone and nodded; someone had picked up.

“Yeah, hi … I’m at the McDonald’s at the three-way intersection at Main Street and Route 1. Armed men in pickup trucks are setting up some kind of barricade or checkpoint and turning cars away… uh… rifles, assault rifles, that kind of thing. They’re wearing body armor and camouflage… about a dozen… three pickup trucks… not that I can see, ma’am, no. One has a red light on top of the cab of his truck. Ok, thank you.” He hung up. “It’s not police. They’re sending a car over.”

“Hope they get here quick. Things are escalating,” Steven said.

At the checkpoint, the woman had rolled down her window and was arguing with the men. One of them backed up, and raised his rifle, pointing it at her. Circling around to the other side, the second man tried to open the door.

“Holy shit,” Steven said.

The woman put the car in reverse — hers was the only car in that lane — and the man on the passenger side fell to the ground. Even from inside the restaurant, they could hear the other man shouting what must have been “get out of the car.” Instead the car whipped around and took off in the other direction as the man holding the rifle continued to aim.

One of the men from the center had run forward and was yelling “don’t shoot.” He reached the man and pushed the rifle down.

“Jesus,” Jon said. “Jesus are you getting this?”

“Every second,” Steven said.

“Here comes the cavalry,” Jon said, as a squad car appeared from the other direction — the direction of the town center. That’s where police HQ was, a couple minutes’ drive away.

The car pulled over to the side of the road, and two officers stepped out. After looking at the center, where one of the men nodded, the rest of the people took their hands off their weapons and raised their hands. The police officers walked up to the checkpoint. One of the armed men — he was short and stocky, well-built, the same one who’d disarmed the situation with the old woman — walked out, and shook hands with the lead officer. The two of them talked, the officers nodded, then returned to their squad car and left.

Steven laughed nervously. “What the fuck?”

“Should I go out there? Like I said I know that guy. We’re on OK terms.”

“I think we should get in our cars and get the hell out of here while we still can,” Steven said.

“Woah, look at this,” Jon said. Google maps was showing red traffic at several 3- and 4-way intersections around town. “We might be too late.”

“But what are these things for?”

“If the cops are ok with it, how bad can it be?” Jon said.

“Bad enough I don’t want to find out how bad it can be,” Steven said. “Hell I’d even say ditch the car, let’s just hoof it out of here.”

“Fine, I’ll finish recording. You finish your burger and fries.”

“I’m not hungry anymore,” Steven said.

The men at the checkpoint resumed their positions. One sat in a running truck, five were in the middle assembling some sort of ad hoc building or office, and the rest in pairs, guarding the roads and turning cars away.

A car approached that they waved into the checkpoint. The car — a maroon Toyota Prius hybrid — slowed down as it was approaching, almost as though it was having doubts. Like a warthog approaching a lounging pack of wild African dogs on the savannah, wondering whether to taunt them with its strength and quickness, or to escape. One soldier pulled back a strand of concertina wire and the other waved it into the area, while two of the men in the middle, who had stopped working, approached. The car moved through, and the concertina wire was replaced.

“That car looks familiar… can’t place it, though,” Jon said.

The leader of the armed men, or at least the leader of this group, opened the door, and a middle-aged woman stepped out from the car. He motioned her to walk with him, and another one of the armed men accompanied them, as the two appeared to talk.

“That’s our State Representative, Steve. Trish Froem. I knew I recognized the car, we worked together on a couple cases in the state capital.”

“Wasn’t she — there was some kind of scandal, right? She pulled influence to get her kids into that prep school on full scholarship?”

“That was a while ago,” Jon said. “And I think it was kind of blown out of proportion by conservative media.”

It happened so quickly. The man accompanying Trish and his leader jabbed her with what must have been a taser; while she jerked spastically, (flopping like a fish, Jon thought) he gently lowered her to the ground, then flex-cuffed her. Two of the other men ran up to help. After securing her, they carried her limp body into the back of the running pickup truck, and rapped on the hood. The driver exited the checkpoint and headed off down the road, away from the town center. Another one of the men piloted the abandoned Toyota into the McDonald’s parking lot.

Steven and Jon looked at each other. Steven stopped recording and put the phone in his pocket.

“You were right, we should’ve driven out while we had the chance,” Jon said.

“Wait — isn’t that the dude you said you know from church? In the Prius?”

Jon cocked his head. “Yeah, that’s him.”

“Ok, check it out. We’re gonna walk out of here like we didn’t see a thing and pretend to just bump into him, casually. Offer him a ride to the checkpoint. That’ll get us through.”

“What are you going to do about your car?”

Steven sat back, his food unfinished. “I don’t know, I’ll figure that out later. Right now we need to get out of here. Some bad shit’s going down.”

Jon nodded and they got up together, trashing the uneaten food, letting the empty wrappers slide off the tray and into the bin, then stacking their trays. Jon had this impression that he was floating in a swimming pool. Step by step, he thought. Don’t lose it.

Going out the front door was the hardest part. The doorway felt like a portal to a strange new world , one in which the election of a person, a human, to public office — state rep! — was less important than a handful of men willing to do that same person violence . Maybe that was the real world, and civilization was the delusion, a happy fantasy that enough people had tolerated for a few decades or centuries to make real. Maybe the truth was a world of violence like a crocodile catching a deer drinking water on the savannah and making the deer its dinner, and these people had figured that out. The question now, the urgent question, was how Steven and Jon were going to fit into this new world. Would they be waved through, or tased?

Jon willed himself to place his hand on the door, like walking into a courtroom, nothing to it, and then pushed through. Steven followed into the parking lot.

They’d timed it perfectly — the short militiaman was pulling himself out of the Prius, having parked it. Jon stopped somewhat dramatically — selling but trying not to oversell the moment of recognition. “Jeff? That you?”

The heavyset militiaman froze.

“Jeff Parsons! Hey, what’s — what’s going on, new car? What’s the getup?”

Jeff seemed disarmed by the questions. He froze, then pulled down his balaclava. “Hey Jon, how are you.”

“Good man. What’s, what’s going on?”

“I’m with a group of folks who are looking for enemies of the, uh, state,” Jeff said unconvincingly, shifting from foot to foot. “We got deputized by the local police to help.”

“Is that right,” Jon said, looking up at the checkpoint. “Well, this here’s my friend, Steve. Steve, Jeff and I go to church together.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Steven said, extending his hand. Jeff pulled off one of his tactical shooter gloves and shook Steven’s hand. Jeff’s rifle — an AR-15 secured by a one-point sling — dangled awkwardly from his plate carrier, spinning unsecured. I could grab it, Jon thought, but the moment passed.

“Hey so, I guess we should probably head home, if something’s going down — is that right?” Jon said.

“Yeah, that’s probably smart,” Jeff said.

“Let us give you a ride back to the checkpoint. I’m right here, hop in,” said Jon.

“Oh, thanks,” Jeff said.

The three climbed into Jon’s car, a Chevrolet Suburban. Jeff huffed and puffed a little pulling himself into the back seat. Steven got into the front passenger seat, and Jon piloted the car slowly to the checkpoint. When they were near, the car slowed, and Jeff got out the back, approaching the checkpoint on foot. He turned back to wave them forward and through.

“Well done,” Steven said quietly, his lips barely moving. Then raised his hand to wave, an insincere smile plastered across his face. Jeff waved back.

The two militiamen at the checkpoint pulled back the concertina wire, and Jon drove through, slowly navigating the wire and barriers. As the SUV moved through the checkpoint, militia men watched it. Behind their balaclavas it was impossible to know what they were thinking, or who they were. Other men from the town or area, Jon thought, men pulled into a movement or who had sought it out. Were they extremists? Or regular folks, like Steven said? Like Jeff? It wasn’t until they exited the other side that Jon exhaled. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath. Without accelerating quickly, he pulled the SUV away, and the place receded into the rear-view mirror.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Tight, that was tight,” Steven said. “But listen. Where are we going.”

“I’m going home to get my wife and kids, gotta figure out what the next step is for the family. Might be able to make our way there through side roads, miss any more of these bigger intersections. I can drop you anywhere you want after that.”

“Yeah, no problem.” Steven consulted his phone. “Look there’s a kind of long way around where you only hit one intersection. It’s down the road a bit, you’ll take a right on Landsdale, past the high school, but we avoid the center. Obviously local police are part of whatever this bullshit is. But there’s no way to make it clean to your house without hitting any intersections. What do you think.”

Jon was already piloting the Suburban where it needed to go. “Good plan.”

They drove for a few minutes in silence, the measure of their friendship overwhelmed by the magnitude of the circumstances.

There is a paradox in moments of crisis. One spends much of one’s life dreading catastrophe and everything that catastrophe means. But when the bad moment arrives, when the wind carries ill fortune, most people have within them the animal intuition for how to respond. Fight or flight. Everyone knows what to do, based on how evolution and education formed them. Jon was thinking about his wife and kids. Steven was thinking about his ex-wife and their kids, living a state away in Massachusetts, though they weren’t his family anymore. Also, he was thinking about what was happening, and his likely part in what might be to come. The old New England style houses and various small businesses of the town flashed by while Steven looked out the window at the newly foreign landscape.

“Here we go,” Jon said, slowing as they approached a long line of cars that heralded the checkpoint. It was still out of sight, around a bend in the road. “Guess the story is, we’re heading back to my house, you’re my friend, we’re grabbing dinner with my family.”

“Best lies happen to be true,” Steven said.

Though the line of the cars was long, it moved quickly. Some were peeling off rather than waiting. As they rounded the bend, the checkpoint came into view.

This one was different. It was made up of two police cars, one pulled off the road, the other in the middle. An officer was in each lane checking cars and directing traffic, while two more lounged by the parked squad car, carrying shotguns. This checkpoint worked as follows: a car would be brought forward, the officer directing traffic would take a photo of the license plate, then take a photo of the car’s driver holding up their license. It took each car about 30 seconds to be processed and sent on its way.

“So much for our clever cover story,” Steven said.

“Let’s not celebrate yet,” Jon said. “We don’t know whose laws these cops are enforcing.”

When they pulled forward and rolled down the window, Jon asked the officer about the other checkpoint.

“Can’t say what’s happening elsewhere,” the officer said. “But we haven’t deputized anyone. We’re state police,” he said. “Maybe local police are doing things different.”

“Doing what different,” Steven said. “What’s happening, sir?”

“Best you get home and watch the news,” the officer said, waving them through. “You’ll know more about what’s happening than I do. We just got orders to establish this checkpoint and log transients and that’s what we’re doing.”

They drove through. “’What’s happening.’ Dude!”  Jon said, shaking his head. “What were you thinking? The cop was waving us through!”

Steven didn’t respond.

“Well, it didn’t get us killed this time. So, straight shot to my house from here. You want to come with, figure out what the next steps are?”

Steven was still looking out the window. “Actually, why don’t you drop me off. It’s not too cold. Think I’ll walk back to my apartment. Maybe get the lay of the land.”

“You sure? I can drop you there later, once we’ve sorted out what’s happening. Safety in numbers.”

Steven didn’t want to say so but the idea of plugging in with Jon’s family did not appeal to him. Being part of a family at a moment like this, it was an implicit commitment to others he didn’t feel like making. He had too much (or too little) self-regard to insert himself into another man’s family. To be their Kramer, some guy who was a third wheel, to the main plot of Jon and his wife’s journey with their children.

Part of him had this idea that whatever was happening was an opportunity, a change in the order of things. The state representative (Steven resented how Jon had put it; he remembered her being crooked, a person of low integrity, not ‘blown out of proportion’ at all, if anything tolerated and swept under the rug) had been poorly treated. Nobody deserved to be tased. But was her removal unjust? No, the people had just had enough of being oppressed. he thought about how his ex-wife had demeaned him and gotten into all that crazy woke DEI stuff. He wasn’t sadistic, Steven; he was a reasonable man. And you can push a reasonable man so far, he thought.

“Yeah, let me out here. I need the exercise.”

“Good luck,” Jon said pulling the car to the side of the road. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

“You too,” Steven said, opening his door. He paused, then turned back to Jon. The men shook hands and looked each other in the eye. Then Steven nodded, and closed the door.

“Drone up,” said Lieutenant Levi.

Heads turned and eyes followed the drone’s swift ascent to the sequoia canopy 350 feet above. It briefly hovered there before slipping out of sight, free of the enclosing redwoods and the damp shadowed ground.

“Eyeballs on the treeline,” ordered Captain Sophie Bencker. She stood next to the prisoner in the midst of the small circle of Rangers in the clearing. Good soldiers, special forces and Marines. But they’d been out here three weeks. Too long, she thought, and searched for Cat. It was a game to see if she could spot its nano-camouflage. There! Some thirty yards away by the northeast treeline, just beyond the unit’s defensive EM bubble. Still and sphinx-like, Cat was peering into the trees, perpetually ready. A hybrid predator of nano/biotech and huge male cougar, its luminescent red eyes gave troopers the shits.

Snowbird-North Fork CS Zone was an immense glory of primeval forest. In the early 2040s the UN had renamed all world forests, temperate and tropical, as Carbon-Scrubber Zones. An attempt to save our planetary lungs from incessant pillaging, it also made for good PR. Yet Snowbird had rare earth mines—and hydrothermals—which added up to very big bucks. Particularly for the Consortia, unholy alliances between defence, mining and tech-media, which sponsored most public ventures.

In the clearing, Janssen, Fernandez and Kelly were fastening their HOTS, Hostile Terrain Suits.

“I’m sick of pissing in my suit. Three weeks out, it stinks,” said Fernandez.

“Yeah, you stink like a bear,” said Kelly, activating her own suit. “But gotta recycle those meds.”

They urinated on the march to recycle their precious mix of bio-protection and performance-enhancing drugs, triple-A approved, and a vital advantage in the Games.

Once Taiwan was off the table, the superpowers had seen the futility of endless confrontation. They could still dominate the show and make gestures to eco-stewardship while keeping a tight rein on their own populace. The business of war had become too risky for those in power and far less rewarding. Also in trouble were the bloated dope-ridden Olympics, tame sports for fractional achievements. Already losing their appeal for fragile societies ridden with eco-guilt, suicide bombers at the 2036 Mumbai Games put the nail in their coffin. Sensing an unprecedented opportunity, the Consortia and their shadowy financiers had created the New Reality Games.

Its players were veterans and loner-chancers of all nationalities; its stars were ex-special forces. For these near-redundant military, the Games meant good money, playing with new if untested tech, and rules of engagement that were… flexible. Survival odds were equally variable, and players needed any edge they could get. The HOTsuit was nano-metamaterial and piezoelectrical-responsive, sealed head-to-toe, and designed by Hugo Boss, to boot.

“Hey Kelly, your tits really that shape or is it just the suit?” asked Fernandez.

“You’re never gonna find out,” Kelly countered with a smile.

“These suits really protect us?” asked Koch, the newbie on his first deep patrol.

“They’ll take a hit from light fire, shield your body heat against infra-red detection, and bend light to give basic camouflage” said Janssen who really got off on this stuff. “Temporary protection against biochems, and limited EM defence”

“Can’t wait to see if that’s true,” muttered Kelly. Looking at Fernandez she added: “If the Enclavers or Smugglers get hold of you, they’ll strip it off. And dump what’s in it.”

“You’re kidding, right?” asked Fernandez. Kelly just turned away.

The New Reality Games offered a spectacle of lethal conflict at human scale in a choice of environments “protected” by a bankrupt UN. Governments bought in. The Global South ravaged by floodwaters, firestorms, and epidemics saw lands emptied by violence and migration become newly lucrative. In the First World, rulers eschewed the thankless business of governance in favour of full-on entertaining of their consumer-citizens, those purposeless slaves to the social media mainstream as they curated their stories and imbibed podcasts. Gamers&Gamblers Anonymous briefly became the flagship 12-step recovery programme until outlawed.

“Just stay on mission, stay alive, and bank the friggin paycheck,” said Kelly wearily.

Protected forests needed protectors, and Bencker’s Rangers were among the best. They were owned by PC—the Pacific Consortium of Afrikaan Mines, AppleMeta, LevantSolar, Nike, Russian SiberNex, Vatican Zurich Holdings, and X-Disney. The PC yellow-flash-on-blue logo adorned their uniforms, along with its slogan We fight For Trees, which was unwise to dispute.

This particular, early Spring mission of Bencker’s Rangers was a deep sweep into Snowbird to check on the principal mining operations and tolerated human activities, read tree monitors, gather intel on strange reports filtering in from deep country, deal with any bad guys, and generally strut their stuff.

“The HOTS will keep you safe, Fernandez,” Janssen put in helpfully, exchanging a look with Kelly.

The Games were invisible to those on the ground. Airtime was not live—financially and politically way too risky—but edited and sold for online VR/AR products showcased at Moondance, the annual games fest where the world came to shop for some dynamic oblivion.

All of which made the Captiva, their new prisoner, very valuable. They’d stumbled upon her just before dawn. Strange. She was one of the forest dwellers, rarely seen. In Snowbird a deep patrol could come up against armed groups either from the fortified Enclaves of wealthy religious wackos or from Vancouver smugglers using stealthcraft to run in food, Sinopioids, weapons—oh the bosses loved a brush with those guys. There were also survivalist Treeboys looking for redemption or whatever, and these Captivas, who just goddam lived here. Then there were the weird rumours, stuff that bounced around a campfire at night. Keep the lid on that shit thought Bencker.

The Captiva. She was compact and muscular, Asian-looking with black pony tail and a crest of grey like a warning, and eyes that missed and betrayed nothing. She sat on the ground, her hands bound behind her. Lieutenant Levi’s SCAR 7.62 mm had the safety off and its barrel was in her face, and she held his gaze. Captain Bencker entered the small circle of troopers.

“Lower your weapon,” she ordered in even tone.

A spasm played across Levi’s well-shaven jaw; troopers watching the treeline glanced over.

“Sir, the Rules say prisoners are without rights,” countered Levi. “She’s probably been raped, anyway.”  Trooper Fernandez, down on one knee and eyes on a small navscreen, shook his head.

“Not by us,” said Bencker quietly. “The weapon, Lieutenant.”

Bencker never pulled rank and the quietness of her voice spoke of something coiled. Those within earshot tensed. This had been brewing awhile: a shaven-headed female commander with a reputation even outside the Rangers, and a marine hunk with a gilded tech-and-sports education and son of a Consortium bigwheel. And now this prisoner, who likely doesn’t know shit about the Games. Levi wants to waste her, WTF?

Cat had locked its red eyes on Levi. Neurolinked to the commander, Cat received Bencker’s biofeed and instructions and sent back images and recon sense-data. Levi didn’t have to look at Cat, just felt the eyes. Slowly he turned from the prisoner and cradling his weapon, sauntered to the perimeter with a fuck-you roll in the shoulders. The Captiva’s eyes followed him, then went to Bencker who spoke for everybody to hear.

“The Captiva might have intel, and knows how to survive here.” Play with what you’ve got. Her own weapon was slung across her back, her preferred Heckler & Koch MP5 upgrade.

“Hope daddy Levi don’t spot that little scene,” Kossowski said quietly to Janssen, who nodded.

* *

Something had now opened inside the unit. An opening could be as sharp and haphazard as an incoming shell or as drawn-out as nursing a cold beer while stoned under a hot shower after a patrol in bad bush. It was all SAR, Situational Awareness and Readiness, what nerves fed on in the field to make each moment full and keep you alive. Regardless of all the think-positive shit or meticulous PPTs in a pre-op briefing, out here in deep Snowbird the mind was veined with uncertainty. How does this Captiva survive? wondered Bencker, moving away to sit against a small rock.

* *

Janssen finished cleaning his Glock automatic, an uncle’s hand-me-down; he loved the heft of it. He looked over at Cooper sitting on the ground with his plants. “Cooper, what you got for us today?”

A trained botanist and mycologist, Cooper could spot a mushroom at 30 yards. “The usual, some buttons, ink caps, oysters, chanterelles. And a shroom,” holding it up. “Psilocybe semilanceata. This little beauty will open your mind and mess with your brain. If you have one.”

“Fuck you,” said Janssen, and Kelly smiled, then noticed the Captiva looking at them.

“What’s your problem?” asked Kelly. “Hungry? You want some?” as if teasing a child.

“Shut it, Kelly,” said Cooper, squatting in front of the prisoner and holding out the mushroom with a questioning look. He waited; they all waited.

“If she won’t speak, maybe Levi had the right idea,” said Kelly.

“Maybe she’s scared of you,” said Janssen.

“Not this one,” replied Kelly. “But she might hate us. And she doesn’t like us picking her mushrooms.”

“Sacred.”

The word fell from the Captiva and drew eyes to her, and nobody spoke. Again Cooper held out the mushroom: “Sacred, how?” he asked quietly.

Bencker had put down her book and was looking at the group.

“We talk to the dead,” and her eyes travelled over them, “to our ancestors.” Cooper nodded, his brows knitted together, and backed away.

“Now that is intel,” he said, mostly to himself.

Kelly breathed out audibly. “Friggin ancestors done shit for me. I don’t even know my parents.”

“Hey, straight up, Cooper,” said Janssen, whose social skills were what you’d expect from someone on the spectrum. “What you reckon’s out there?”

“No friggin clue,” said Cooper. “And hope it stays that way. Anything could stay hidden in this.”

“C’mon, what aren’t they telling us?” insisted Janssen.

“It’s probably the mines,” answered Cooper slowly. “Rare earths and heavy metals discharged into ponds and streams, then leaking into the aquifers. And the mines are just the stuff we know about.” Silence.

Bush fever. Bencker couldn’t let that get into her unit.

“Trooper Nurri, activate Exemption,” she ordered loudly. Nurri stopped scoping the treeline through his gunsight and touched his suitPad. He was the only one Bencker could bounce ideas off of—the price of being a woman in the ancient profession of arms commanding men, some of them smart… some, well, less than smart. Nurri was self-contained and ruthless, with a devilish sense of humour and piercings in strange places.

“Snowboard CSZ is unoccupied, Captain,” commented Nurri, and Bencker gave him a pointed look.

Exemption protects us but also reveals our position, I know.

“Exemption activated,” quickly confirmed Nurri, knowing better than to give her attitude.

Regardless of popular misconceptions and Consortium hype, big data-assisted AI had only amplified the uncertainty of warfare for those on the ground. Sure, troopers humped hi-tech weaponry and sweated in HOTsuits, but they were up against odds they could never fathom. Game rules forbade calling in fire-support or medical evacuation. You went in and you came out. Or you didn’t. Shareholders and spectators of the Games would always be the winners, so finish the mission and stay alive. Troopers functioned more or less strung out in their private meds-enhanced SAR-cloud; some of these Rangers were also stoned a lot of the time, thanks to Cooper.

“Another morning in paradise,” said Kossowski, sitting on the ground and spooning rations into her mouth. “Friggin mist, it’s always shifting, things appear and disappear, can’t tell what I’m seeing.” She licked the spoon carefully and began packing her gear.

“And drip drip drip all friggin night,” added Koch, bloodying a Tiger mosquito on his arm; dengue was rife here but the meds should handle that.

Fernandez took a last look at the photo of a lady, his, and their child, slid it inside his suit and stood.

* *

Bencker took meds; she also had Cat to bounce off. But her refuge was a tattered copy of the Odyssey. Where it spoke of creatures that lure ships onto rocks she’d noted: “the Sirens speak to each sailor only about himself. Like algorithms.” Damn this Captiva.

Bencker went to the prisoner, knelt and held out the black carbon neck-bracelet. “Put it on.”

The woman stared at it, expressionless, stared at her and down at the large dagger in Bencker’s belt. The Captiva took the bracelet and slowly put it around her neck, clicking it to lock. She now belonged to their SecurNet—in fact, to Cat. She could try and run but… bad idea.

Bencker moved back to the rock and the Odyssey. Her father had also been a reader and his old copy of the Iliad was on her desk back at base, his photo tucked inside. It had ridden in her pack until she’d discovered the Odyssey, the first tale of a lost wanderer

Her father the Colonel had been a decorated warrior of the conflicts that had seen the rise of the consortia. He’d died in an infamous op at MB7, a mining-base in northeast Africa, when everything had gone fatally wrong for the unit… and unexpectedly well for its sponsors.

Twenty years later, situations were even more “fluid,” even for the Games. Slick Powerpoint assumptions broke as soon as a boot touched the drop zone—even because it touched the ground, in this quantum fuck-up of a world. Bencker had become an elite soldier because her loneliness and rage could only be soothed in battle and its liminal moments, where knowing and caring were fused in pure awareness of death, of its imminence. Her personnel file was a mix of medical reports and censorial black ink, and troopers either avoided her in the mess or vied for a place on her team.

Resting on the ground against the rock, Bencker read her Odyssey. Kelly and Janssen, sitting nearby, exchanged looks.

“Any answers in there, Captain?” ventured Janssen carefully.

“No,” said Bencker. No answers; acceptance, maybe. She resumed: “Three thousand years ago wars were short and small-scale, close-to and savage, sometimes honourable,” said Bencker, echoing her father. She turned her head, suddenly aware that the Captiva was looking at her and the book.

“Men fought like animals, some saw themselves as half-gods,” she added.

“No shit,” said Janssen, nodding. “No shit.”

“Uh, and the space thing that the Colonel—” began Jenssen.

“The Space, his notion of leadership, Trooper,” Bencker said with finality, putting away the book.

“And the women?” asked Kelly.

“They washed bodies and mourned, or waited for their men,” replied Bencker. “If on the losing side they were sold, or…” she stopped, remembering the Captiva and Levi and what he’d said. Kelly and Janssen looked at the Captiva then away and began scoping the trees through their gunsights.

“Move out in ten,” said Bencker. “Lifting the Bubble.”

Gloved fingers checked safety locks, flipped off screens, patted pouches, stoppered canteens, felt to ensure a knife was to hand, adjusted straps, all before catching the eye of another trooper for a long second.

For Captain Sophie Bencker, the Space was her Rangers and this forest, was achieving the mission and bringing everybody home. The troopers’ HOTs were now sending in their KVIs (key vital indicators) which flitted across Bencker’s visor, confirming their biochems were stable: the Space rebalances itself.

Suddenly she was aware how quiet it had grown. Cat?

“Check for Sweepers,” she ordered. These autonomous weaponised droids were the delight of west coast EcoPuritans and ZenBuddies, each with a self-righteous agenda and no time for human messiness. Sweepers protected the forest and had the legal right to kill interlopers who didn’t signal an Exemption.

“Movement, one click northeast,” said Kossowski, and troopers turned and looked at her. Kossowski was on point, a comms role that demanded one’s visor-SAR to be always active and attention at 100%. Point was a prime target for snipers. On the edge of Bencker’s mind a wind blew down the neurolink as chunks of data fed in from Cat already speeding towards the unidentified threat.

“Moving erratically… in our direction,” said Kossowski.

“Could be a Sweeper, Captain,” said Nurri, frowning, and with reason.

Their Exemption was active so there should be no problem. But the briefing had said the area was empty of Sweepers and likely hostiles.

“The drone?” asked Bencker, looking around for Levi. She had just touched her sleeve panel to raise the collective EM defence bubble again when suddenly she gasped as if hit in the gut, feeling her feet begin to slide. Koch had raised his rifle toward the northeast but was already crumpling to his knees. In the same instant Bencker’s own suit-bubble was activated—Cat’s doing—as she pivoted to throw herself on top of the Captiva and everything went dark.

* *

Seated in PC Command outside Eureka, northern California, Operations Controller Ellis squinted at the big wallscreen. “Bencker’s unit?” He’d never gotten used to the Consortium’s obligatory “team.”

“Offline, Sir. And we’re trying to confirm a sonic pulse.”

“Sonic? Out there?”

“Trying to identify but interference is heavy.” An understatement, given canopy density and high hydrothermal humidity.

“Find them,” said Ellis as calmly as he could manage.

Sonics were not standard on Sweepers, so that should rule out a rogue droid, or so he hoped. He had maybe 30 minutes before this “situation” leaked to the Consortium’s ears-and-eyes and his red desk telephone went berserk. Turning his head from side to side to ease his neck muscles, he walked oh so casually out of the Ops Room to his office. Closing the door he activated the bugscan: all clear. Carefully he punched a code into his private phone. After a lapse, another phone buzzed far away.

“Marvin.” Ellis heard his codename with relief despite its nerdy ring. “What a pleasant surprise,” said a rough, careful female voice.

“Aunty,” he replied in what he hoped was a neutral tone: This cloak-and-dagger stuff was not his game. He paused, then: “The lady. She’s disappeared on mission in Snowbird. Her unit is down, no movement.” Silence. “We’re waiting confirmation on a rogue sonic pulse.”

“And Cat?” asked the woman after a beat.

“Active, was active for nearly an hour after the incident, then nothing.”

Ellis heard the slight seeping of breath from ex-Lieutenant M’Gele, officially KIA. She’d served under Sophie Bencker’s father and her Shibriya dagger would reply to any who dared speak a word against the Colonel.  After MB7 her missing body was just one of the strange things that had happened that day. She had survived, and only Sophie and Ellis knew this, which suited M’Gele just fine.

“If Cat is moving then the lady is too. If you have no indications of further attack then we can assume she decided to go dark.” Just like that day years ago at MB7 with her colonel in their last battle. The entire squad, an ambush—though by whom had not been clear.

“Keep me informed, please.” She hung up. Ranger Sophie Bencker, with the blue-eyes of her father and a ferocity all her own, was going to hunt. “Be without mercy and find your song, little leopard,” M’Gele said to the shadows. She touched the red garnet at her throat, remembering the promise she’d made to her Colonel as the light had left his eyes: I will protect your daughter.

Ellis sat, not moving. He too was back to that day at MB7, as the young Watcher in Rome EuroCommand following Colonel Bencker’s unit, seeing events unfold on screen, recalling the carnage found later at the mining base. Taking a deep breath he slowly let it out. Tonight would normally be an at-home with his wife Paula and their two little girls, for pizza and TV. But not this night.

* *

‘‘Dad.” Captain Sophie Bencker flashed back in cinematic microseconds. “Dad dad dad.”

If only she could have known him as one soldier to another. Would he approve of her tatoos, and her shaven head, devoid of the golden locks he’d so loved? He might balk at CAT and its neurolinks; he used to look at their dog Mifty and just grunt, and it had seemed to work between them.

Her father’s image wobbled; the eyes changing to red and Cat looking down at her. Clarity flowed along their link. But never make assumptions: “Identify!” She said with difficulty, and felt its purring of approval. Bagheera entered her mind, the private name she’d given Cat, taken from a story dad used to read to her. Then down came Breathe, and Cat’s own deep breathing began to pace and calm her own.

“I’m good.” SAR was re-establishing itself.

“Nurri?” Nothing. “Levi? Kossowski? Cooper?… Janssen? Kelly, Fernandez?”  Cat, Sitrep!

Down the neurolink came images of troopers scattered on the ground, none moving, and: Levi has gone. There was no signal from the drone. What the hell happened?

Swift activation of her HOTSuit had saved her and the Captiva. Need to move, she thought-sent. Cat replied with an image of the woman and a warning. Bencker flashed back: she comes with us. Intel, survival.

With a growl Bagheera bounded off, his sense-data flitting across her visor. Bencker nodded to the woman who sprung off fast, following Cat with ease. Bencker could see that this was her land. Levi. WTF?

* *

The team’s drone had returned, its control now overridden by CSZ Command. It hovered over the clearing and the scattered troopers of Bencker’s unit, then descended over each body. Away in the Ops Room, all eyes were riveted to the big wallscreen. As each face came into close-up the trooper’s name appeared in a side column. They looked peaceful, thought Ellis. A message came onscreen: two MIA, Captain Bencker and Lieutenant Levi.

“Can we get a fix on them?” asked Ellis. “And what about the Cat?”

“Negative, for the moment. Damage, or environmental interference,” said a young operator.

Ellis glanced at the red phone. “Levi,” he said quietly. An inevitable shitstorm was heading his way once Levi Sr in corporate HQ came looking for an explanation of a lost team that included his son—and for just a few seconds of footage. Heads would roll. He recalled a saying of Colonel Bencker’s: “When playing poker, remember it’s always serious, even when they say it isn’t.” As a rookie Watcher listening to the Colonel over a beer and totally overawed, Ellis had thought this unbelievably cool. Now he was beginning to see what it could mean, and didn’t like it.

“Keep looking, see what Narciss comes up with,” Ellis ordered. Narciss, their mighty AI sitting on photonic quantum hardware, was there to facilitate decision-making. But in the particularly fluid “fog of war” they had to confront nowadays it was of little use. “Beware of geeks bearing gifts,” he said under his breath, adding: “Keep safe, Captain Sophie Bencker.”

“We have one alive!”  All eyes in the Ops room flew to the wallscreen. There was an arm slowly rising. Ellis felt sick.

“Trooper Nurri, sir,” said the operator.

Ellis nodded. Nurri, tough bastard. And the Games don’t do immediate evac so I have to leave him, at least until Editorial decide how they can use him. He just has to survive the next few hours.

* *

The two women had stopped by a pool. The one with the black ponytail approached the small waterfall, and slipped behind the curtain of water. Bencker followed into the cave.

“We are undetectable here, the water and the rock,” said the Captiva, then: “Take this off,” touching the neck bracelet. Those eyes. Without you I’ll probably die here. Bencker removed the bracelet. The woman gently rubbed her throat; “I will prepare some food,” she said.

* *

They were sitting by a small fire. “It’s good,” said Bencker, carefully spooning the hot plant stew from a bowl in her lap.

“You will piss out the meds. Your body needs to rebalance to survive here.” Bencker paused in eating. “And you will take off the suit.”

My HOTS? “No friggin way!” Bencker’s eyes flashed. “I need to be in contact for my unit. They—”

“They are probably dead.” Then, matter-of-factly: “You would have heard something by now.” She waited, watching Bencker. “You must cut all comms to your base. And you cannot jog for long in the suit,” she said with finality. Rummaging in a wooden box, she handed Bencker a shirt, trousers, and top like her own, in a rough grey-green fabric. “Keep your link to the…” nodding towards the mouth of the cave, “but cut its comms to your base.”

Outside a shadow moved and a growl came down the link. Cat, cool it! This woman knows her shit.

“Also you smell wrong. Swim, wash.” She is used to giving orders, Sophie saw, but still didn’t move. The woman looked at her: “You stopped the soldier killing me. You covered me in the attack. Now I protect you.” She had brought out thick blankets, “At night it gets cold.”

* *

Later, the fire down to embers. Under blankets they were close for warmth, semi-naked.

“What is your name?” Bencker asked. The woman didn’t answer, but stretched her hand to touch the leather-bound Odyssey lying between Bencker’s breasts.

“I do not know you yet,” said the woman, looking frankly at Bencker’s body. “What is this book?”

I asked dad the same question. “Stories of ancient warriors.” Remembering his words, she added, “They were mighty as trees.” The woman nodded, and for the first time, smiled.

“My father said those times were violent, men were violent, a few were godlike. They fought knowing that any moment could bring the terror of gods in blinding light, and all a warrior could do was pray, ‘may the gods be on my side.’”

“Your stories are of people and the desire to be like gods. They could have chosen to be like trees, to be great without making the gods jealous.”

“Trees are dying, they get cut down,” replied Bencker too quickly.

The woman looked her full in the face. “We talk to our dead.”

Uh huh, mushrooms. Bencker was beginning to feel lost.

They stared into the fire. “I think your father is proud of you,” offered the woman. Bencker turned away from the fire, her gaze dropping to the dagger, her fingers resting on the scabbard.

“He gave me this Shibriya, a Christmas present. A week later came the funeral-drone carrying his ashes.”

It had been a clumsy, New Year’s Day media attempt to turn the Colonel into a posthumous legend as a prelude to the first Consortium Games. But by raising her teenage middle finger to the drone’s camera and the world, Sophie Bencker had become the angel of self-contained, traumatized anger, perfect for social media and its self-elected obsessiveness. Then she’d gone off-grid (keeping the details vague), eventually reappearing as a trained soldier hardened by pain. Now Consortium eyes and various nutters tracked the maverick Captain Bencker, Ranger. She was top dollar, with her tanned features and the sapphire eyes of her dad.

“I am sorry,” said the woman, putting out her hand gently to touch a shoulder. Bencker turned back, their eyes found each other. On the cave wall the dying fire threw their shapes which moved as if borne on the soft evening wind.

* *

It was first light and cold outside and they dressed quickly, then sat to eat in silence. Cupping her hands around a steaming mug the woman said, “You will know my name when I am sure of you.” Then added in a quieter voice: “I do not want the loss of you.”

WTF? Bencker’s gut churned. She knew about loss, her father, and now her squad.

“Do you know what happened to my troopers?” she asked.

“I was tracking you for a week.”

Bencker stared at her. “A week! But when we captured you—”

“I let myself be captured.” The words hung in the air. “We can talk later. Now we have to move. This is not a game, there are dangers.”

All clear came over the neurolink. Cat was blended into the forest shades, hard to see. All was still.

“Where are we going?”  Gotta keep my head straight.

“Into the deep woods.”  Bencker opened her mouth to ask another question but was cut off: “Now.”

Captain Sophie Bencker realized that she was going to have to trust the woman with her life. She already did so with Cat. For a soldier such trust was normal; it bound comrades to each other and to each waking day and each long night; trust defined them in a way that was absolute. But this woman was not a comrade in arms. Nor was she a stranger anymore. Bencker had unveiled herself to this woman, and with an intimacy she never showed. They were also bound together by danger. From now, uncertainty and danger would vie in her life with her capacity to trust, and this tension would be her Space. One hand resting on the hilt of her Shibriya, she looked up at the canopy far above and smiled.

“Ready?” asked the woman. Bencker nodded.

The woman set off at a jog through the shadows and mist among the trees. Her strong fluid gait reminded Bencker of another, many years ago: Lieutenant M’Gele. This land is their land. Now for Ranger Captain Sophie Bencker, the song of her hunt had begun.

“You coming to work, New Guy?” Sailor asks, and I snarl at my nickname. Dude gives me the creeps—somehow they stuffed a three-hundred-pound bear who never blinks into a uniform. When the plane landed in Kandahar last night a sergeant with bagpipe lungs paired us off. New blood was teamed with guys who’d been here for a while—I got saddled with Sailor. Ain’t no way some Navy goof is gonna push me around, even this missing-link motherfucker whose voice rumbles like grenade day on the range.

We leave the barracks and the Afghan sun kicks me square in the coin purse. Next thing I notice is the stink. Like when your little brother drops a deuce under your bed and, reaching for a sock, you grab it by mistake. “Hey Sailor,” I say, “Does it always reek like this?”

“Yep.” Deadpan. “Civilians wisely bury their shit to keep the stink at bay. Here in Kandahar we pool it in the poo pond. During hot days the shit heats up and particles attach to the dust. That’s why you can taste it.” Sailor leads me down the maze-like streets of the base, where twelve-foot concrete barriers offer a little shade. On top of each, coils of barbed wire scrawl like signatures. In fact, all I can see is concrete barriers and kill-wire, the world’s largest rat maze. Not some lifeless anti-oasis: there are troops everywhere with assault rifles. I snicker at a dead bird getting torn apart by ants like a bitch.

He’s right about the dust, goddamnit. Fucking everywhere. Within minutes of trudging through it, I could taste the poo pond and feel stones form in my nose. Next there’s this wicked-loud sound from behind—European police sirens wailing or how the fuck should I know? Sailor grabs my shoulder with a beefy mitt and we’re both face down in the ass-dust. “Rockets,” he hisses. The alarm eases into a snobby British voice of God going, ROCKET ATTACK, ROCKET ATTACK. Holy fuck, man. I’m not going to say I’m scared or anything—last summer after Phase Three of infantry training (HUA) I got jumped by four bikers and broke their faces with a pool cue, fearless. Still, having someone shoot missiles at my ass made my palms a little sweaty, ya know? But then there’s this huge WOOF except the dog is loud as six dragons. Gravel rains all over us. Alright, fine—now I’m scared shitless. Meanwhile, Sailor has hauled me on top of the friendly Afghan cactus, whose hook-like barbs itch for human skin. “Wait another minute, and then we move to that bunker,” Sailor rumbles, pointing with his never-blinking eyes to a concrete structure across the street.

“How am I gonna wank with my hands full of thorns?” Pretty sure I sounded tough despite my little squeak at the end. Sailor doesn’t say shit anyway—we hustle toward the bunker. I’ve got that feeling another rocket’s gonna burst before we get there and fill my guts with shrapnel. WOOF WOOF WOOF go the dragons.

Sailor flops against the concrete. “We’ll wait here until the siren sounds again, New Guy.” I’m not a big fan of taking orders from some cumguzzler—Sailor doesn’t give a fuck about my murder-gaze, and he seems to not get that I’m infantry, and Army, and therefore better. Sitting in the dirt, he rests his feet on the opposite wall and shuts his eyes. Sailor doesn’t look scared, but man, he’s about as tired as a Dad with forty-eight kids. I’m feeling safer since the bunker’s got these thick-ass walls—we’re talking three-foot-thick concrete. Almost underground except you can still see some sky through slits. Cloudless. Piercing. Blue.

Sailor catches my eye. “The Taliban pay locals to launch cheap rockets bought from the Russians. Fuck-all for accuracy, but as the base is big, there’s a chance that someone will hit the death-lottery and blow up a mess hall.” Dry laugh. “I don’t even blame them. The locals, I mean. Someone offers you more money than you make in a year to fire a few rockets at foreign devils? I’d take that deal too.” Sailor trails off and stares at that little patch of sky and the silence stretches. I’m thinking, fuck this guy.

“Sailor, you got a perverted way of looking at the Enemy. We’re talking terrorists and suicide bombers, right? Osama Bin Ladens? Fanatics who want to make an orphanage for your kids? I’m supposed to feel bad for psychos just because they’re poor? Listen, Navy, someone shoots a rocket at me they deserve to bleed out slow.” Sailor snorts. He looks like he’s gonna say something and maybe he’ll confirm that I’m the shit or maybe I’ll need to buttstroke the fucker, but that siren blares again and the British asshole is saying ALL CLEAR.

We pile from the bunker and start heading toward the mess. Sailor says, “When we get to work later I’ll introduce you to a friend of mine. He’s called the Fisherman.” He stares through me again. Oh great. This Fisherman sounds like another goddamn Navy guy, another silverback pillow-biter dreaming of ways to touch my junk.

The mess is colored with the same shit-paint as every other building. Sailor flourishes his ID to a raghead behind a counter. It’s like other messes I’ve been in back in Canada except there’s a hundred people here and no laughter. Sailor wanders to a depleted salad bar and scoops cucumbers. No wonder he’s grumpy—no fucking protein. I order the meatloaf, like a man, from a wizened dude behind a counter. Gandalf arches an eyebrow suspiciously, arms himself with a plastic glove, and tenderly places the loaf on the plate like it might explode. Not gonna lie, I’ve eaten some humble loaves in my day but that one could have moonlighted as the lung from the cigarette package. In the Army you choke down some weird shit and keep it down. I sit with Sailor and hack the rubbery mass with my plastic knife until it breaks at the hilt and Sailor hands me a spare. Finally get a chunk to my mouth. Never French kissed a corpse before but now I don’t need to: “Just add Tabasco,” I say, smiling.

After the meal we trudge down a street with big fuck-off tanks and trucks driving past. Tanks look different back home. These ones have sharp angles on the bottom and the turrets are belted with rebar. Distracted from the bubbles frothing up from the poo pond, and imagining what a swim would feel like on my naked skin, I lose situational awareness and follow Sailor blindly. Not that I’d ever admit it to him. I gotta get me a map of this place, man. There’s no fucking street signs or anything. I could get lost as balls and end up devoured by ants.

Pretty soon we reach a twenty-foot-tall gate with razor wire looping along the top. Sailor teaches me the door code and we enter the Canadian compound. I plug a nostril and fire a rock out of the other, and it ricochets off a second door with a separate combo. Inside, air conditioning. “Welcome to the Operations Centre, New Guy.” Sailor gestures at the room as if he’s pulling the curtain off a shitty masterpiece.

But what a fucking dump, man! There’s a couple of long tables covered with computers and wires which have a dozen grim-eyed dudes plugging away. At the far end of the room two large screens have words scrolling down them. Facebook chat for murder. There’s also a big television showing the news. Everything’s made out of knotty plywood, the cheap shit, except the computers and a well-stained coffee pot. “Time to meet the Fisherman,” Sailor says, guiding me to one of the screens at the front. No one looks up. “One of the things we do here is use drones to fire missiles at people putting bombs in the road. We watch them through our many screens, and when we catch them in a hostile act, we strike.”

“That’s what I’m talking about!” I say. “No fucking hidin’ in a bunker for me—reach out and destroy the Enemy.” I’ve heard about these videos: drone porn. This righteousness has spread all over the internet—assholes getting blown to bits. Sailor nods to someone and the video starts to play.

The screen shimmers into place over a dusty dirt road, lined with little ditches cracked with crotch rot. There’s this towelhead on the road, wearing pyjamas. He’s maybe seventeen or eighteen years old. The screen is gritty and the resolution sucks balls. Still, no cars, no humans, not even a fucking sheep, and the asshole is digging, no matter the afternoon sun.

“You killed this prick, right?” I ask Sailor.

He looks at me and for a second he’s a big fuckoff owl and I’m a mouse. He says, “We’d been tracking The Fisherman for a while, trying to make sure he was actually planting a bomb instead of working on the wadis. But here you can see a spool of wire and he’s connecting the wire to something in the hole he’s dug. We had the drones on site.”

As I’m watching the towelhead working on his bomb, the screen lights up in this flash. “Take that, you fucking raghead!” I cackle. There’s a big cloud of dust where the missile struck next to the dude. I’m surprised more people aren’t cheering. Killing towelheads gives me righteous wood, you know?

I figured he’d be evaporated, pink mist—get the mop—but no. When the dust clears the towelhead is on his knees and his turban is bobbing up and down like he’s praying. Wouldn’t it be a shame if the raghead pulled through? Maybe the missile missed? As the drone circles, the camera angle changes. I start thinking maybe he’s not praying after all. From the side, he looks like he’s fishing for something. Like he’s reeling in a bigass fish and he’s working his balls off to get that sucker in the boat.

I’m still trying to figure out what’s happening when Sailor says, “Praying and fishing, New Guy. Praying and fishing. My parents were born in Newfoundland in a little coastal village. Praying and fishing were all they had.” I see that the Fisherman’s not reeling in a fishing line at all. He’s got his guts smashed open, man. He’s got guts snaked out all over the fucking place. He’s just trying to piece himself together, grabbing handfuls of intestines and cramming them back inside. I can’t hear anything since we’re watching through a drone but the Fisherman’s got his mouth open in this noiseless scream. The meatloaf backflips in my stomach.

“New Guy, this is a Battle Damage Assessment, or BDA. We conduct a BDA after every strike to watch for a mob forming, to make sure the dropped weapons aren’t reclaimed, and to make sure the dead are truly dead.” The Fisherman writhes. He’s attracted a big swarm of flies, glittering grey pixels, trying to lay eggs inside him. He’s still cramming in his guts, but he’s losing speed. There’s so much fucking dirt and dust on his insides that there’s no way he’s gonna make it. “Normally when we strike and the victim is this injured we’d send a helicopter and get him to a hospital. But some zones are too dangerous, protected by RPG.”

We watch in silence. The Fisherman is still going. He’s getting slower and weaker, but he’s hanging in there. I get this awful feeling. My chest is made of cloth and it’s tearing. Some fabric I didn’t know I had, ripping apart slowly. You don’t know you have it until it tears.

Fuck this, man. Just gotta find the numb place. Just gotta get warm and comfortable and numb. I look over at Sailor and his face is as hard and cold and lonely as a mountain. I guess after a year of this shit, there ain’t no fabric left. Just rubble.

I don’t want to admit watching a towelhead snuff it bothers me, but after fifteen minutes I blurt, “Alright, Sailor, thanks. I fucking get it. It’s awful, alright? How long are we gonna watch this guy die, you sick asshole?”

Sailor fixes me with a stare. “This isn’t a television program where you can just change the channel. You talked shit earlier about how the Enemy deserves to be killed, and how the Enemy doesn’t deserve our sympathy. Well here’s something you don’t learn in your training. The skin colour is different but the guts are the same, aren’t they?” Now that Sailor has mentioned the guts I’m taking a closer look and they do look grey and slimy, even through the drone feed. The Fisherman is still twitching and I’m begging, actually begging in my head, Die, man. Just die already, alright?

I’m sure he only has a few twitches left when Sailor goes on, “Lot of people back home will want to know what Afghanistan is all about but you can’t explain the Fisherman to anybody. You just carry him wherever you go.” And as Sailor says this a dozen human shapes scurry down the road—I’m sure they’re scorching in those burkas. As they come closer I pick up details, you know? Like a few are wringing the shit out of their hands, a few have baskets and they’re collecting parts. One woman gets right next to the Fisherman and takes his hand and you can see her wailing wailing wailing. I think of my own mother back home and how she’d feel watching me die like this and that cloth in my chest tears from shoulder to waist.

Sailor’s voice is soft. “When you strike, you don’t just wound a person. You wound a whole community. Just because your job is to drop bombs on people doesn’t mean you have to be a monster.” He goes quiet and I see his eyes shut down and he’s a mountain again.

Fuck this shit, man. Killing from an office? Killing with compassion? I didn’t train for this—I trained to be a warrior. Give me a C7 rifle and send me out past the barbed wire. I wanna be in the shit, with the other killers. I wanna sleep on a big pile of dead Afghans at night…

Movement on the screen: the Fisherman is still alive. He’s sprawled all over the grass with blood bubbles popping out. His lips are moving like he’s whispering to his mother. I catch myself leaning towards the screen, trying to listen, hoping he’ll say whatever he’s gotta say and then he’ll finally slump down dead.

But the Fisherman will live forever.

Somewhere near the Hải Vân Pass, Vietnam, 1969

I found her body tangled among a thicket of vines on the jungle floor. Our patrol stopped for the night, and we were digging into our defensive positions when I tripped over her shoeless feet.

“Grab your e-tool, Private,” the Sergeant said. “Let’s get her buried before sunup.”

I slung my M16 across my back and pulled the collapsible shovel from my rucksack. With the serrated edge, I hacked at the undergrowth snaked around her legs.

“Slowly,” the Sergeant said. “Check for wires.” The Viet Cong, we called them Charlie, booby-trapped the entire jungle. The Sergeant slowly ran his hand along the thickest vine, which wrapped around her shoulders. He followed it to the ground before slicing the root with the precision of a surgeon.

Around us, our platoon recovered from a nine-hour push through an uneven mountain pass. But in the boonies, sleep was elusive. Most nights, we sat back-to-back, resting in two-hour shifts, awaiting Charlie’s arrival. Their sadistic game of hide and seek.

Finally loose from her planted chains, the moonlight illuminated her body. She was short and thin, with calloused hands. Probably from a nearby farming village. The cotton threads that covered her torso were torn and blood-soaked. Her brown eyes peered through a veil of knotted black hair and followed me like Mona Lisa’s gaze. My stomach knotted.

“What are you going to do back home, Private?” the Sergeant asked. With the tip of his shovel, he drew a circle in the mud. A place to start digging.

I wrestled my gaze from hers. “I’d like to write. Fiction, maybe nonfiction. I don’t know.”

“Really, a famous author? Book signings, cafés in Paris, all that crap?”

“Not like that. I wouldn’t even use my real name.”

“Who in their right mind would do that?” the Sergeant said.

“Mark Twain was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.” I slid my shovel into the muck and tossed it off to the side, accidentally splashing across her face. With a rag, I wiped away the mud and pushed her hair from her eyes. In the trees, the nightbirds bellowed like a chorus of trombones.

“Is it one of ours?” the Sergeant asked. The hole in her ribcage was the size of a cherry tomato, but that wouldn’t tell where it came from. Charlie’s AK47 and our M16s made similar entry wounds but exited in different spots.

The AK47’s 7.62 round was powerful enough to blast straight through a femur. Our 5.56 rounds were smaller but faster. The bullet tumbled around inside the body, wreaking havoc on tendons, muscles, and organs before exiting somewhere completely different.

But she had no exit wound.

“Everyone knew who Twain was. He got the money and the fame,” the Sergeant said.

“The Bronte’s didn’t. Sure, they used men’s names because women had a tough time getting published. But Emily hated the notoriety.”

In the distance, the bushes rustled. Then, the jungle went silent. I froze. The Sergeant grabbed my flak jacket and pulled me into the hole. I strapped my helmet, pulled my M16 close, and held my breath.

Her body laid still at the mouth of the hole, staring up at the night sky. For over an hour, we crouched in silence, searching for eyeballs in the brush. But that night, no one came.

“I get it,” the Sergeant said after we went back to digging. “You just want to be broke.”

“No, it’s about the message. Orwell was a pen name to separate himself and his family from his ideology.”

“What kind of man puts ideas like that into the world and won’t stamp his name on it?”

“That’s the point. The story is more important than the name.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. I think that’s just what people say because, in the end, most names will be lost. The story goes on without them.”

We finished the hole and tossed our shovels to the side. It wasn’t 6 feet deep, maybe half that. The Sergeant grabbed her shoulders. I lifted her feet, and we slid her into the muddy ditch.

“Do you want to say a prayer?” I asked.

He shook his head no. “You’re the writer. You say something.”

But I couldn’t find the right words. So, we bowed our heads in silence. Then we picked up our shovels and filled in the hole.

1.

A rocket hit the village. I woke up to the sound of the explosion. My eyes widened, I jumped out of bed, put on my bulletproof vest, grabbed my helmet and boots and headed for the door. Another missile hit nearby. The ground shook and the wooden beams of the house creaked. I heard nothing but the beating of my blood in my forehead. My nostrils flared, my muscles tensed. The adrenaline was making me unable to think. I was ready to run out into the night in my underwear.

“Calm down, there’s nothing wrong,” said Petya from his bed across the room. He was a miner from Kharkiv. A hundred and twenty kilos of fat and muscle, with dog eyes and a raspy baritone voice. When he slept, the wooden building shook from his snoring. It was like sharing a room with a bear.

“It’s ok,” he repeated. “They are randomly shooting the hill.”

He sounded as if talking to a child who had a bad dream. Not that I knew how he talked to his son, but his tone suggested the whole Russian invasion was just a bad dream, with missiles thundering down.

My mind began to clear.

I knew if the place took a direct hit, I’d be dead before I could run anywhere, and if it didn’t, it would be pretty pointless to run out into the night.

Yet this was always my reaction when the missiles hit too close.

Petya, seeing my confusion, got up, pulled his backpack out from under the bed, and took out a jar. “Come, have some honey,” he said. His English was terrible, but I hardly noticed anymore.

I got up and walked over to the window that yawned into the night. Petya unscrewed the lid off the jar and drew his knife. I took my knife out of my vest pocket, dipped it in the jar, and ran my tongue down the blade.

There was thick, black honey in the jar. Not the sickeningly sweet stuff you get in the store.

“I was dreaming about my wife,” he said.

“I wasn’t dreaming about anything.”  I gripped the knife tightly so he wouldn’t see my hand tremble.

“We were in little house in Ilovaisk, the one I tell you about. Her father’s house.”

“And?”

“The kids were in bed and she was in kitchen cleaning up.”

“Do I have to listen to one of your sex stories? It’ll give me nightmares.”

“Did not get to sex. I was smelling her hair when the Russians woke me up and fucked up my dream.”

“Too bad.”

“They fucked up your dream too.”

“I wasn’t dreaming anything.”

“You will if you stay here long enough.”

“You know perfectly well this is my last day at the front.”

“What time is it?”

“The sun will rise in two hours.”

There were crimson hints of dawn on the horizon as we stood by the window. We sipped our instant coffees, smoked, and watched the sparkling shards of glass in the grass under the windowpanes.

2.

They had found a bunk for me in a ghost village with the 72nd Ukrainian Motorized Rifle Division two weeks earlier. The place was on a hillside next to a coal-fired power station lake. A narrow concrete bridge cut across the lake, the only way into the town on the far side. Wild ducks nested in the mud under its pillars.

Gray block houses stared at us from the opposite hillside. The Ukrainians had put the artillery units between the buildings, but there were still plenty of people living in the town.

In the evenings, the lights in the apartments winked out as the village plunged into total darkness, with residents avoiding any signals that could reveal the soldiers’ sleeping locations to the Russian artillery.

The cannons rumbled during the day, but the real show started after the sun went down. The Ukrainian anti-aircraft guns operated throughout the nights, intercepting at least one or two Russian rockets. It wasn’t safe for the soldiers to stay consecutive days in the same house. The Russians seemed content to occupy ruins.

On the front, you swiftly learn to differentiate between the sound of your own artillery and that of the enemy. After two days, I had mastered this skill. While most shells landed kilometers away from us, if one hit closer, my lack of proper military training would instinctively lead me to throw myself to the ground, always providing the soldiers with a good laugh.

3.

A young boy took me from Kiyiv to Dnipropetrovsk in a camouflage all-terrain vehicle with no license plate. The closer we got to the front in the east, the more checkpoints there were.

The boy would pull up in front of the roadblocks, roll down the window, and shout the latest password, which was sent to the soldiers every day by the Ministry of War. We set out at dawn, and by afternoon we had reached the town. At a gas station, I had to switch cars. They put me in a car driven by two snipers from the 72nd Brigade. I shared the back seat with AKM machine guns and a hand grenade launcher all the way to Donetsk province. No one had to tell us we had reached the front. The continuous roar of the artillery made that clear enough.

For two or three hours, nobody bothered with the foreign correspondent. I took pictures of soldiers trying to fix shot-up SUVs in the yards of the houses they had requisitioned. The sun had already set by the time a soldier in his twenties who wouldn’t stop grinning came up to me.

“The commander of the Unit, Nazar wants to see you now.”

He took me to a two-story wooden house. The ground floor was full of soldiers eating eggs and chicken with potatoes roasted in their peels. The men were sitting on crates of NLAW anti-tank rockets pushed  against the wall. The commander who must have been about fifty, introduced himself, put a plate in my hand and gestured me to sit down and eat.

I had a few bites. There was an uncomfortable silence in the room, and everyone was looking at me.

“So, you are Hungarian?” Nazar asked.

“Yes.”

“I know a Hungarian.”

I felt shivers go down my spine. I sincerely hoped I wouldn’t have to explain Hungarian foreign policy to a bunch of armed men in the middle of the night.

“Yes?”

“The best Hungarian, I think. The most talented. Do you know her name?”

“No.”

“Michelle Wild.”

The men in the room who were over forty laughed. The men in their twenties had no idea what he was talking about.

“She had a big influence on me too,” I said.

“Are you talking about a politician?” asked a twenty-something kid, called Vitya.

“No,” Nazar replied. “Talented actress.”

“How come I never hear of her?” asked Vitya.

“Because by time you were born, she already retired.”

“I could still know her.”

“You don’t know her because you’re homo and you don’t watch porn.”

“Yes I watch porn!”

“But you don’t watch classic porn. Because you’re homo.”

“I’m not a homo!”

“Yes, you are,” Nazar said, bringing the debate to an end.

“So what you come here for, Hungarian?”

“To film.”

“Porn?” the kid asked.

“Yes.”

“Welcome to Ukraine!” Nazar said.

Someone found a bottle of American whiskey, and by the time we had finished it, they had assigned me to Vitya, who would take me to the front.

The war had been going on for eight months, and we all knew that eight months was more than enough time for people in the West to forget that the Russians had invaded a European country. Ukrainian resistance depended on getting military support. The presence of foreign journalists was a necessary evil to secure arms supplies.

4.

I met Petya upon my arrival to the frontline. Nazar assigned me to one of the wooden buildings where his soldiers slept. When I first stepped into the room with my backpack slung across my back, a huge man with a shaved head was standing in front of me in his underwear and a poison green T-shirt. He looked me up and down:

“I warn you that I snore like chainsaw.”

“It won’t bother me. Actually, makes me feel at home.”

“That’s what my wife says.”

“Does she snore?”

“I don’t know. I never heard her snore.”

“I snore.”

“No problem.”

I unpacked my stuff next to my bed, undressed, and went to bed. I listened to the night noises, the rumble of the cannons in the distance. The branches of the trees were heavy with fruit, and you could hear the wasps and bees buzzing around the rotting apples and pears in the leaves on the ground.

I had trouble falling asleep. Petya was wide awake too—I could tell because there wasn’t a hint of his usual snoring.We lay quietly on our beds for a while.

“Do you have a family?” Petya asked from his bed, breaking the silence.

“A wife and a son from my first marriage. How about you? Do you have any children?”

“Two. Two boys. Eight and twelve years old. Do you want to see picture?”

“Yes.”

Petya stood. Stepping over to my bed, the boards creaking underneath him, he held up a battered smartphone displaying a picture of two little boys wearing striped T-shirts and enjoying ice cream.

“They are very handsome,” I said. Then I shuddered because a shell had struck maybe a kilometer or two away.

“Do you have picture of your son?”

I took out my phone and brought up a pic of my son.

“He looks just like you.”

“Yeah. Lots of people say I had myself cloned.”

“My babies not look like me, good thing. They like their mother.”

“Lucky for them,” I said with a grin.

“You’re not most handsome man in world either, Sasha.”

5.

During the day, I toured the Ukrainian positions with Vitya and conducted interviews. I grew very fond of the kid very quickly. Once, right before we went to the front, I saw him wrestling on the ground with another soldier. He teased everyone relentlessly, but no one took offense at his rough jokes. Vitya belonged to the generation born into war. War cradled his crib, and armed resistance against the Russians was his first love. He graduated from the war.  At the age of twenty-three, he was already considered a veteran among the frontline soldiers. Nazar had instructed that I shouldn’t be sent to the active front until he was confident in my readiness.

About ten kilometers from the front, I interviewed the medics of the battalion or the guys returning in tanks. Several times, I was assigned to kitchen duty. This meant I had to accompany one of the soldiers and assist him in hunting pheasants at the edges of the wheat fields. The birds were confused by the thunder of the mortar shells, so they would run out to the side of the road, and you could just shoot them. There was always something freshly killed for dinner. During the two weeks I spent at the front, the soldiers shot pheasant for the most part. I managed to bag some wild rabbits once. Everyone was overjoyed that day.

I usually chatted with Petya in the evenings. He was stationed at the Browning machine guns. The Russians would shell the hell out of the Ukrainian positions dug in the ground between the stunted trees and then try to overrun them with infantry. There were more and more unburied bodies in the wheat fields under the October sky.

On the third night, Petya asked if I had a picture of my wife.

“Yes.”

“Show me.”

I showed him one of the pics on my phone. He looked at it for a long time.

“Too Jewish for me.”

“Jewish cunts are warmer, you know.”

“My wife’s cunt is hotter. Want to see picture?”

“Of your wife’s cunt?”

“No, idiot. Of wife.”

“Sure.”

Petya stepped over to my bed and put his phone in my hand. On the screen was a pic of a natural blond, a stunningly beautiful woman.”

“She’s my Tyina,” he said.

“Poor thing, she must be blind.”

“Why you say she is blind?”

“She married you.”

“What do you know about true love?”

“Everything. What the hell does she see in you?”

“I don’t know. We met at May ball of steelwork. She was in bright yellow dress, so beautiful I could not breathe.”

“What did you do to trick her into talking to you?”

“Nothing. I knew her father from factory. He introduced me. It was love at first sight. I dated her one month before she let me hold hand. No one had ever kissed me like.”

“Gimme a tissue so I can wipe away my tears.”

“Her kiss was sweet like honey.”

“You were born to be a poet, Petya, not a soldier.”

“After one year, I married her. The wedding was in Ilovaisk. And then came Petyaka and then little Volodya.”

“You think about them a lot.”

“I do not think about anything else.”

“When was the last time you saw them?”

“Seven months ago.”

“That’s a lot. Do you talk to them often?”

“Yes. Every day.”

6.

In the evenings, Petya talked about his family. He told me what his children’s favorite food was, how his wife made it, how they kept bees at his father-in-law’s place, twelve hives in all. I’d been among the soldiers for a week when Petya came to dinner one night with a bandage on his hand.

“What happened?”

“It’s nothing.”

He ate, drank some whisky, and went to bed. I played cards with the others.

“The Russians tried to break through today.” – said Vitya when he got bored of the game.

“Did you have to give up the position?”

“Yep. Fifty rounds left in the Browning. Can you imagine?”

“What happened to Petya?”

“He’s the only one left alive. A bullet went through his hand. We had to shout to get him to leave the post. He grabbed the gun, just in case.”

Petya was already snoring when I got back to the room. I went to bed. I was awakened by his moaning and swearing.

“What happened?”

“I rolled on hand. Stitches are torn, I think.”

The bandage was dripping with blood.

“We should go to the hospital.”

The hospital was about twenty kilometers away. I knew this, because I wasn’t allowed to take any pictures there. Anywhere but there. The Ukrainians wouldn’t let us report their losses.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Just bandage it up again.”

“I’m not a doctor.”

“Just bandage the fucking thing. I will go to hospital in morning.”

“Okay.”

“First aid kit is on vest.”

I unzipped the pouch marked with the white cross and took out the tourniquets. The gauze and iodine were at the bottom. I used the small scissors to cut the bandage on Petya’ hand. The stitches had torn badly. A mix of red and black blood.

“Clean it out.”

I wiped the wound with iodine and even poured a little in it. Petya was constantly cursing. English has a limited number of curse words compared to the Ukrainian language. In any of the Slavic languages, you can continue swearing for hours without repeating yourself. I couldn’t catch everything he said, but it seemed to involve the insertion of pine woods, John Deeres, and umbrellas into the enemy’s private parts. When his wound looked clean enough, I started to bandage it up.

“There you go,” I said. “But you should take better care of yourself. You’ve got your family waiting for you back home.”

“They will have to wait a little longer.”

“There’s no telling how long this war will last.”

“It lasts while it lasts. We will be together in end anyway.”

“I sincerely hope so.”

“You don’t have to hope. We will be together for sure. But not now. I still have some Russians to kill.”

“I hope you get home soon.”

“You are a good man, Sasha.”

7.

While playing cards, Nazar said, “Tomorrow you can take the Hungarian out after the attack has started.” When I asked what attack he was talking about, no one said a word, not surprisingly.

It later turned out that, contrary to expectations, the Ukrainian forces had launched a successful counterattack at Kharkiv.Nazar thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to send me to the front lines and keep me safe at the same time. The offensive would distract the Russians enough to reduce the artillery fire on their positions.

We were cutting across fields of wheat, with the sun shining resplendently in the sky above us, when the Russians started shelling the position we were headed for. Two shells hit right next to our car, and it felt as if someone had pushed my head under water.

Vitya drove the car into the woods, mud splashing on the windshield from the shells. He stopped the car next to the trench where the Browning guys had dug themselves and ordered everyone out. Two other soldiers were in the car; they knelt to the ground and listened, then ran to take cover in the trees, dragging me along.

Dusty earth and mud. The trenches were like something out of a World War I movie. Petya was grinning as he came up from underground.

“Want some coffee?” he asked.

We did. I glanced where the barrels of the Browning machine guns were pointed. The Russians were less than a kilometer away on the far side. You couldn’t see the dead bodies because of the tall grass, but I knew there were a lot of them lying unburied in the field, because when the wind shifted, it brought with it the sweet smell of decay.

I had a cup of coffee in my hand when I heard the shriek of the mortar shell. I lurched to one side and splattered the whole cup on Vitya.

“That was more than ten meters away,” he said after the mortar struck, and he pulled me up off the ground. I couldn’t control the shaking of my hands.

The biggest problem with modern-day artillery is that you can’t see it at all. The legend that 82mm mortar shells were deliberately designed to whistle before impact is widely held. It’s nonsense, of course. No engineer would design a weapon so that the targets would know before it hit that it was about to strike. Mortar shells whistle because they cut through the air and leave a vacuum behind them.

But you only hear the whistle of the shells that God intended for someone else.

The Ukrainians knew when the Russians were firing missiles. I guess the front was close and they could hear them launching. Though I’m not really sure. I only know that on the way back to the car, Vitya suddenly grabbed me and pulled me down into a hole.

The ground shook. I heard a big crash, then nothing.

When Vitya pulled me to my feet,I was totally lost, didn’t know where to go. He steered me towards the car. My ears felt like they’d exploded, but my eardrums weren’t bleeding. Silence stuck around until we hit the ghost village. When my hearing kicked back in, every explosion made me feel like I was getting zapped by electricity. Trying not to hit the dirt took some work, but I held up okay unless the hits got too close.

8.

Nazar told me that there was a car leaving for Kiev at eight o’clock, and I would leave the front in it.

The brigade was hard at work. All the equipment had to be moved to a new location because the Russian missiles were getting closer and closer. Old flatbed trucks were rolling down the dirt roads, loaded up with fuel, rocket launchers, and ammunition. They drafted me to lend a hand, so I was lugging boxes too, muttering all the while about how nice it’d be if the Russians could please not fire any fucking rockets for just a little while.

The new headquarters was in a granary. It was a concrete building from the Cold War era, with bullet holes and boarded-up windows. We were still hard at work when a green all-terrain vehicle pulled up in front of the entrance.

“What about you?” I asked Petya.

“I am coming with you.”

“See, I told you you’d make it home,” I said, giving him a slap on the back. “I’m good luck for you.”

There were five of us in the all-terrain, and the trip back was a good twelve hours. Wasn’t exactly first-class. I was longing to get a shower and finally take a shit in a toilet, but most of all just to stretch my legs once we reached Kiev.

But that was out of the question. Nazar and the others insisted that we get a round of drinks.

In the city center, we went to a pub called Gorky’s. It was in a cellar, with heavy wooden tables and a bar. We could barely get a seat. I was shocked by the bustle. It felt as if we had arrived in a different country, a country that wasn’t being ripped apart by war.

The guys ordered Ukrainian vodka and beer. The waiter brought dried salted fish and five shot glasses.

Nazar filled everyone’s glass, and when he was done, he raised his own.

“A toast to those who gave their lives.”

He lifted his glass on high, then poured the vodka on the ground and threw the glass on the floor with all his might. The others did exactly the same thing. The place fell dead silent, and everyone looked at us.

“Is there a problem?” Nazar asked the bartender.

“Glory to Ukraine!” the bartender replied.

“Glory to the heroes!” the soldiers said, and everyone in the pub echoed their shout.

New glasses were brought to the table. Nazar filled them.

“And now a toast to the living,” he said, and he knocked it back in one gulp.

We drank quickly, and a lot.

“And now,” Nazar said after the second bottle of vodka, “we go to see the patriotic whores.”

Since the offensive began, downtown brothels gave a 20% discount to frontline fighters due to an 11 PM curfew. Keeping the places afloat and showing patriotic devotion played a part, but “patriotic” became the buzzword.

I was dizzy from alcohol and fatigue. I didn’t want to go, but I couldn’t get out of it. The whorehouse was in a four-story building. We went on foot. Nazar rang the bell, and the door swung open.

The women were on the fourth floor. Two old, moderately spacious apartments that had been turned into one. There was a big Ukrainian flag on the wall in the hallway. A woman who must have been about fifty and whose cheeks were caked with rouge walked over to us and sat us down on the sofa.

She and Nazar started haggling in Ukrainian. It took me a while to realize that they were arguing about me. I was not a soldier, she was saying, and so I did not get any discount. I cast a glance at Petya, hoping he could get me out of the whole thing, but he was just staring at the wall. Eventually, Nazar must have reached some kind of agreement with the woman, because she walked over to the counter, picked up a bell, and gave it a shake.

The three doors off the hallway swung open, and soon six women were standing in front of us with business smiles on their faces. They were dressed in bras and panties.

“Take your pick,” the woman said, and even I understood.

I also understood the silence that fell over us. When it comes to committing a sinful act, no one wants to go first. Several seconds of silence passed, several unbearably awkward seconds.

And then Petya stood up. He had a bleary look in his eyes. He walked over to one of the brunettes, a girl who must have been in her twenties.

“Let’s go, sweetheart,” he said. She took his hand and led him into the room.

The other two soldiers immediately followed suit, chose a girl, and then left. I stared in shock.

“What?” Nazar asked, lighting a cigarette. “You look like you have seen a ghost.”

“No,” I replied, “I’m just a little surprised. Petya was always talking about his wife. I never would have thought he’d sleep with another woman.”

Nazar took a drag on his cigarette, grimaced a little, stubbed it out in the ashtray, and stood up.

“Petya’s apartment in Kharkiv was hit by a rocket the day after the invasion started,” he said. “His family was killed.”

He then walked over to one of the girls, took her hand, and withdrew with her into one of the rooms.

We’d been expecting the fascists for a few days but they’d gotten hung up on Newark. Usually they moved fast. Camden had gone quiet just a week after the government had evacuated from Washington, D.C. to some secret location. Then, abruptly, the fascists flowed south, a growing mob of pickup trucks and tractor trailers bristling with guns, fuel, flags, and ammunition: to Richmond, although Baltimore was closer; finally hastening back northward after wrecking that old city, the capital of The Confederacy. Each of those cities had fallen in weeks, carved into pieces and starved, capitulating before the threat of fire and murder that appeared to have come anyway, in spite of surrender. Here and there the cities of the South and Midwest still stood, but were cut off — separate from each other, separate from us, isolated by long stretches of forest and strip malls patrolled by men in multicam holding AR-15s and shotguns, lines of utility vehicles across tracts of the largely deracinated terrain.

The suburbs across the river in New Jersey were filling up with refugees and transients, huddled between the homes of New Yorkers who could afford to live outside the city. Hedge fund managers, software engineers, salesmen, bankers, cops, lawyers, university faculty handed out blankets and food at first. Then later they became stingy, alert to any word of crime. These people were of the city but not in it — their loyalty, dubious. The thousands and later hundreds of thousands fleeing the fascists were bound for sadness and tragedy, driven from homes that would likely never be seen again. Once the center began to crumble, none but the bravest returned to their previous lives, and the bravest were not those running headlong from the hatchet and gunfire.

Many of us still half-believed the whole thing was a joke taken too far, a mass hallucination or something illegal rather than outside the law, a matter for police or maybe the FBI. Even after D.C. and Richmond and Camden we felt that it would be stopped somewhere, by others. Certainly not by us. Psychologically we were in the denial stage of grief, preparing, though far too slowly for what was coming. In that moment they had laid siege to Newark. While we’d been waiting for the fascists to mount their inevitable northern push, the push had happened; like a bullet, or a hypersonic missile, they’d moved too fast for us to track.

This sent us into a frenzy of preparation. The George Washington Bridge came down, and the Tappen Zee. All week, tens of thousands of anxious eyes stared round the clock at the western approaches to New York. But once news from Newark slowed, it was almost a week before we saw the first movement from our perch in Manhattan, across the Muhheakunnuk River.

I’d dropped out of my fifth year at Muhlenberg college to join the 1st People’s Revolutionary Corps. Academics came slowly to me so college was taking more time than it should have. My dad didn’t believe much in getting a bachelor’s degree. He’d done fine for himself in construction without one. But it was important to my mom that I graduate from college. That’s how I ended up at Muhlenberg instead of the Army or Marines like my dad wanted. As far as I knew, my folks supported the fascists. I hadn’t heard from them in months.

Now I was in a reserve detachment of scouts stationed at an observation post (or OP) in what used to be called Washington Heights. We’d renamed it Canarsee Hill. The OP overlooked the Muhheakunnuk. Mostly we were watching to the northwest but just before the weekend, Smith, another scout, who had come down from Yonkers, spotted men moving on the bluffs opposite us due west. Smith called Vargas over to the telescope to confirm.

Vargas was our leader, though our unit’s military hierarchy was still inchoate. We didn’t have ranks, we were all volunteers and organized in a broadly egalitarian way. He was our leader because he’d been (or claimed to have been) an Army Scout during the 1990s, and had definitely been in the fighting that first broke out south of here. He seemed to know his business and we respected him for his quiet competence and willingness to teach us basic fieldcraft. His crypto-reactionary loyalties and remarks we overlooked with trepidation.

“That’s them all right,” he said, his flat, battered mug pressed squinting and grimacing against the telescope. Vargas’s life hadn’t been easy since leaving the military, and in addition to a scar running across his face from eye to cheek, his nose had been mashed in a fight and never fixed. He motioned to me. “Take a look kid. See how they move? That’s discipline. They’re out of range but they’re spaced out, two by two. Way you need to remember to do things. Understand?”

In the round, magnified slice of world across the river, there they were: camouflaged shapes hunched over, moving tactically in pairs. One would stop while another moved, rifles up and at the high ready, in both pairs, presenting an appearance of constant motion and menace, rippling like a snake.

“Here, you’ve had enough,” Vargas said, taking back his position. “Ok: total 8 troops, that’s a squad… one tactical vehicle. Looks like an M-ATV. Must be another back there somewhere, or a technical. Smith, you report that up to HQ yet?”

Smith gestured at the radio. “It’s offline. I think the batteries are dead.”

“Christ,” Vargas mumbled. “Well call them with your phone. Look this is important. Tonight get new batteries from the command post.”

“I’ll get the batteries,” I said, wanting to impress Vargas. Also my girlfriend, Tandy, lived down near 180^th. It wasn’t far off the way to her place, an excuse to drop in and get some home cooking.

“You think we’ll see some action?” Smith said.

“Action, action, all you want is action,” Vargas said. “If you’d seen what I did in DC, you wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get your gun on. But yeah, if there’s one thing the fascists mean, it’s action. Sooner or later.”

The Revolutionary Corps at that point was mustered mostly from New England and the suburbs of NYC itself. It hadn’t seen fighting in the winter and spring since the contested election. Smith and most of the others (myself included) hadn’t been there in D.C. when the fascists had made it almost to the White House and a motley, improvised group of citizens, soldiers, and loyal law enforcement had gone street to street pushing them back so the government could escape. Vargas was there — he’d been someone’s bodyguard. Who — a Senator — a woman from New York? The Midwest? What was her name… It doesn’t matter any more, though at the time it was an interesting anecdote…

Like everywhere, New England had seen violence when the fascists rose up, but nothing like what happened on the West Coast, the South, or the mid-Atlantic. Up in New England things had been resolved quickly. There weren’t enough fascists to make a go of it outside New Hampshire, and those fascists who did rise up in New Hampshire were brutally repressed after their comrades were defeated in Boston, Springfield, and Hartford. Enough police forces and national guard units had refused to betray their oaths to the Constitution, enough of the democratic revolutionary spirit remained within the breasts of New England men and women, that the reactionaries there had floundered and failed early — spectacularly so, even.

Whether they did so as part of a plan or not, what the fascists of New England accomplished was to tie northern pro-democracy states up with fighting internal enemies instead of helping their neighbors. We didn’t know that at the time, but at moments when swift and decisive help might have forestalled great bloodshed, the attention on potential local foes consumed everyone’s attention. It wasn’t long before a second wave of those enemies would appear at their borders, a howling, hostile army.

But in most other places the fascists had translated their quick offensive into victory more often than not and with surprising scope. Perhaps they sensed their vulnerabilities lay in us being able to organize our superior strength in manpower and industry. They’d been chewing the national and most state governments up since January, keeping the legitimately elected authorities and their forces on their heels, hitting them over and over where they least expected it. In our region Philadelphia and Pittsburgh had time to brace and fortify, so the fascists ran at Camden with full strength — wiped it nearly off the map. In their haste to capture Newark, they’d surrounded nearly 22,000 anti-fascist volunteers there, the entire 3^rd People’s Revolutionary Corps. Most evenings one could see flashes and hear the fascist artillery thumping in the distance.

Smith and Boucher and a few of the other guys had been excited to see the fascists arrive. To them it meant taking part in a battle. Boucher, a Marxist from New London, compared them to the Germans outside Moscow. Morale was high, and Vargas didn’t do much to pour cold water on it.

A few hours after reporting their scouts up to higher, we’d observed several armored fighting vehicles and a tank maneuvering on the bluffs. The fascists put up a couple drones and tried to fly them across the river, then sent them high into the air when they realized we were outside the drones’ range. What struck me more than the size of the group was its cohesion, and its audacity. They moved up to a point and acted. They didn’t ask for permission or wait for orders from higher. We had armored fighting vehicles, we had tanks, just like them. We didn’t have artillery — only the Army had artillery — but we had drones. Seeing the fascists there, flying their black and white flag with a blue stripe down the middle, made me nervous. They’d reduced the space between them and us to that narrow band of water on which so much depended. A free and diverse New York City, the heart of our revolution, was exposed and vulnerable. How had this happened?

A half hour or hour later, further down the river, the fascists launched a motorboat. Vargas told me to observe its progress through the telescope and report movement to him as it crept across the sun-dappled surface. The boat circled wider and wider, seeing how close it could come to our lines. At the middle of the river at the apex of its approach it abruptly beelined for the city. An old red “MAGA” flag was visible on its stern, flapping in the wind. The boat’s three occupants wore tactical vests and helmets; one was scanning our side with a sniper rifle, another was piloting, and the third was talking on a portable radio, probably doing to us what we should’ve been doing to them.

I appreciated their daring. They presented a confident, professional air, like they were straight out of a movie or video game about the Navy SEALs. They knew exactly what to do. Slapping across the water at high speed, these fascists, veterans of the bigger battles to the south, were getting down to business, getting it done.

We were far enough upriver from the source that we saw the boat tossed high into the air, tumbling end over end from the explosion before we heard the shot and the boom. No forms emerged from the wreckage, and the boat sank slowly into the river. This was the first time I’d seen our side fire first. I was glad we had.

***

Shortly after the fascists had turned their attention to Richmond, while New England, New York, and Pennsylvania were wrestling with their own fascist problems, New York City had declared itself a free city. Run by an alliance of Democratic Socialists, progressive Democrats, anarchists, and independents, the historic agreement put an end to strikes and labor walk offs, stabilized a questionable police force, and, in short, unified and anchored what we all hoped would be a fresh start for the city and maybe for America, too. Hopes were high for a nonviolent revolution ushering in the promise of a full, meritocratic democratic polity.

Many people left the city, but many more came, attracted by the promise of a just new world. One of the first things we did was rename things: The Hudson River became The Muhheakunnuk, or “River that flows two ways,” in the original Lenape. Madison Avenue became Liberty Avenue. Rockefeller Plaza, Veblen Plaza. Trump Tower became Mohican tower, for the indigenous Mohican peoples. And soforth.

Where we could reduce the damage done by naming places and things for white European settler colonialists who caused real and literal ethnic cleansing and genocide, we remedied as best we could. While the fascists were shooting and murdering, we were getting resolutions passed in bipartisan committees. As the shitlib pro-government forces were fighting desperate retrogrades, we were setting up a new way of compensating labor on the blockchain: Hours (pronounced “ours”) of labor were our new, profession-blind currency. A person worked the hours they did and were rewarded based on that flat rate, digitally, plus a small bonus in consideration for specialty labor or difficult labor nobody wanted to do. My daily wages, for example, were 14 ½ Hours per day: 12 Hours for the 12 hours of work I did for the militia, plus a 2 ½ Hour bonus for the hazardous nature of my work (though I had, up until that point, done little hazardous duty — that would change soon).

What a sound and simple system; what a fair and just means of compensation. I’d never seen anything like it, and haven’t since, though home ownership and other realities of adult life have given me a better appreciation for modern economies than I had in my youth.

The People’s Council of New York had compensated those New Yorkers who had stayed in the city with Hours on a prorated basis for the dollars and real estate it confiscated in order to trade with external partners, and signed an alliance with its neighboring states, the state of New York, and the federal government. Everyone was relieved it hadn’t come to shooting. Putting nearly 120,000 people under arms, such as myself, made the city by itself one of the largest standing armies on the territory of the former U.S.A. We were all proud of what we’d accomplished in such a short amount of time.

***

At the end of our shift, I took the spent batteries from our radio and headed down to HQ. The arrival of the fascists had sent everyone into a frenzy of activity and worry. When I poked my head into the command tent, I caught our commander, a woman who had flown C-17s for the Air Force, yelling at our XO for the comms situation. I saw that there weren’t any fresh batteries to be had, then made a swift retreat from the scene so as not to contribute to the man’s confusion and embarrassment.

“Where’s the RTO,” I asked one of the guards who was vaping and lounging outside the entrance.

“Over there,” he said, gesturing upslope toward another tent about 50 meters away. I walked over, passing three soldiers setting up some sort of fortified machinegun position.

“Look downhill at the road. Now look at the sandbags. Now look at the barrel of the gun,” the first soldier was saying. “Aha! Aha! Now do you see the problem? Move the machinegun around, like so… now you see more problems. Do it again!”

Scenes like this were common. None of us had more than a week’s training — it wasn’t even formal training, more like pre-basic. While there were more leftist veterans than many had probably thought before the war, in general the stereotype of veterans as moderates or pro-fascist was pretty true. A small group of sympathetic veterans were running round-the-clock training ranges up in Connecticut and Long Island, and NYC’s soldiery was permitted to access this as part of our agreement with our neighbors.

At the signals tent, I found the commander’s radio operator fiddling with two banks of battery rechargers. “You need to get these up to your position ASAP, the CO’s on the warpath about bad comms and using smartphones,” he said.

“I’ll be back in six hours,” I said, and left the heavy green blocks on the black recharger alongside several others, while the recharge status blinked red.

Next I headed north to Tandy’s building, a fin de siècle mansion that had been converted to high-ceilinged apartments, and was now housing for students and workers. It was a 10 minute bike ride from our positions, or a 25 minute jog, easily accomplished if the sirens signaled an attack.

I checked my Hours on my phone which promptly updated on the hour with my day’s work, plus the bonus for military service. Then I stopped at a bodega for provisions. One of the best-managed parts of the city was its city-wide revolutionary food cooperative. Food came in from upstate and Connecticut, and was rationed. There was enough of it on any given day, but hoarding was strictly forbidden so what was available was whatever happened to be on hand, often local produce.

The proprietor of this bodega was an Iraqi man who’d immigrated to the U.S. after the war there, Ahmed. Together with his family he supervised the bodega’s co-op labor, and had a keen eye for organizing. He greeted me when he saw me walk in, much as he greeted everyone in uniform.

“My friend, thank you for protecting us! You must be hungry: what would you like? Eggs, corn from Poughkeepsie, sausage? Please, take what you need, eat, stay strong and healthy! And say hello to your beautiful girlfriend! You’re a lucky man!”

Ahmed may or may not have known me, but he certainly seemed to know me, and that was appreciated in a strange city. I picked up a couple sausages, a quart of milk, and a half dozen eggs. There wasn’t any cheese, so I had to hope Tandy or one of what she called her “mates” had some at their place. Then, in the back, I procured a glass bottle of Long Island red wine.

“Five and one half Hours,” Ahmed said. “Did you hear our forces repelled a fascist invasion today? Maybe you were part of that?”

He was talking about the boat. “We spotted them,” I said. “It wasn’t anything serious.”

“Please, it wasn’t serious, you sound like me when I was in the Iraqi Army. I helped liberate Mosul from ISIS, you know. It’s never serious. Until you’re in the hospital!” He raised his shirt, and pointed at several scars near his abdomen. “Here, take some chewing gum, free. It helped me stay awake during long nights. When you don’t have your girlfriend around,” he said, winking conspiratorially.

Tandy was still at class when I arrived. James, a PhD candidate in Political Science at Columbia greeted me at the door and when he saw what I was carrying he invited me in, shepherding me to the kitchen where Vince, a militiaman from Danbury, Connecticut, gladly took my contribution to the dinner. “You’re always welcome here,” Vince said, “when you have food and wine!

 This was one practical way in which being a militia volunteer translated into good social standing, but I didn’t lord it over people, just showed up with what I had and got whatever amounted to a single portion in return.

This particular collective was mostly students, so my portion was usually appreciated, in spite of my taking part in what was a violent endeavor. Only the most radical students felt that in defending our political ideals, I was participating in an immoral and unethical war, but even they sat down to eat with me. The main course was a cabbage- and barley- based soup with my eggs and sausages as a garnish— again, no cheese — food wasn’t in short supply, but the variety had significantly diminished thanks to the war. The Californians and Midwesterners were probably eating great.

Seven of us sat around a small round table. I was briefly the center of attention as I talked about the motorboat reconnaissance, and the arrival of the fascists. Before I offered my eyewitness account, I was treated to another more outlandish product of the rumor mill I’d first encountered at Ahmed’s: the fascists, I heard, had attempted a crossing in force, and were driven back only by the killing of their general in the lead boat. I was glad to correct the record.

My much more prosaic account of the fascists’ arrival was held up to the various perspectives present at the meal. Some felt as my fellow militiamen did, that this was an opportunity to strike back while the fascists were few, that we should take the fight to them. Others that the fascists were too strong — that they’d make their way across the river sooner or later and so we should head up to Canada while we still could. Most held the opinion that nonviolent resistance was the way to resolve this, that fighting would only lead to more fighting, that perhaps the situation could be resolved through discussion and diplomacy. Reports of atrocities, this last group dismissed as liberal, pro-government propaganda.

The apartment’s owner, who also owned the building and had been well liked and admired before the war for his egalitarian and attentive approach to ownership, asked why we couldn’t come to some accommodation with the fascists.

“Let them have their wretched dystopian hell. Let them live in the rot that accompanies dictatorship, fascism, and all abominable authoritarian places,” he said. “Give them the land they have and tell them not to come any further.”

“What about our comrades in Newark?” said one of his tenants, Jenny, a black girl whose parents had moved to New York City from South Carolina in the 1960s for work. Jenny worked at a small factory sewing uniforms for the militia, and was one of the more prescient of us when it came to the threat of the fascists, and the importance of fighting. “If we abandon those like us in the South, or in Newark, why did we abstain from voting for Biden? If we don’t fight for our convictions, to help each other, shouldn’t we just join the fascists?”

“I voted for RFK Jr.,” said the former apartment owner to good natured jeers and boos, “I voted for RFK Jr. and I’d do it again” he yelled, with similar good-natured energy. Here, having voted for RFK Jr. was far less objectionable than voting for “Genocide Joe Biden,” which was tantamount to heresy.

Vince spoke in the lull that followed the yelling. “Anyway the fascists have started and they won’t stop. The real choices are Canada — assuming they don’t roll up there next — or fight. Fight or flee and hope someone else beats them. They’ll chase us to the end of the earth, they’ll never halt. Might as well be here.”

“They’ll negotiate when they’re punched out,” said Christina, a journalism student at City University of New York and one of the more moderate people in the collective. She was a bit older, in her 40s, and had been a public school teacher during an earlier life that hadn’t quite worked out on Long Island, near one of the Hamptons. “If we make a deal they agree to — ceasefire, a demarcation of borders — they’ll just rearm and keep going. These people are always the same — Hitler, Genghis Khan, Putin, Alexander the Great. Read history. They stop when they’re stopped, which is when they die. Because they know stopping means dealing with the violent energies they’ve unleashed, and they want to be fighting external enemies, not internal enemies.”

“It would have happened sooner or later,” added Jenny. “The moderates, the Democrats and shitlibs spent the years since the end of the Cold War selling everything as fast as they could, and supporting global racism and genocide. They’re as responsible for creating this movement as anyone else.”

Sometimes I wished I was confident and practiced in my public speaking, like the students. My first day with the unit I’d brought this line of reasoning, about Biden and the Democrats and the shitlibs, to Vargas, and he’d scoffed at what he called my naiveté.

“What happened in D.C. was, when they couldn’t get to the people they said they were mad at — the government, the globalists — the fascists made do with the vulnerable. They headed right for the poorest neighborhoods on their way out of the city and just about wrecked them,” he’d said. “As bad as Biden and the Democrats were over the years, I’ve never saw the suburbs where most of his supporters lived reduced to a smoking ruin, their inhabitants murdered, captured, or fled.”

I didn’t mention that perspective here at the table. It didn’t seem like the time or the place for it. Besides I wasn’t sure what I thought about it all. Sometimes in describing the fascists as intolerant of other viewpoints and dogmatic in their application of violence, I thought maybe we were guilty of that, too, in some ways. Certainly nothing like what the fascists did, but still… when I thought about our project, sometimes I questioned its wisdom or justice.

“You’ll never convince me violence is the answer,” said James. Soft-spoken and charismatic, when he spoke, people listened. His father was a first-generation immigrant from Cuba, and his mother, a Chinese immigrant. They’d met in Flushing, Queens, a real American love story. “Violence begets violence. Without anyone to fight, the fascists will fight each other. Ultimately they’ll lose interest in the cities and fall to quarreling among each other. You’ll see.”

We did see, just not in the way James meant. But those dark days were yet to come.

***

After dinner I waited around for Tandy, but she still hadn’t come home. After an hour, still restless after the day’s events, I decided that rather than hang around and look desperate, I’d put in some volunteer time. It was still too early to get the batteries. I picked up my rifle and wandered down to the Muhheakunnuk. It was summer, and the weather wasn’t bad. Ideal for nighttime strolling provided one had the proper identification so one wasn’t accidentally shot.

At the river’s edge I stopped and stared at what remained of the George Washington Bridge. The moon illuminated the ruined structure’s contours, rendered its demise somehow more tragic, more human. Its skeletal wreckage jutted up from the river’s calm surface, like ancient ruins. In places, the bridge had twisted as it fell, partially damming the river’s flow. Now it resembled nothing so much as a memorial to America, the ruins of a vision for peace and prosperity that could not last forever, because nothing in this universe ever does.

Destroying the GW made sense from the perspective of guns and firepower; the fascists had an edge in that department owing to personal stockpiles as well as those seized by various police and traitorous military units, but weapons require people, and they had far fewer volunteers than we did. In spite of their military successes, their victories over larger but poorly-led, poorly equipped units, everywhere they went they engendered fear and hatred, an occupying force that looked and talked like your racist neighbor. The strategy, then, was to attrit them, draw them into the cities, grind them down until there weren’t enough of them to the point where we could start pushing back. Of course as I mentioned earlier the hope at that time was that some disaster or calamity or miracle would forestall our having to fight them at all.

The fascists fielded excellent soldiers and combat leaders. Their units moved quickly and punched hard, and wrecked or absorbed local and state law enforcement organizations wholesale. Their units hung together well, and were led (mostly competently and capably) by veterans and former police officers.

Further down toward the bay loyalist Army units kept the Verrazano intact and were fortifying our side. I didn’t understand the logic behind keeping that bridge but taking out the much larger GW and Tappan Zee. Maybe the destruction was partly for the symbolism. The fascists claimed to stand for law and order and tradition, and part of how it had all started (insane as it sounds to say it now looking back over the great Golgothas we made for each other during the fighting) was over statues and names. What was an iconic bridge between New York and New Jersey, named for one of America’s founders, if not a statue, a monument to an idea like traffic, interstate commerce, a community based on trust and the exchange of goods?

Then again, it was also a symbolic loss for us—if we couldn’t control the George Washington Bridge, what did that say about our long term prospects? Vargas said slowing the fascists down was our best shot and the people who were placed in charge of our efforts at first — people who as time would demonstrate were not up to the effort — were a little too enthusiastic about doing so, and less enthusiastic about actually preparing us for what came next.

Loyalist Army units had sealed the Lincoln Tunnel, which was similar to blowing it. The decision had been made with some procedure for removing concrete in mind, but when you walked down near midtown and saw the familiar entrance, saw the white and gray spill as though trolls had melted the world’s biggest marshmallow, it was hard imagining that tunnel ever working again.

From the bones of the fallen GW, I walked south for 5 minutes until I came to one of our fortified positions, down near the water, forward and downhill from HQ. It was crewed by my unit, but not one from the scouts, conventional infantry. We all had the same challenge and password. I didn’t know this group, but stopped in to chat about the motorboat, ask if they’d seen any other movement. They hadn’t. Didn’t have thermal scopes down here, were worried about night landings and infiltration. I was shocked — I thought frontline positions would have thermals for sure.

“One every 5 positions,” said the duty sergeant. “We rely on them and tracers to figure out what’s happening. Moonlit night like tonight, seems unlikely we’ll see any more action. Especially considering the tide.”

I asked why the tide was significant. Prior to the war I hadn’t spent much time near the ocean.

“Oh, a full moon corresponds with high tide. This particular high tide is what they call a “king tide,” get them in winter and summer,” the sergeant said. “Higher water means a longer distance to cross, and stronger currents. Groups trying to cross in boats would be pulled far upriver or downriver of where they were hoping to cross — maybe even swept out to ocean.”

“You think the fascists know that?”

“Oh, I’m sure of it… they’re mostly country folk, people who know things like the tides, and hunting. No that’s not going to throw them. Sad to say it. That’s the sort of thing our generals would probably fuck up.”

We stood there quietly in awe of the sergeant’s demoralizing statement, one we both felt to be true, the GW’s shredded metal beams and cables clanking and squealing upriver. A rumble of artillery in the distance and flashes of light roused us from our reverie.

“Won’t be much longer. No way they can hold out without reinforcements.”

“How do you know? How do you know they won’t grind the fascists up street by street and block by block?”

The sergeant gestured toward the southern end of Manhattan. “Brother works at one of the fish markets. Buddy of his is a fisherman, solid American and New Yorker, told him he’s been in touch with fishermen out of Newark. Apparently they’re getting pummeled. Never seen the fascists put so much work into destroying a city.”

“You think we should move down, try to help them?”

In response, the sergeant now nodded up at the GW’s ruins. “Not part of the plan. Anyway, we barely know how to hold a defense. Most of the guys here have never fired their rifles, it’s all we can do to point them in the right direction. How are we supposed to move to the attack?”

For this question and all the others, I had no answers. I’d joined the movement, I was a scout, and all I knew was that if the fascists wanted a fight, we ought to give it to them. Even then I sensed that simply to accommodate their desires would be a mistake. I looked out at the river, to where the boat had been earlier. The fighting would get so much worse in the days and months to come, far worse than almost anyone could imagine. But on that day, the thing that I noticed was the water — how high it had come up the pier — how close we were to it, lapping at the moorings and the concrete stairs, closer to our boots than it had ever been. And what terrible creatures teemed beneath its opaque surface!

I escaped to America after my fiancé, Farhid, died. He was an officer in the Afghan National Army in Bagarm when he was killed by a roadside bomb. His friend Abdul called and told me the news. He and Farhid had attended school together and had joined the army at the same time. Abdul used to visit us, but I hadn’t seen him in years. When I got off the phone, I felt like still air on a clear day. Nothing stirred. No sound and no one around me. An emptiness engulfed me that was not altogether unpleasant. I was adrift but not grieving. I had never wanted to marry him; it was my father’s wish that I do so. Farhid was my cousin.

His father, my Uncle Gülay, was my father’s brother. Gülay died in a car accident before I was born, and my father took Farhid and his mother into our family. I saw Farhid as an older brother—someone I played hide and seek with as a child—and not as a husband, but my father said he wanted to have grandchildren, especially a grandson. He also thought our marriage would honor Gülay, and he made it clear I didn’t have a choice. I don’t like Farhid, I told my father, not in that way. Oh, you are a big shame, he scolded me. I didn’t ask for your opinion. I decide. I ran to my room. My mother followed and sat beside me as I wept into my pillow. Your father has decided as my father decided for me when I was your age, she said. It will be fine. Your family wouldn’t make a bad decision. Farhid is a good boy. Open your heart and you will see him as your father sees him and learn to love him.

After Farhid died, I mourned the boy I knew but not the man I hadn’t wanted for a husband. I remembered when he stood with me on the second floor of our home in Jalalabad when the Taliban left Afghanistan after the Americans invaded. We watched them drive away, their faces grim, angry. After that, my father allowed me to leave the house without a burqa. Farhid and I would walk to the downtown bazaar, and he’d hold my left hand as he guided us through the crowds. He liked to make puppets, and some mornings I’d wake up and find him crouched at the foot of my bed with socks on his hands imitating sheep and goats. Get up, baaa! Get up, Samira, baaa, he’d say and I’d duck under the sheets giggling as he pinched my toes. These memories made me sad. Farhid—my cousin, my brother—was gone, but I felt a certain lightness too because now I’d never have to marry him. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and saw hill-shaped shadows rise out of the dark and spread across the ceiling and loom over me and I knew it was the spirit of Uncle Gülay, enraged that Farhid’s death had denied him the honor of our marriage.

My father hung a photograph of Farhid in his army uniform in the entrance of our house. I hadn’t seen this picture before. He looked older than I remembered. He had a sharp chin, a firm mouth, and a stern look that gave the impression of someone gazing into their future. He wasn’t the boy with the puppets. Perhaps I could have loved him, I thought, and for the first time I felt despair but it was a distant kind of grief toward someone I had never really known.

After his funeral, my life resumed as if he had never died. I woke up early and attended classes at Jalalabad State University from seven to one. After school, I took a computer course and studied English so that one day I could get a good job with a Western NGO. One of my favorite memories: accessing the internet for the first time and establishing a Yahoo email account.

Those leisurely days didn’t last. Eight weeks after Farhid’s funeral, I began receiving death threats from Taliban supporters. Some of them sent text messages: We know your fiancé fought against the army of Allah. He is dead and you’ll be next. Some mornings, my father would find notes tacked to our front door: Whore! You have betrayed Islam by becoming engaged to an infidel. We will eliminate you and all infidels who betray Allah. Whoever wrote these notes, I believe, set off bombs near our house, too many to count, and sticky bombs on cars belonging to our neighbors. It became normal to hear an explosion and the panicked screams that followed. I became afraid to leave the house and stopped attending school.

My father was a physician. One day he went out with the Afghan National Army to treat sick soldiers when a bomb exploded and shrapnel tore into his left arm and both legs. A neighbor heard the news but didn’t want to alarm my family. He asked for some clothes to take to the hospital treating my father. Why do you need his clothes? my mother asked; but instead of answering her, he rushed off without explanation. Then my cousin Reshaf called from Kabul and asked my mother about the bombing. He had read about it on the internet. It killed ten government soldiers, he said. My mother tried to reach my father but he didn’t answer his phone. Finally, someone from the hospital called and said he had been injured. We rushed to the hospital and wandered halls where injured soldiers lay on gurneys and stared at us with dazed, hollow eyes. My father lay in a bed in a small room with peeling green paint that overlooked a courtyard. Families sat under trees. Roaming dogs snapped at men who chased them away. A white sheet covered my father up to his chin. His blood-stained legs were raised in slings, and his injured arm was wrapped in gauze soaked by iodine. Dozens of cuts ruined his face. He tried to speak but his voice caught in his throat and I looked away as tears rolled down his face.

He recovered but he couldn’t walk without help and often used a wheelchair. Nerve damage in his left hand prevented him from using medical instruments. He spent his days in his small clinic sitting at his desk and offering advice to colleagues. He watched them work, and when he grew bored he scrolled through his computer until he grew tired and rested his chin on his chest and slept.

The threats against my life continued. That summer my father began making inquiries, and through a friend in the Ministry of Interior he secured a visa for me to emigrate to the United States that was given to families who had either fought or worked with Western forces. Her husband was an Afghan soldier, my father told his friend. She can’t stay here. That night while I was in my room preparing to go to bed he called for me. I followed his voice out to our garden where he stood in the light of a full moon. Cats yowled and the distant barking of dogs rose above the noise of car horns and of voices in the shopping centers of Shar-e-Naw. My parents’ bedroom window opened onto the garden and I could hear my mother crying. Without looking at me, my father said I’d fly to the United States in the morning. Arrangements had been made through an NGO to take me to Houston, Texas, where an American aid organization would help me. You will leave us to start a new life, inshallah, my father said.

I ran from the garden to my mother’s room but she had shut the door and wouldn’t let me in. There is nothing I can do for you, she called out to me. I slid to the floor and wept. In my bed that night, I wondered where Texas was in the United States. I thought of Farhid and the resolute look on his face in the photograph above our front door. I decided to have that same kind of determination, and I embraced his image, ignored my fear, and withheld my tears until something inside me retreated to a far corner.

My father and mother took me to Kabul International Airport. I held my mother for a long time, our wet faces touching. A plane carried me to Qatar and then to Washington, D.C. That evening, I flew to El Paso and stayed in a tent in a U.S. Army camp near Fort Bliss. I couldn’t count the number of tents and the number of people filling them. Like a gathering of nomads stretching without end across a white desert. The suffocating summer heat, I thought, was worse than Jalalabad. Sand and dust swirled endlessly. There wasn’t a single second I didn’t hear babies crying, heavy trucks driving past, and announcements over loudspeakers. One morning a soldier took me to a room in a square, concrete building where a man sat alone at a table. He said he was from the Department of Homeland Security. He asked me about Farhid. I told him how we used to play as children. I know nothing about his life as a soldier, I said. But he was your fiancé, the man insisted. My father arranged our marriage, I explained. He asked about my parents and if they had ever traveled outside of Afghanistan. No, I told him, they hadn’t. He thanked me and the soldier returned me to my tent.

I lost my appetite and would sit on the floor of my tent and spend hours rocking back and forth as I had as a child when I was scared.  A nurse told me I suffered from panic attacks, and she gave me medication that put me to sleep. I had dreams of bomb blasts. In one dream, I told my father, Let’s go away from here. You’re in America, he said, don’t worry. Another time, I dreamed my father was in great pain. When I called them, my mother said, Your father’s legs were hurting him. That’s why you had the dream.

Two months later I flew to Houston, where I was met by a man named Yasin from the Texas Institute for Refugee Services. Welcome to Houston, he said, and then he led me out of the airport and into a parking lot. The hot, humid air wrapped around me so tightly that my arms felt stuck to my body. My clothes clung to me like wet paper.

Yasin told me he was my caseworker. What is that? I asked. It means you are my responsibility, he said. He had dark hair and brown eyes and he wore a white shirt with a thin tie and a gray suit. He said he was from the Afghan city of Herat and had worked for an American NGO until he came under threat from the Taliban. He got a U.S. visa like mine and had flown to Houston three years ago. I told him about Farhid. I’m sorry for you, he said. When I think of Afghanistan and everyone I left behind, I shake with fear. His sad look touched me.

He led me to his car, a hybrid, he told me proudly. Turning a knob, he switched on the air conditioning and a chill ran through me as the cold air struck my sweat-dampened clothes. He gave me a bottle of water and told me I could remove my hijab; in America, he explained, women don’t have to cover their heads. I told him I felt more comfortable keeping it on. I wore your shoes once, as the Americans like to say, he said, but don’t be scared. After a while the U.S. won’t feel so strange and you will take off your hijab. He smiled and showed all of his teeth.

We drove to a Social Security office where I signed up for refugee benefits and Medicaid. He said these programs would provide a little bit of money to pay for housing, food, and health care. He took me to a small apartment in a five-story building owned by the institute. A swing hung motionless in an empty playground and large black birds hopped on the ground, and the noise they made flapping their heavy wings reminded me of Jalalabad merchants when they snapped carpets in the air to shake off dust. We took an elevator to a second-floor apartment. It had a sofa and a table with two chairs. A small bed with sheets and a blanket took up most of the bedroom. Blue towels hung from a rack in the bathroom. This will be your new home, Yasin said. I looked out the living room window and saw nothing but the doors of apartments across the way. Through my kitchen window I noticed people sitting on steps leading to the floors above me. Shadows converged over them and I became depressed, and I thought of Farhid’s spirit rising toward paradise—a dark journey toward light—and I decided this was my dark journey and eventually, inshallah, I’d find light and happiness in this my new home.

In the following days, Yasin took me to a job preparation class. The instructor was impressed I knew so much English and I explained I had studied it in Jalalabad. That is a good start, but you don’t know everything, he said. He told me that when I met someone, I should shake their hand and look them in their eyes and say, How do you do? Nice to meet you. I told him in Afghanistan this wouldn’t be possible; a woman would never shake a man’s hand or look at them unless they were their husband or family. You aren’t in Afghanistan, he reminded me. After class, Yasin would always walk ahead of me and when we came to a door he would stop and open it for me. I told him he didn’t have to do this, but he insisted. He was very kind. Slow, slowly, in the evenings in my apartment, I began to think that I might like America. I thought I could love Yasin.

After four weeks, Yasin told me he could no longer see me. Catholic Charities worked with refugees for only one month. He was very matter-of-fact. He told me to stop at a flower shop near his office. It was owned by a friend of his, Shivay. He had spoken to him and Shivay had agreed to hire me. You are fully oriented to the city, he told me, and now you will have a job. You’re set. Go and live your life. He smiled his toothy grin and stuck out his hand to shake mine. I don’t understand, I said. What don’t you understand? he asked. That stillness I felt when Abdul called me about Farhid returned, but this time it was Yasin’s absence I began to feel and I didn’t want him to go. He looked at me without understanding. I resisted the tears I felt brimming in my eyes and took his hand. Thank you, I said, looking at him. It was nice to meet you.

The next morning, I met Shivay. He told me he was born in Houston but his parents are Afghan. They came to the United States after the Russian invasion. I tried to speak to him in Dari as I sometimes had with Yasin, but he shook his head. My parents always spoke English around me, he said. They wanted me to be an American. That is what you should want to be too, Samira. He provided me with a table and a calculator to ring up sales. I inhaled the fragrance of red roses that filled buckets on the shelves by the door as I waited for customers, prompting memories of my childhood in Jalalabad. In those days, Farhid and I helped vendors put roses in pails of water outside their stalls on narrow streets hazy with dust. Orange trees bloomed in the summer and after the fruit had set, Farhid climbed them and dropped oranges down to me. The Kabul River passed behind the bazaar and we dangled our bare feet in its clear water. The frigid winter weather made us shake with cold and we stayed inside under blankets, eager for the comforts of spring. The sun blistered the sky in summer making the days impossibly hot, but no matter the heat we’d be back in the bazaars helping the vendors with their roses, deep red and cool in their buckets.

The flower shop took up a corner lot in a quiet neighborhood near a park where people gathered in the afternoon. I’d see men walk up to women and hug them and after a brief conversation they’d walk away. In Afghanistan, a woman would never hug a man outside of her family. Who were these men, I asked myself? The women wore slim dresses that revealed too much of their bodies, and I wondered how they felt, almost naked in public pressing their bodies against a man, some of whom didn’t wear shirts, and I saw the men’s bare chests and my heart beat fast and I blushed when I caught Shivay watching me. He laughed. Here, there are many men and women who aren’t Muslim, he said. In America, it isn’t shameful to look.

One morning Shivay surprised me with a cup of green tea. My parents always drink green tea, he said. They say it’s an Afghan custom. Is it? I told him it was and from then on he made green tea for me every morning.

At midday, Shivay would buy us lunch and after work he’d walk me to the nearby bus stop, and he’d wait with me until the bus arrived. I told him he didn’t have to do this but he insisted. You are a pretty girl and shouldn’t go out alone at night. When the bus arrived, I’d get on and watch him walk away. I felt warm all over. I thought I could love this man.

Two months later, however, Shivay told me he no longer needed me. He had hired me as a favor to Yasin, he said. That night when he walked me to the bus, he suggested I apply at a nearby Wal-Mart. He promised to give me a good recommendation and then he handed me a half empty box of green tea. I don’t drink it, he said.

Wal-Mart didn’t have any job openings. I applied at other stores, but no one called me. I  called Yasin. He said he’d try to help me, but I was no longer his client. I stayed in my apartment and when I grew bored I drew henna tattoos on my hands and feet, and at night I took the pills that helped me sleep. Then one afternoon, my father called. He said Farhid’s friend Abdul had received a U.S. visa and would be arriving in Houston soon. He has visited your mother and me many times since Farhid died so that we’d know he honors Farhid’s memory, my father told me. He is a nice boy. I have spoken to his family, and we are in agreement that he’d make a good husband for you in Texas.

I didn’t know what to say. After a moment, I hurried outside and took the elevator down to the playground and sat in a swing, gripping my phone in my left hand, and rocked back and forth, thrusting my legs out to gain momentum and stared at the sky through the spare trees. Motionless clouds blocked the sun. Lean shadows cut across the sidewalk. I rose higher and higher, lulled by the rhythmic creaking of the swing. Hello, Samira, are you there? I heard my father shout. No other sound but his voice disturbed the resigned stillness until I was ready to emerge from its quiet consolation. I ceased pumping my legs, let my toes drag against the ground. I slowed to a stop. Yes, Father, I’m here, I said into my phone. I asked him to text me a photograph of Abdul. Seconds later, a young man with a smooth face stared out at me from my phone. He had a distant, moody look that conveyed a seriousness of purpose, of someone who believed he was performing his duty. As would I. Over time, I was sure I could love this man.

Alpert Nelsen had lost a toe. He just didn’t know it yet. Not a big toe. One of the smaller ones. It got infected when he kicked a roll of fencing after his cameraman deleted the interview footage.

“Can’t you disinfect it?” he asked his doctor, a bearded and bespectacled man working out of a family clinic in the Bronx. “You know. Cut it off. Clean it off. Then reattach it?”

His doctor looked at him for a beat. “Sepsis,” he said flatly. “Tell me, Mr. Nelsen, how did you injure your toe?” He wiped Alpert’s arm with an alcohol swab, pinched the skin, and plunged a syringe needle into his muscle for tetanus.

He winced at the sting. As the doctor covered the spot with a bandage, Alpert told him about the desert along the northern Texas border and his interviews with the sheriff. Spools of wire sat scattered across the cracked earth, random and misplaced like aeration plugs on a drought-stricken lawn. Glug glug, the sheriff had joked as he watered a long line of planter boxes under the eaves of the waystation, the sharp tips of yucca leaves spearing the soft bodies of jade. Empty water bottles blew across the road into a ditch, a reservoir of plastic.

“So, you’re telling me you kicked a roll of fencing on the Texas border?” the doctor asked.

“Yeah.”

“You will need to be more careful next time.”

“Yeah, but what about one of those fancy new prosthetics? You know, put that in place of my toe.”

“No,” the doctor said. “If your foot was missing, sure. Or your hand. Or a limb. You could opt for a nerve-spliced prosthetic with synthetic skin, indistinguishable from the real thing. But a missing toe? No, that is just something you will have to get used to.”

“Huh.”

“Not to worry, though. You will get used to it. A slight limp for a few months, regain your balance, and then you’ll be right as rain.”

“Might as well chop off my entire foot. Better to have a prosthetic.”

“Might have to do that if you don’t get started on antibiotics right away. And we need to schedule intake at our sister clinic to have that toe removed,” he said confidently. Then, upon seeing Alpert’s face, he assured him, “It’s a simple procedure, really. They’ll numb the area, no pain, and then snip it off at the joint. You won’t feel a thing. You cannot leave that toe unattended, Mr. Nelsen.”

Mr. Nelsen attended to his apartment instead, limping as he looked for an old Two-Way camera. A Two-Way won’t have a crisis of conscience, he thought as he picked through oil-stained boxes at his workstation. A Two-Way won’t look away. The automated flying recorder would feed his servers footage that he edited into digestible narratives for his followers to share and patronize. Still, his subscriber count had begun to dip.

People quit on him. His cameraman. His girlfriend. Sinkholes appeared in his life without warning, leaving him to scramble around the openings and shovel dirt to bring the ground back to level. Oriana Knowles had left him to help refugees fleeing Texas after other countries airlifted their citizens to safety, or so she had claimed. He remembered her face, a tear-streaked mask of resentment framed by hair the color of sunlight, a Renaissance painting if there ever was one. He held the Two-Way to a pendant light and fiddled with its gyroscope.

A battery pack fell out, tumbled against the workstation, and landed on his bad toe. He shrieked in pain and clutched his foot. Goddamn me, he admonished himself. I shouldn’t have started thinking about her. But he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Her absence. It wasn’t fair that Oriana had cared more about others, cared more about some strangers in some far-off land that could have been ignored just by going about their lives. Eating penne alla vodka at Guiseppe’s. Strolling through Central Park. Gelatos under the Statue of Liberty. He missed those quiet moments when a pocket of time opened up just for them.

His toe throbbed on the flight back to the Texas border and hurt even more as he baked under the New Mexico sun. The sovereign territory of Texas disappeared over the horizon, flat and dry. Dead earth not worth fighting for. They thought they were free, but the collapse had brought cartels into their cities, and detention camps spread throughout the Texas deserts like cacti bloom after rain.

A man with a cowboy hat, the sheriff, walked toward the waystation, heat mirages and dust distorting him in the distance. The man showed no urgency to join him under the shade, taking his time to adjust his boots or shift something he carried. As he got closer, Alpert recognized the object as a plastic jug, like the water jugs on pallets inside the entrance. Water. He swallowed and felt thirst scrape at his throat. He had forgotten how quickly dehydration came here in the desert, even when standing in the shade.

He eyed the jugs on the pallets. Some were half-empty, bubbles resting in the water, but each had an individual and somewhat peculiar stamp. A blue trident, its lateral prongs curving comically off to the side, or a cartoon devil, its horns making the same exaggerated curve, or an abstract bird with curved wings. He bent down and rubbed his thumb over one of the trident stamps. The ink didn’t smudge as the water jostled inside.

“Traffickers stamp them,” the sheriff said, coming up behind him. “Their way of identifying their stash. I find them and confiscate them.” He placed the jug he had been carrying next to the others.

“Can I have some?” Alpert asked hopefully.

The sheriff nodded. “Knock yourself out.”

Alpert fumbled with the cap on a trident jug and drank, drops splattering against his collared shirt. The water calmed his thirst, for a moment, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough to last for long. He handed the empty jug back to the sheriff.

The sheriff watched him with detached interest. His eyes hid behind wrap-around sunglasses, skin peeling at the edges of his sunburned nose and cheeks, ears pushed down under the brim of his white cowboy hat. The faded insignia of border security rested above the hatband. It showed an old map of the southern states before Texas had seceded, blobs of territory shifting throughout history.

Texas independence, if it could be called that, had come through the judiciary a decade ago, granted by the Chief Justice himself in a 5-to-4 ruling. Texas’s right-wing militias took over most of the territory in the years that followed, like warlords from some distant land, and interstate commerce collapsed. New maps of America showed a cavernous hole where Texas had once proudly stood, cordoned off by fencing and surveillance, an emptiness that felt like a phantom limb.

“What happened to your cameraman?” the sheriff asked.

“Fired him.” They both knew he hadn’t fired his cameraman, Pierre Teeter from Nova Scotia. Pierre had stormed off in a huff after the sheriff had mocked him for the umpteenth time, testing his discomfort. Having a good cameraman was preferable to self-shooting. More accurate reaction shots, whereas the Two-Way pivoted in the air between sounds. “We’ll use my floater to finish our interview and get aerial shots. That work for you?”

“Knock yourself out.”

Alpert considered the sheriff’s repeated phrase of self-harm as he set the camera aloft and decided it was easier to believe that he hadn’t meant it as an expression of violence. Either way, it would be captured on his remote servers to be edited, memed, and shared. A self-described independent journalist, he had attracted a fanbase of anti-refugees after multiple interviews with Texas militia leaders, but really they were just ranchers armed with weapons of war. Most had knocked themselves out with assassinations on rival militias and mass shootings, creating the recent influx of Texas refugees seeking asylum.

After confirming his profile in the viewfinder, Alpert adopted the practiced pose of pensive curiosity as he squinted at the camera. “Sheriff Ward Baptiste is a humble man decorated for years of service protecting our southern border. We are here today to learn about the technology deployed at his border station, an unassuming rambler hidden somewhere secret, a location that even I cannot disclose.”

The sheriff chuckled. “Sure, Alpert. Very secret, very hidden. Illegal aliens are scooped up by our surveillance-detention system and brought back to Texas Detention Centers, or TDCs. Simple as that. We keep it clean-clean as a jellybean. On this side of the border, at least. Can’t speak for the other side.”

Finally, Alpert exclaimed, some good soundbites. Ward Baptiste, sheriff Glug Glug himself, must have been practicing. Absent were his previous one-word answers tinged with distrust. Perhaps he watched some of my other interviews, he thought. “Tell me about the illegal aliens. Who are they, and why do they come here?”

“Well,” the sheriff drawled, seeming to stare off into the distance behind his impenetrable sunglasses.

Alpert feared he had returned to his adversarial persona, like the whiplash of interviewing a politician who delights in switching between faux compliments and verbal abuse. Alpert tightened his jaw as he prepared to prompt him again.

“Well.” Ward pointed toward a distant object in the desert that wavered behind a heat mirage. “Why don’t you ask one yourself?”

It looked like nothing, and it looked like it could be anything. A specter among the many wavering things sitting at the edge of the horizon. Alpert glanced at the footage captured on the Two-Way on his phone, but he couldn’t determine its location near the border station as the camera circled overhead. He pulled at his collar to get air moving over the sweat on his chest, this unexpected and unseen thing ratcheting up his frustration.

“How can you tell?”

“Been around the desert long enough to know when something is out of place. It’s a second skin. Same reflection every day. Any change out there is a mole or a freckle that needs to be looked at. C’mon, boyo, let’s start walking.”

Looking back at the utility vehicle sitting in the shade of the waystation, Alpert hobbled after Ward. Sun blasted him from above as he came out from under the eaves.

“Can’t we take the four-wheeler out there? Looks like a long walk.”

“Naa, I could use your help destroying supply caches. Easier to find them on foot.”

Alpert felt like Ward was torturing him on purpose as he took his time around the rolls of fencing, looking back at Alpert to make sure he was keeping up. The sheriff exercised excruciating exactness overturning rocks and opening bluffs woven out of dried mud and sticks. He unwrapped food hidden in underground stashes, scattered it across the earth, and told Alpert how coyotes and red-tailed hawks gnawed at it and shat it out. “The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain,” he quoted and laughed. Upon finding a cache of energy bars in yellow packaging, he unwrapped one and dropped the wrapper. Alpert watched it flutter away like a butterfly in the wind.

“See that shape drawn on the ground over there?” Ward smacked his lips as he talked, his tongue navigating nougat. “Go brush off the dirt and rocks and lift up the panel. Water’s hidden underneath.”

Alpert stared at the ground for evidence of a shape. He looked back at the sheriff’s inscrutable face under the shadow of his cowboy hat. He felt frustration rising again with the heat, sweat dripping down his chest. His inflamed toe pulsed with pain. A mingling of misery that made him impatient and made him long to be back in his climate-controlled apartment. He squatted down, tilted his head, and looked for the thing, anything, hoping to see it from a different angle. No shape appeared.

“What are you seeing?” He shook his head in defeat.

“Right there in front of you. El Cartel del Mar. They mark their stashes with a trident. You gotta look for the curve in the dirt they make with pebbles and rocks. Ya see it now?”

Alpert saw it, finally, couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it to begin with. Like learning to see an optical illusion, the shape was obvious to him now. Looking around the ground, he saw other distinctive curvatures marking hidden stashes. “There are so many of them,” he said in astonishment. He shook his head. Not having Pierre here to capture footage of the markings on the ground, a graveyard of contraband, lessened the impact. The Two-Way hovered lazily nearby, focusing only on him and the sheriff as they spoke.

“Wait.” Alpert knitted his brow above his practiced pensive look. “I can’t believe that the cartels are helping Texas refugees, I mean, illegal aliens. What do the cartels get out of hiding food and water near the border?”

Ward looked at him for a beat, which made him feel like he was back in the doctor’s office asking stupid questions about reattaching toes and prosthetics. No, these are all perfectly reasonable questions, he thought, but conceded that he should have considered his doctor’s advice before rushing back to the border, his toe pulsing with unbearable heat.

“Money,” Ward said flatly. “Moving commodities is a lucrative business, whether it be drugs or aliens.”

The panel pulled up like the top of a trapdoor spider’s hidey-hole, and Alpert lifted out a water jug, thankful no spiders jumped out with it. Only a quarter of water sloshed at the jug’s base. He drank greedily at the spout, water running down his neck and chest. Water. Sweet, delicious water in the heat, even if it left a plastic aftertaste. He placed the empty jug back in the hole and hobbled after the dirt clouds stirred up by the sheriff’s boots.

They walked toward the object that had piqued the sheriff’s interest, still about a hundred yards out or more. Alpert couldn’t determine distances here. In a baseball stadium, sure, he could say they were as close as the 15th row to the pitcher’s mound. Goddamn me, he thought, to be at a Yankees game right about now would be fucking fantastic. He imagined resting his aching foot on the cup holder mounted to the front row seats. The quiet before the crack of the bat against the ball, the roar of the crowd as the ball sailed into the stands. The hitter lazily rounding the bases toward home, crossing himself and gesturing to the sky, sanctified. Oriana sitting beside him, a bright smile every time he turned to tell her he was the luckiest man alive and kiss her soft cheek. Laughter as her hair, hair the color of sunlight, blew across his face, the sweet smells of her shampoo and perfume.

But she had to go all social justice on me. Better to just accept the new reality, or what had she called it? The Balkanization of America. The mirror had been shattered, our national identity strewn across the southern states like broken glass where we couldn’t recognize each other as Americans anymore, even as former US citizens begged for reunification. The Supreme Court had killed that hope, she had complained bitterly. Precedent, originalism, and the constitution be damned, amorphous terms that had never protected civil rights.

Alpert pushed her out of his mind and focused on the thing ahead. He hadn’t noticed that Ward had been talking the entire time about immigration policy and Texas bounty hunters assigned to detention centers. “They nab the aliens before they get close to our borders,” he said. “Collect their reward from a TDC, and we clean up the rest.”

No matter, he thought, the heat making him listless. The Two-Way would have recorded anything important he had missed, and he could edit out any of the parts that didn’t appeal to his fans. The sins of journalistic malpractice—omission, hyperbole, and outrage—didn’t apply to the profession of professional vlogger. Only establishing a narrative that helped his patrons feel better about their own lives. They would certainly feel happy about not having to walk through this godforsaken desert, he thought.

The heat rose off the ground and enveloped him like a blanket. He felt thirst clawing at his throat. He scanned the ground and located the faint outline of a symbol marking a stash. El Cartel del Mar. How good of them to hide life-saving supplies here in the desert, but no, wait. They’re the bad guys. They’re the invaders who traffic humans and guns and drugs. But how very good of them, how very nice of them to leave me water. His mind reeled as he reached for the trapdoor.

Ward pulled him back, a firm hand on his shoulder. “No, boyo, not that one. Don’t touch that.” He studied the ground and pointed toward another trident symbol about a stone’s throw away. “I’ll unearth some water there. You stay put.”

Alpert limped toward the thing instead, a second skin the sheriff had called it, or a boll weevil, or… he couldn’t remember through the pain of his toe. The Two-Way spun off from filming him as it picked up muffled moans coming from the thing, close enough now that he could see it was a human, or a human-shaped thing, trapped inside a net. The net scrunched closer and closer the more it struggled, mesh pressed against the skin. Bending down, he saw that it was a woman, and he recoiled from the smell of urine.

“Hey there, dearie.” Ward joined Alpert to stand over the cocooned body. “You look a little parched. Glug glug.” A crystalline column of water poured out of the jug, beads of water splintering against her body. “Strands keep them alive for a few hours under the sun, needles injecting saline and a mild sedative. Makes it painful on the hands where all the nerve endings are, but they can’t feel it on the rest of their body, for the most part. By the time I get to them, the saline has run dry. They need a splash before heatstroke sets in.”

Alpert looked for a drone or a machine crawling along the ground that could have deployed the net. “How does the surveillance-detention system work? I don’t see where the net came from.”

The sheriff nodded as he deactivated the net with a key fob. “You’re not supposed to see where it came from. This isn’t some penal colony where you get to see all the secrets behind our technology.” The net slackened and flopped open on the ground. The woman rolled off and tried lifting herself on her hands and knees before collapsing. Her chest heaved as she shielded her eyes from the sun.

The net looked like a spider web. Its silk lines rustled in the wind, breathing in and out. It glittered with beads of water. He watched, mesmerized, and by looking at the net instead of the woman, he didn’t have to acknowledge her existence.

He began to run his hand over the edge of the net before jerking back and cursing. The pressure-sensitive surface jumped up to grab at his hand like some living thing, and it stung like nettles, that ugly plant growing between sidewalk cracks in the Bronx, and god help those who happened to brush a bare calf or ankle against one. Spines barbed to the skin, uneven patches of inflammation, and scratching at the invisible thing ended with no relief.

“Discourages second attempts, doesn’t it,” Ward said as he grinned in satisfaction. “No repeat offenders. Once they’ve gotten tangled up in our nets, big fish, little fish, never coming back.”

“Goddamn me,” he spat at Ward. “That hurt. How is this contraption considered okay, you know, with human rights? It seems unnecessarily cruel.” He stopped, realizing he would lose more of his fans and most of his patrons mentioning human rights. I’ll have to edit this out, he thought, but his frustration rose like nettle rash.

“Illegal aliens don’t get human rights,” the sheriff said confidently. Then, upon seeing Alpert’s face, he assured him, “It’s simple, really. Title 8 and the sovereign territory of Texas authorizes the capture, detainment, and transfer of aliens as soon as they step on American soil.”

Alpert looked at her, finally. Hair the color of sunlight. She didn’t look like an alien. She looked like she belonged in America. Oriana had referred to refugees as future Americans just to tease him. Maybe she had been right.

“Look here.” Ward pointed at the woman’s blistered neck. “That’s a cartel stamp. She’s been trafficked. And look here.” He wrenched the woman’s wrist around to show Alpert her forearm, ignoring her yelp of pain. “That’s a detention center tattoo. That symbol means that she was detained for the murder of an unborn baby, and she has since been sterilized. She’s the property of Texas.”

The woman looked up at them, blue eyes darting between their faces. Her chapped lips sputtered, white spittle crusted on the corners, but no words came out. A Renaissance painting that reminded him of Oriana. The day she had left him came flooding back, a gut punch as he remembered her face. Disappointment. She had cried that day, tears running down her soft cheeks that he had tried to wipe away, but she had swatted at his hand and insisted that he didn’t understand the damage Texas had inflicted on America, the inhumanity of a theocratic wasteland that imprisoned and killed women.

The woman on the ground uttered a word, her first, and Alpert squatted down to hear her, pain shooting up his leg from his toe.

“Water.”

Alpert saw the outline of dried tears over the dirt on her face. He was a fool to not have admitted it earlier. Her absence hurt. He wanted her back. He wanted her safe from wherever she had disappeared to inside Texas, wipe away all those tears, and tell her she was right.

“Ya want water?” Ward asked the woman. “Ha! How does the old saying go? ‘You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her drink,’ or something like that.”

What happened next felt like a memory, like he was watching it happen without control over his body and its actions. The sheriff fell backward, his hat flying off into the wind. The net leapt up to meet him, grab him, and crumple him into a ball. He tried stretching out toward Alpert and yelled invective until the net cinched over his mouth, the sound of sunglasses crunching against his face. He looked like a burrito baking in the sun.

“It’s okay.” Alpert turned to offer the woman his hand. “I’m going to help you.”

She swatted at his hand and scooted back in a panic as the Two-Way pivoted behind him.

“Oh, that? Don’t be scared, that’s just my camera. I’m a journalist. I’m filming a story about the Texas border. Really, you can trust me. I’m going to help you.” It felt good to repeat the words, like the act of saying them out loud absolved his actions. He hadn’t been able to wipe away her tears, but he would wipe away the guilt of letting her disappear.

She looked at him suspiciously before pointing. “Water. I need water.” Her finger pointed at a symbol marked on the ground.

The trident, El Cartel del Mar. He felt sandpaper in his throat as he tried to swallow. Yes, water. How very good of them. How very nice of them.

He limped toward the symbol. “Don’t you worry,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m going to help you.” He brushed off the trident and opened the ground. A net exploded out of the hole like a trapdoor spider capturing its prey. The pain was instantaneous as the net’s needles sank into his skin. He struggled to escape, but the net tightened around his body, hugging him like a second skin.

The woman stood over Alpert and watched. She made no effort to free him. After he stopped moving, she found the sheriff’s plastic jug and drank deeply of what remained. Her neck muscles worked as she dipped her head back, hair moving across her shoulders. She dropped the empty jug between Alpert and the sheriff, and started walking toward the waystation. Toward America. The Two-Way sparkled in the sun above them for a moment until it spun off to record the sound of wind scraping across the border.

So, Abe, the pleasant guy who buzzes you in every week at the bubbled-roof tennis facility, takes your thick wad of cash (he appreciates exact change) and makes the usual small talk: weather, recent professional tennis matches, how he’s doing fixing up the fixer-upper he just bought in Queens, etc.

Lately, you’ve also been discussing updates on when the tennis club is scheduled to permanently close. The date keeps shifting, but it’s imminent.

He’ll lose his job. You’ll lose your precious hour of weekly tennis.

Today, you notice for the first time a large swelling at Abe’s neck. Behind the plexiglass, you suppress a gasp and try not to gawk. You glimpse. It’s protruding like an Adam’s apple, but halfway down his neck and on the side.

Is it new? Is it painful?

Should you tell him?

Is he blithely unaware?

Or is he fully aware and ignoring it?

Or is he aware and already undergoing medical treatment to deal with it, to keep it from growing, to keep it from consuming all of his neck and possibly his friendly, dark-eyebrowed face and even his shaved head?

Your long-time tennis partner would know what to do, and whether you should bring it up with Abe. She was raised down south and has impeccable manners.

But she’s in Egypt for a climate change conference and to see the pyramids. Or so she says. You imagine she is a perfect spy or a radical activist. She is tiny, nondescript, unassuming, and so soft-spoken no one has a clue what she is saying. She is traveling despite all the warnings and articulated dangers associated with travel for someone her age during what is hoped to be a waning phase of the pandemic.

If you wait for your tennis partner to return (in a few weeks) to consult on how to handle Abe’s situation, it may be too late for Abe. And it will be solely on you if Abe dies before her return from her high-risk trip because you neglected to mention the large swelling attacking his neck.

Abe is functioning fine. He’s busy juggling multiple phone lines, multiple demands for coveted weekend court time. Not knowing what to do, you wave at him through the plexiglass, he smiles back, and you wander to your court, fully masked for action.

You and your tennis partner have been playing with face masks on for several months now; they fog up eyeglasses, pinch behind ears, cut visual perspective horizontally and vertically, and muffle attempts at conversation. On the other hand, there is the possibility that wearing masks while exerting and running could improve lung capacity.

After ten minutes on the court with the young local pro, you are huffing and exhausted. So much for lung capacity. Fifty more minutes to go. During the expensive lesson, you want to make every costly minute count. But you are distracted. You hit the ball wide or long or inaccurately into the sloping net.

Is the distraction due to concerns about your partner’s long, potentially dangerous trip? The amount of extra money you have to pay for a lesson while she’s away?

Or is it all due to thoughts of Abe’s neck growth? To wondering if it will intensify or expand to the size of a yellow tennis ball, while you are selfishly hitting one instead of helping him? What will Abe’s neck look like when your lesson is over?

Will the growth turn yellow? Will that mean it is full of pus?

Why aren’t you racing off the court to beg Abe for the love of God to go immediately to an urgent care center (there’s one only a few blocks away) to address his neck issue?

***

You are unaccustomed to the steady onslaught of briskly and accurately placed balls the pro provides. He plucks the balls nonstop from a jam-packed grocery cart and smacks them at you.

You are accustomed to a sluggish weekly pace with your tennis partner, filled with rambling delays between points as she collects loose balls and places them in odd arrangements at the back of the court. You imagine she is plotting to overthrow a government on a continent oceans away, beyond this smooth, immovable, and bright blue deco surface. You impatiently pace, wait, and sometimes perform jumping jacks until she is finally ready to successfully hit her serve with the intensity of ten thousand suns. Or she hits it directly into the net.

From his side of the court, the agile-legged pro speaks liltingly about flow. “Where is your flow?” he asks. “Don’t rush your shots. Get your arm back early. Get it! I like that one. Pivot! Run up to the net. Keep your wrist steady.”

You have heard these commands, especially about wrist and flow, nearly every time you take a lesson when your tennis partner is unavailable and your back-up options (a sturdy friend from college, a hard-hitting former work colleague) don’t pan out.

Your wrist is the size of a pencil, so what’s a woman to do? It doesn’t wobble on return of serve since you have time to prepare. But impromptu, at the net, it dips. Some might say it collapses. You start mumbling your “Grip!” mantra to yourself under your multiple masks. It helps you focus and slightly improves the wrist flailing.

As for flow, some days you have it and some days you don’t. But honestly, how can you flow when a young man’s neck might now be the size of a Buick while you, a masked idiot, gambol all over your side of the court and contend with an unreliable wrist?

You associate the word “flow” with menstruation, something you have not had to worry about for quite some time. Years ago, at a Long Island party where everyone discussed furniture, you were introduced to a much older, wizened man. Over the course of your very brief conversation, he chose for some reason to confide in you that he only dated women who still “flowed.”

At the time, you silently wondered:

• Who invited this guy to the party and why? And who uses the word flow in this manner, much less in party patter with a stranger?
• How does he screen for flow status upfront, before dating anyone? Does he require a doctor’s note? Does he check out bathroom cabinets? Does he ask women directly? Do they punch him in the nose as he deserves and as the woebegone look of his nose implies?
• Has he incorrectly assumed you no longer flowed, or God forbid that you were interested in dating him?
• You have a gorgeous and smart friend, a mother of twins, who went through early menopause in her thirties. If he had met her “post-flow” would this presumed Viagra user find her lacking? Chopped liver?

Now you wonder why couldn’t that guy have a tennis ball affixed to the side of his creased neck instead of poor, young Abe? Abe, who hasn’t even finished fixing up his house.

In fury, you use your two-handed backhand to nail a deep, perfect shot down the line past your lilting-voiced pro. He’s unable to return it. He smiles broadly at you and says, “Nice!”

Flow or no flow, for a moment, you’ve still got it. And it feels so good to hit something.

Maybe Abe just needs some drainage.

Maybe your tennis partner will return safely and virus-free from Egypt.

Maybe the tennis club will stay open.

All unlikely.

But, maybe, and it’s a long shot, a very long shot, maybe you will learn finally to go with the flow.

But, then again, why start now?

It was a typical Thursday night at the Taj Tiki Bar, tucked away off the Jalalabad – Kabul road in the hamlet of Bagrami just outside of the Jbad city limits. The Tiki Bar at the Taj had been established by a UN road building crew from Australia in 2003 and was the only bar in Eastern Afghanistan. The Taj itself was a three building world-class guesthouse that also featured a custom swimming pool that the Aussies built that we filled with sand filtered, freezing cold well water. This being Afghanistan, Afghans were not allowed in the Tiki bar and because the pool was frequented by western NGO women it was surrounded by a 40 foot bamboo screen. Bikini wearing women cavorting in a pool with men is haram in Afghanistan and best kept out of public view.

During the summer of 2008 the Tiki Bar had never been busier during weekly Thursday night happy hour. The UN had pulled out the year before, so the Taj was now home to the Synergy Strike Force, an MIT FabLab, and the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club. My USAID funded Community Development Program (CDP) was also based there.  Jalalabad and San Diego are sister cities which was why the Rotarians were actively funding projects to refurbish schools, build dormitories at Nangarhar University and purchase modern equipment for the Nangarhar University Teaching Hospital.

The Synergy Strike Force (SSF) was a San Diego based collection of high-end tech gurus who were there to “save the willing” by accessing unlimited funding from DARPA to fine tune their crowd sourcing software. To get the internet out to the people the founder of the Synergy Strike Force, a dual MD/PhD named Bob, conned the National Science Foundation into funding the deployment of an MIT Fabrication Laboratory to the Taj Guesthouse that came with two Grad students to set it up.

The Tiki Bar had become so busy that I brought my son Patrick, who had just graduated from High School, over to run the bar allowing me to focus on supply. Buying beer was no problem but getting it past the National Directorate of Security (NDS) checkpoint in the Kabul Gorge could be a real problem. I had already lost 2 sets of body armor and 5 bottles of booze to them, but they headed home early every Thursday clearing the run back from Camp Warehouse long before the sun set.

There was a giant clay fireplace across from the bar for cold weather operations and the patio area between the main house, bar, and pool deck was filled with the usual suspects. NGO workers from the American aid giants DAI and Chemonics, two women from Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale, the attaché from the Pakistan consulate who had the hots for one of the German ladies, four agriculture specialists from the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the ever lovely and vivacious Ms. Mimi from Agence Française de Développement. Mimi had a male colleague who insisted on wearing a speedo bathing suit in the pool area, but we let it slide because Mimi was a most attractive and agreeable guest who often stayed the night and spent Friday’s pool side.

A Blackwater crew from the Border Police training academy were there as usual as was the brigade Human Terrain Team from FOB Fenty. There were two Air Force officers from the Nangarhar Provincial Reconstruction Team (technically in a UA status). One of them, an intelligence officer, was dating my Aussie running mate Rory which was a lot of risk for marginal gain in my opinion, but I’m a retired Marine Corps grunt on the other side of 50 so I might have been jealous, I was never sure.

The SSF crew were spending their last night in country before heading back to the USA for the annual Burning Man festival and they were in rare form, as were the Rotarians from the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club who were reinforced by some Rotarians from Perth Australia because it turns out Perth too is a sister city of San Diego and Jalalabad. The Twins were the MIT grad students sent to start up the FabLab. They were from The Center for Bits and Atoms and were both TS (SCI) cleared engineers. They were from New Jersey, both had long jet black hair, both smiled so much it made me uncomfortable; one was Chinese American the other Indian American. They were seated at the bar with The Skipper – an EOD trainer who remained outside the wire living with his Afghan trainees in a compound near the Jalalabad Teaching Hospital. The Skipper was my nickname for a retired navy Senior Chief EOD specialist who looked just like Alan Hale from the 1960’s era TV Show Gilligan’s Island. He had laid out a bunch of triggering switches he had collected from disabled IED’s and was taking notes as the Twins examined each with magnifying glasses. The Twins had the uncanny ability to recognize countries of origin and fabrication anomalies in the circuit work.

The Twins were trouble from the start because they proved themselves to be indispensable. We expected computer geeks from MIT, not engineers who could fix or build anything without apparent effort. They rebuilt the Tiki Bar because they found the original construction faulty, they built shelving from wood scrapes that were so impressive they looked like museum pieces. They got bored one day and started working on the War Pig, our up armored Toyota Hi Lux, fabricating a turbo charger and, with the help of our house manager Mehrab and a local diesel mechanic, super charged the engine and lifted the suspension 3 inches so the new tires they “found” would fit the truck. Once done they surmised the War Pig it would run hot and fast on the hairpin turns which were a feature of the Kabul – Jalalabad highway and they frequently jetted out of the front gate to drive like maniacs on the mountain roads when unsupervised.

The Skipper was a regular at the Tiki Bar Happy Hour every Thursday evening where he drank exactly two beers regardless of how long he stayed. The Skipper was superstitious, he insisted on driving himself, like I did, but he was the slowest, most cautious driver I ever saw in Afghanistan. He also never missed church on Sundays. After getting his engineering reports sorted he told the Twins he’d be heading into Khogyani district in the morning to blow some dud ordnance at the Border Police Training Academy. Friday being a weekend day in Islamic lands it should be quiet enough for them to tag along.

I agreed to join them to provide an extra hand if things went pear shaped so as dawn broke across the Nangarhar Valley on a scorching hot Friday I was poking along in The Skippers armored SUV with the twins. I was wearing body armor, with my 1911 pistol mounted in a chest holster, and I had my Bushmaster flame stick with its 10.5 inch barrel and Noveske vortex pig snout flash suppressor. We had discovered regular bird cage flash suppressors kicked too much gas and noise back into a vehicle if you were firing while mounted but the pig snout kicked it all out the end of the barrel which resulted in a little additional muzzle flip but no gas blowing back in your eyes.

The Twins carried Glock 19’s with two extra mags in kydex holsters and they both sported WWII era M3 .45 caliber Grease Guns. There were hundreds of old M3 submachineguns and 1911 pistols floating around Afghanistan at the beginning of the War, and we had obtained more than our fair share somehow. The M3 was the only weapon that could be fired out of the muzzle port in the windshield of the War Pig. The poorly designed add-on armor from South Africa featured a V shaped windshield with a firing port on the passenger’s side. But the angle of the bullet proof windscreen was so steep the only weapon we could fire out of it was an M3 subgun held upside down with the bottom of the magazine facing the roof.  But the Twins liked them because it was easy to modulate the trigger and control them when firing on full auto.

We were poking along the hardball road leading into the foothills near Tora Bora when The Skipper stopped dead in his tracks. His Afghan EOD team driving behind him must have anticipated this because they stopped on a dime too. “You smell that” he asked as he opened his door letting in an overpowering smell of cut hay and shredded leaves. His Afghans were out of their truck looking up and down the road, The Skipper looked over at me and said “IED”. That perked the Twins up as the Skipper explained we should be seeing a carpet of leaves covering the road ahead.

The road doglegged to the right crossing a large culvert that channeled a fair-sized stream under the asphalt paved road. The road was covered in a several inch carpet of leaves but there was no blast signature I could detect. We got out of the trucks and started looking around, trying to figure out what had happened when a patrol from the Afghan National Army (ANA) pulled up with a bunch of villagers in the back of their pickups. The villagers told us there is a bomb in the culvert we’re standing on. The Afghan team leader asks what had just blown up and an elder pointed downstream and said, ‘the man who put the bomb in the culvert.”

The Skipper got one those fisheye mirrors used for vehicle searches out of the back of his truck along with a powerful surefire flashlight and gave them to his EOD techs. One of the EOD techs laid on his belly and held the mirror in front of the drainage pipe while one of the other EOD men shined the flashlight into the culvert pipe. They spot the IED immediately – The Skipper and the Twins look and see it too; a pressure cooker on vehicle jack stand jammed up against the top of the culvert pipe with a blasting cap inserted into a hole in the lid and wire running out of the drainage pipe heading downstream.

The Skipper called back to FOB Fenty at the Jalalabad airfield to tell the brigade what he found, and they instructed us to stay on scene and wait for the route clearance package to lead the EOD team out of Fenty to recover the IED. The Skipper acknowledged them but we both knew waiting for the army was a non-starter. They would take at least 8 hours to roll out of the gate and another two to get to us; there was no way the ANA would keep a road closed that long. He looked at the Twins and said, “let’s blow this bitch up”. They broke into radiant smiles and immediately started organizing a work area in rear area of the truck.

The Skipper got four bricks of C4 out and gave them to the Twins who taped them tightly together while he unspooled some det cord. The Twins then wrapped the bricks tightly with the det cord and handed them to the Afghan EOD techs. They along with the ANA troops glued the charge to a piece of cardboard and then tape the cardboard to a five-gallon water jug they had some local kids take down the creek and top off.

The Twins conned The Skipper into giving up his blasting caps so they could prime the charge, the Afghan EOD men attached about 10 feet of shock tube to the charge and using 550 cord lowered the water jug over the mouth of the culvert. A few of the ANA troops and some local teenagers had stopped up the downstream end of the pipe that was now filling with water. The other ANA troops were with the EOD techs in the stream bed making a big show of lining up the shot correctly. Once the shot was perfectly lined up, they threw a yellow smoke grenade into the pipe and scrambled up the stream bank.

When the smoke was flowing out of the pipe the senior Afghan EOD tech looked at the Skipper who nodded his head while putting on set of high-end hearing protectors. The Twins and I had foam ear plugs which we fished out of our pockets before sitting on folding beach chairs the Skipper carries around for just such an occasion.  With the smoke billowing out, the techs and ANA soldiers yelled ‘fire in the hole’ three times (in English) and the senior EOD man shot the charge.

The C4 went off with a giant WHOOMP; it’s a slow burning explosive so it doesn’t evaporate the water, it pushes it down the pipe at around 26,000 feet per second, the kinetic energy takes out the IED and the water renders the explosive components safe. A giant gush of yellow tinted water erupted out of the downstream end of the culvert pipe arcing over the creek bed for about 100 feet before slamming into the trees like a wave. The water then exploded up into the sky, slowly dissipating in a rainbow of colors that hung suspended in the air for a good 45 seconds.

There were dozens of local people from the near-by villages and the stalled traffic watching us and they erupted in cheering and laughing and shouting. Their kids were dancing around in excitement laughing and clapping; local men came up to take pictures with the ANA troops and the EOD team. The Skipper looked over with a big wide smile and said to me “can you believe we get paid to do this shit”? I could not, nor could the Twins who were self-funded volunteers and not making a dime during their time in the Stan but still happy to be here with us.

The Skipper lost his dream gig in 2011 when the position was eliminated, and he moved onto the big box FOB on Bagram. His company felt it was no longer safe for him to free range outside the wire and they were probably right. Somebody up in Nuristan had taken a shot at the Skipper that missed due to a low order detonation from incompetent poor waterproofing so despite his willingness to stay it was time for him to go.  For the three years he roamed around N2KL (Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, and Laghman provinces) ‘removing the boom’ from local towns and villages while making one hell of an impression on the Afghans. They loved him and he, in return, poised for hundreds of pictures, while patiently fielding complaints about ISAF, the Afghan government and various American administrations from local elders. The Skipper had balls the size of grapefruit and he never hesitated to go into Indian Country with just his Afghan EOD crew when called.

The Skipper, like every heavily armed humanitarian I knew, made it home safe and sound after staying in Afghanistan (on FOB’s) until 2015. His never talked about his free-range past because none of the people he worked with believed his stories. That was a common among us outside the wire contractors in Afghanistan. There were only a few of us who invested the time it took to learn the language and put their skin in the game. Those that did, like the Skipper, were rewarded with a veil of protection by the local people. That may have been a minor accomplishment in the big scheme of things, but it was a worthy one that came with no small amount of pride. We were able to go places and do things that would have gotten us killed ten times over had we still been in uniform. And that little bit of special pride is borne in silence by us these days because nobody believes that we lived outside the wire with the Afghans, for years and enjoyed every minute of it.

From his notebook, illustrated with a picture of a four-eyed flower:

We live in a bungalow in Pasadena, California, where my father is a professor of physics at Cal Tech, and my mother is a plein air watercolorist. My mother taught me how to read, and at the age of seven, I was assigned two books per week or eight per month. Later the number went up. You may have already guessed I was homeschooled and that was the case. It was a utopian life, unmarred by peer pressure and the stresses of competitive education. I am now twenty-nine years old and understand the world of “common consent.” Except I can’t take it anymore.

***

It was Tuesday afternoon and Bartholomew was tutoring English to a ninth grader from San Marino High School. His parents, Anthony and Barbara, quietly slipped out the kitchen door so as not to disturb the lesson. They had been walking for several blocks around the leafy neighborhood.

“He needs a degree,” Barbara announced.

“We’ve talked about this before,” said Anthony. “College isn’t for everyone. Barth is what they call a creative.”

“Who says that?”

“It’s a designation.”

“Whose?”

Anthony laughed. “Never mind.”

“He needs a good job—a career,” she said. “We thought he would find his own way. Fat chance.”

“I thought you were being serious.”

“I am.”

“He likes living with us,” said Anthony. “He doesn’t see a logical reason to leave home.”

“Then it’s time for him to move out,” she said.

“He’s broke.”

“Give him his college fund.”

“And push him out to sea,” said Anthony.

“If you’re going to the Athenaeum for lunch, I thought I would join you.”

“I’m having lunch with the department head.”

“Oh, well then—” she said.

“Don’t look so glum.”

***

It was the beginning of April and unseasonably hot. They walked around Lacy Park and down Orlando, past the big houses that Anthony referred to as palaces. Barbara was the first to notice a broken sprinkler flooding the lawn of a Spanish revival. Ducks from Huntington Gardens had discovered it.

“We’re in a drought,” she said. “I’ll go up.”

She rang the doorbell—and rang it again. A big dog started barking, and Barbara told the dog to shut up. This made the dog snarl and scratch at the door demonically.

“Shut up,” yelled Anthony from the driveway.

“Shut the fuck up,” chimed Barbara.

They were cutting across the lawn when another sprinkler went off, and they had to run through the duck pond to get away.

***

At lunch at Cal Tech’s Athenaeum, they discussed the pros and cons of giving Bartholomew his college fund, which had grown substantially.

“You’re right. Barth needs a job where he can meet new people,” said Anthony.

“Like single women,” said Barbara.

“What do you think he would do with two hundred fifty thousand dollars?” wondered Anthony.

***

Bartholomew didn’t have a driver’s license, but he didn’t mind walking to Barnes & Noble three miles away. When he arrived at the store, his shirt was sticking to his back under his corduroy sport coat. The store manager gave him an application and directed him to a table at the bookstore café.

“Let’s see. Bartholomew? Like the apostle?” asked the manager.

“That’s right,” said Barth.

“What’s your experience working in retail?”

“None in retail,” he said. “I’ve been tutoring for the last several years.”

“I see. How many hours a week?”

“Two.”

“I see,” said the manager evenly. “Are you living at home?”

“Yes.”

“And no college?”

“No college but I am quite well read.”

“Everybody who works here reads. We like to hire people who are bibliophiles. Do you know the word?”

Bartholomew nodded. “I’m a bibliolater.”

“That’s a word I don’t know,” said the manager.

“I have an extravagant interest in books.”

“I like how you say that, Bartholomew. Can you estimate how many books you’ve read?”

“Over four thousand. My parents kept a log.”

“Excellent. May I ask how—”

“Five books a week—twenty a month.”

The manager returned to Barth’s application. “That’s the advantage of a homeschool education, I guess. We have an opening in customer service. This package has all the information—the benefits and raises. We pay eighteen-seventy-nine an hour to start. You don’t need to wear a sport coat to work. Some people wear T-shirts, but we prefer a shirt with a collar. Can you start tomorrow?”

“I’d like that very much.”

***

It had been three days, and he still hadn’t run into the manager. Instinctively he knew what to do. There were books in carts to put away, books on the floor, books and magazines on tables in the store café. The scene was similar to the disarray at the public library. He arranged errant books alphabetically and put the magazines back on the rack after reverse rolling them to make them lie flat. At the end of the day, a young woman named Nadja introduced herself to him.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked.

“A customer?” Barth ventured.

“I’m Nadja, your boss. I’m taking over Carmen’s job.”

“Nice to meet you, Nadja,” Barth said.

She appeared to be his age and had a nice figure—although it was hard to tell under her wrinkled khaki jumpsuit.

“I like how you’re organizing the fiction section,” she said.

“It was a big mess. What happened to Carmen?” he asked.

“Carmen quit.” She stood up on her toes to stretch her calf muscles. “He quit the day he hired you. He said he can’t stand customers who never buy anything.”

“You mean the homeless?” Barth said.

“Oh, they have homes,” she said oddly. She looked at him suspiciously. “Carmen thought you were homeless.”

“I was hot from walking.”

“I do like your corduroy coat. Why don’t you wear it for work?”

***

They were in the children’s section on the second floor. Nadja took a seat in a tiny chair at the table. There were several books out, including one turned over with a broken spine. She picked it up like it was a bird and bent it backward to restore its shape. “Nothing can be done for it,” she said.

Barth was surprised at how different she looked. Her blond hair was clean, brushed, and tied back in a ponytail. She wore slacks with a gray blouse studded with military buttons. She wanted to know about the books he had read.

He said: “Well, just about everything we have in fiction.”

“How about non?”

Bartholomew was too tall for the table and his legs were cramping. He tried to keep them down, which made one of them vibrate. At the bookstore café he had noticed a lot of people with the condition—usually vibrating one leg at a time. It was something to look into.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He blushed.

“We have something in common,” she said.

“Were you homeschooled?” he asked.

“I never went to school. I had a studio teacher. Actually he was my dialogue coach. I played an English boy, and it got harder for me to do as I grew up.”

“You never went to school?”

“Not a single day. I played against type. Do you know what that means?”

“Reversed?”

“Yes, reversed,” she laughed. “My coach wanted me to try different dialects. It confused me. Sometimes I was a posh boy and sometimes sort of cockney. I wasn’t a good actress. ‘Hello, chappy.’ See, I can’t do it anymore.”

“Hello, chappy,” repeated Barth.

He noticed how she had outlined her left eye with makeup but not her right. “Did you have friends your own age?”

“Adults mainly.”

“I had neighborhood friends,” he said. “They’re not the same as school friends.”

She was paged: “They need me at the register.”

***

He had been thinking about Nadja all week. He loved watching her go up and down on the escalator in the pink pastel sweater she now wore every day. He thought of her as a pink cloud that floated up—diagonally. A routine had developed between them. She would surprise him when he was replenishing the stacks. When he was engrossed she would whisper something in his ear. Once she asked: “Does it frighten you to go upside down?”

He thought he understood the question. He identified it as a reference to St. Bartholomew, his namesake, the patron saint of plasterers and bookbinders. For his zealotry the saint was flayed and crucified upside down. Bartholomew had always been frightened by the story. One day Nadja said: “Has your heart ever been higher than your head?”

***

In May Bartholomew saw Nadja standing in front of Tiffany & Co. on Colorado Boulevard. She looked hypnotized by the window display and didn’t seem to recognize him at first.

“I’m shopping for a birthstone ring,” she said in a voice that sounded distant.

“Let me guess—” said Bartholomew.

A pretty little girl in a sundress ran up to Nadja. She asked her something Barth couldn’t hear. “Yes, puppet, the diamonds are real, but the emeralds are made of celery,” she said.

The little girl laughed and ran away.

“I know your birthstone,” said Barth. “You’re moonstone!”

“Bingo!” said Nadja.

“Let’s grab a drink at the 35er. We can walk there!”

At the bar the bartender seemed to know her. Bartholomew ordered a Bloody Mary, and Nadja asked for change for the jukebox. She dropped quarters into the slot without pausing to read the selections. After a minute “I Am, I Said” by Neil Diamond came on. The next song was called “The Dolphin on Wheels.” She tapped her foot against the barstool but was a beat off. A man approached them at the bar and asked her if she was working. She smiled at him and said: “Is that you, Charlie Chaplin?”

***

Nadja’s apartment was in a condo converted to an extended stay suite. It was a furnished one-bedroom unit with a gas fireplace and refrigerator with bottles of Perrier and Laughing Cow cheese. The light was low and Bartholomew sat across from her in a red leather chair. He liked that she had colored her hair black, and it was cut short with bangs.

“Did you just move in?” he asked, looking around.

“Not just.”

“Where are your books?”

“At the store. Oh, you mean…” She laughed.

Nadja sat with her hands folded in her lap. He sat with his knees touching hers, and they shared a long moment when neither had anything to say. Barth didn’t mind, he didn’t need to talk. She was such a strange bird—the bird is the word—and she made him feel easy because she was like him. Of course she wasn’t just one person. That was obvious. Why was she wearing her watch with the face turned backward on her wrist? As he considered this, the name of the book he had been trying to remember came to him. It was a book by André Breton, the charismatic leader of the early surrealist movement in Paris. Barth read it when he was thirteen and had not thought about it since. The book was called Nadja!

Nadja laughed. “I forgot you were coming over.”

“Did I come on the wrong night?”

“I was playing no-argument solitaire,” she said.

“How do you play that?”

“No kings or jacks.”

“How about jokers?”

“They’re anarchists, you know.”

Bartholomew laughed.

“We haven’t seen each other for a long time.”

“Not since you quit at work,” he said.

“How long ago was that?”

“Two weeks.”

Nadja removed the back cushions from the sofa and threw them over the side. “Take off your sandals. I want to see your feet. Oh, too wide.” She laughed.

As she leaned over he could see the teardrop shape of her breast. He remembered more details of the story. Nadja had been the lover of Max Ernst, who said she was the only natural surrealist in Paris. Bartholomew kissed her and felt an electric disturbance that ran through his body and coiled around his tongue. He remembered this feeling from a dream, and it was accompanied by paralysis, where he found himself hanging upside down with blood rushing to his head and arrows in his chest. It was at this moment that he moved up the plain of her long legs to where they forked and revealed a small yellow bird’s nest.

He started gently and she cried: “Oh Charlie, oh Charlie.” This was her reanimated meme, and it made him angry and so he teased her slowly, exploring with his tongue, until the dam swelled, trembled, and broke—and then he pulled her up by the waist, and they climaxed together in beauty and convulsive beauty like wild horses.

Afterward Nadja drove him home in her car. There was condensation on the windshield, and Nadja turned it into a blank slate and started to write a message with her finger. She licked it and said: “They say you aren’t supposed to lick your finger. It makes the writing smear.”

The word she wrote was HELLO. It ran and only HELL was left.

Bartholomew felt his heart beating too fast.

“What is it, dear friend?” she asked.

“I know how this story ends,” he said solemnly.

“How does it end, André?”

***

Anthony and Barbara were playing Word Exchange on the dining room table. “Barth has a new girlfriend,” said Barbara.

“He told me about her,” said Anthony.

“I’m not sure she’s right for him.”

“Who is?” asked Anthony.

“Nadja was his manager and then something happened.”

“He told me.”

“Did he show you the book?” asked Barbara.

Anthony nodded: “He believes he knew her in a previous life.”

Barbara fell deep in thought—her breathing changed and she started to sob. “We both thought it was the way to go. He’s not normal, is he?”

“Unfortunately, he’s not,” said Anthony.

“What happened?”

“It’s just the way he came, Barbara.”

“You must really like mango.”

The girl lifts them, one, two, three, and puts them in the paper bag, but it’s me she is looking at. Sort of. One eye fixes on me and the other eye wanders off to the side as she faces me across La Florcita’s counter from behind jars of sticky Mexican sweets.

“Who doesn’t like mango?”

“I’d rather have flan.”

“I hate flan. Kools hardpack, please.”

She rings up the cash register and then glances at the debit card. “Ten dollars. Sonora… Vayo. Qué lindo.”

Shudder. Everyone but my mother calls me Sunny.

All dramatic, she turns and points to the wall behind her, covered with business cards, calendars, and head shots of Becky G and Khaldoun Younes because, güey, estamos en Hollywood. Next to an autographed 1990s J-Lo is a poster of two boxers facing off: “LUJAN vs. VAYO.”

“Are you related to this Vayo?”

“Ay, que feo. Jamás.”

“No, not the bald one. The one with the curls!” she calls after me as I stroll out the jingling door into the evening. Over the sound system of passing Explorer roars Sekreto, I hear hoots, laughter, and someone hollering over the bass line, “MARICÓN!”

No, not even close. And if you are screaming that at me, you are lucky you’re moving at forty miles per hour.

When I get home, I toss a mango at my sister Ana Belen, stretched out on the yellow living room sofa, grinding at her laptop, and make my way into the kitchen, sweeping aside fronds of a hanging fern I want to rip down and throw in the trash. A couple of plants are nice, but Ma has a jungle in here. She adds a stalk of windowsill fennel to frying pork chops as I wash a mango and ask, “Want some?”

La Doña Esperanza Pinel Molina is smaller than any of us, but out of all of our family, she’s the one you really would not want to fight.

“We eat in a little while. Save it for dessert.”

“I can’t wait.” I slice my mango, salt it, light up a Kool, and head out to the garage. My nephew Javier stretches out on the lounger playing Fortnite, and in shorts, shoes, and sweat, Felipe works his speed bag. All I see is a blur as his fists punish the Everlast.

“Can I have some?” asks Javier.

“Get outta here with that smoke,” orders Felipe.

“Ay, the one with the curls!” I simper and then slouch in a raggedy lawn chair by the back steps, enjoying my cigarette and letting Javier finish the mango as I check notifications on my phone.

I have the same profile pic from high school, back when I had just one eyebrow piercing and long, black hair. I looked like a total digit. Jeannie Morales is having her third baby, dammit, and Nita Cartagena has been accepted into the accounting program at UC Northridge. Then I notice a “friend request” from some Milagros Toboso. Her profile pic is not even full frontal; it actually is a profile. I realize who it is and burst out laughing.

“FelipeSonoraJavier, come and eat!”

2

“Sonora, hi!”

Suddenly I am seeing this girl everywhere. Here she comes around the corner of MLK and Normandie, trailing alongside me like we are friends.

“Soy Milagros de la bodega.”

“Hey.”

“Did you get my friend request?”

“Quit calling me Sonora. I answer to Sunny. And I have hundreds of friend requests, so it will take a couple weeks to get to you.”

She looks at me steadily, blankly, like a cow, staring me down with her one good eye and her off-kilter vibe. “Okay, Sunny. Tell Felipe I said hi,” she calls and, I swear, almost skips away.

“Yeah. See you around.”

The 757 bus pulls up, and it is packed. I’m jammed up against a fat guy in a Lakers jersey, a woman gripping two Jons grocery bags, and four chavas with fierce eyebrows and more piercings than me, then I transfer to a westbound 2 that lumbers from Barrio Aztlan to Thailandia through Little Armenia to Waspworld, I get off at the Sunset Five Theatre on Crescent Heights, and I nod to Mikela and Garrett on my way to the ladies’ room.

Changed into my red Sunset Five uniform, I step out of the stall to face the mirror. In my stance, I jab advance, jab retreat, rocking a rhythm and breaking it up like Felipe is always talking about, mixing high hits to the skull with low blows to the solar plexus. Some lady enters, sees me, and quickly backs out, slamming the door behind her.

Milk white with forehead zits and spiky, green hair; two left and one right eyebrow stud; ear gauges, a septum ring; and two full sleeve spiderweb, tarantula, and skull tattoos that made Ma cry, the poster child for “Don’t Fuck with Me” glares from the mirror. Crush that. Time to go bland and corporate, to fade away to nothing but a voice repeating: “I Want It All, theater seven on your right. Enjoy your film.”

3

Ana Belen waits for me in her Toyota Tercel at one a.m.

“You look tragic.” Blue circles ring her big, brown eyes.

“Thanks. Four hours O.T.”

“Why can’t Felipe pick me up?”

“You know why. Date with Elena.”

“Getting banged again? He has a match in two weeks. Fighters are supposed to save it for the ring.”

“The only one thinking about a ring is Elena. The one she wants on her finger.”

We unlock the back door quietly to not wake Ma and Javier. Foraging in the fridge and checking my phone, I see yet another “friend request” from esa mema. Alright, you asked for it.

She replies almost instantly: Hey!

Wassup

Good. How are u?

Just got off work. U r persistent. Something on ur mind?

Just want to say hi 2 u & 2 ur brother

u seem so interested in him

No response.

He always talks 2 me about girls if I know a lil bit more bout u I could drop ur name

Thats so nice I was born in Torreon

face 2 face Can I come over?

now?

yes

its late

do u want to meet him or not

A half-hour later, I’m waiting on the threadbare carpet outside her apartment as she undoes at least eight locks to open the door. Her hair storms above her flowered nightie.

“Mi tía, she’s at work, but you can’t stay long. Just an hour, OK?” I nod solemnly. “Let me get you some flan!”

“I don’t really… Sí, gracias.”

We squeeze past a worn, white dresser into a tiny room that could belong to a twelve-year-old girl. A quilted, yellow blanket sprigged with flowers covers a twin bed; a zebra, lion, and mint green rabbit sit on the pillows, and family photos cover the walls. Jesus in soft focus with long, blond curls and a perfect goatee presides over it all.

After settling on her bed, I taste the flan. Warm vanilla and velvety rum fill my mouth, and I actually moan. Milagros grins and nods. “Do you know what this reminds me of?”

I’m so busy savoring another spoonful I don’t even answer.

“A kiss.”

“You’ve had a kiss.” It isn’t a question, just a mocking statement.

For the first time, I see something close to anger in her eyes.

“Yes, I’ve had kisses.”

“And who did you kiss?”

“A boy I knew in school.”

“A boy? How old are you?”

“I’m nineteen. How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-one. Felipe’s twenty-three. And he ain’t no boy.”

There is a lost look on her face.

“You can tell me anything. I’m his sister. And I can tell you what he likes. When he comes home from a date, who do you think he talks to?” We scrape our empty saucers with our spoons.

“So, what does he like?”

“Why should I tell you? You know all about it, right?”

“I just want to be sure.”

“He hates it when girls kiss with their mouths wide open, like some big, dead bacalao at the fish market.”

She laughs, but I say, “Serious. He likes a nice, tight kiss. With just a little bit of tongue. Like this.”

I lean in, take her square jaw in my hand, and pull her mouth to mine. She freezes a moment then squirms.

“Ey. I’m twying to show yooo.” I suck on her lower lip until her mouth slowly opens. After a long moment, she backs into the stuffed animals, one eye staring at me, the other eye taking in family photos, her palms outstretched, pushing air.

A stack of The Daily Word sits on her night stand. I pick one up and leaf through it. Her cheeks mottled, she stares down at her folded hands.

“He likes that?”

“Yeah. If you can do it right. And…”

“What?”

“You have a really nice body, but you need to…”

“What? I need to what?!”

“I don’t know… The way you dress… Get up.” She faces me, shoulders hunched, feet splayed.

“Don’t you have anything sexy?”

“I’m not ‘sposed to. I’m born again.”

“Well, he’s into sexy. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

We peer into her closet at elastic-waist skirts, t-shirts, and mom jeans. I shrug and say, “You better work on that kiss.”

5

“Mi tesoro…” A marine glares at us from a picture frame. Milagros’ nightie is hiked up, and her panties wrap around her ankles. My jeans are wadded up on the floor, and my sweatshirt shields the innocent eyes of her stuffed animals. “Sí, sí, mi amor, sí…” she shudders and sighs. Her eyes flutter open, the right, dull and aimless, the left, dark yet bright, and gleaming at me. She curls into a ball and whispers, “Tell me a secret, and I’ll tell you a secret.”

“What kind of secret?”

“A secret about Felipe.”

“He snores like a pig.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well, that’s the truth. OK, my turn.”

“What does he look like when he’s sleeping?”

“Like everybody else when they sleep! He sleeps on his back with his mouth wide open and drool running down his chin. That’s why he snores so bad.”

“What does he dream?”

“The last dream he told me about was an earthquake. He’s terrified of them. If we get hit by some little 3.5, he’s a basket case for a week. My turn.”

“My uncle dropped me,” she says.

“Huh?”

“My uncle was carrying me. He dropped me, hurt my eye. By the time they realized something was wrong, it was infected.”

“I’m sorry…Was this your first time?”

Her eyes flicker shut as she burrows down in the blankets. “My aunt will be home soon…”

I step outside under a lavender sky. It is still too dark to see my shadow. Pulling my trucker brim low, I look up at the windows but can’t tell which one is hers.

6

Tonight, Felipe is idling his ’98 Corvette in front of Sunset Five.

“Look who’s here. Lover boy.”

“Hey, I need a night off. She’s wearing me out.”

“Ay, pobrecito.”

Felipe swings left, away from Sunset’s colossal billboards and late-night traffic. “You been a little busy too. Where you been going at two, three in the morning?”

Shrug.

“I know you think you’re muy chingón, but you’re asking for trouble wandering around all hours of the night. Can’t you hang out at more civilized hours?”

“I work.”

“Then party on your days off. En serio. If we get some call about you from the emergency room, Ma will have a heart attack–”

“Lay off me.”

We ride down Western in silence until: “You ready for the fight?”

“What? The one with you?”

“Commerce Casino, güey.”

“Yeah, I’m ready. Bobby Cole, a kid from Dallas. Twenty-two years old, just moved up to welterweight.”

“You seen him fight?”

“’Course. Me and Jorge saw him beat Luis Aragon at Quiet Canyon, and we been watching his tapes. Jorge knows his trainer, Sammy Wilkins. Says Sammy’s pushing him too fast. You hanging out tonight?”

“Simón. Take a left here.”

Felipe drops me off at Milagros’ building, sighing as I get out and head up the walk.

“Just because you look scary don’t mean you are scary. Cuidado.”

7

“Could you bring me a picture? A picture of him from when he was little?”

“Milagros…”

We snuggle under her comforter and sip chocolate by the glow of her crucifix nightlight. I feel like I have gone back in time to the third-grade sleepovers with my best friend, Cassandra Murphy, until I was banished from her home for giving her a kiss.

“One picture. He must have been an adorable bebé.”

“He was a creep. My nephew Javier is cuter than he ever was.”

“Brother, mother, sister, nephew. You make me jealous.”

“Of what? Look at all the family you have.”

“Just pictures on a wall. I haven’t seen them in years. Only Fulvia cares. Never mind. I’m going to have my own family. A boy and two girls. We’ll name the girls Carina and Alicia.”

The crucifix nightlight fades to black, and Milagros rolls over, tumbling from the bed into free fall. She’s falling so fast that galaxies speed past her. Mr. Krantz, my senior year astronomy teacher, strolls over to me. “Vayo, what’s on the left?”

“A red dwarf star.”

“And how do you know that?”

“It’s brighter than a nightlight.”

“Thank you, Vayo. Extra butter with that popcorn.”

I roll over in bed, and sunlight tickles my eyelids. Beside me, Milagros is babbling, “¡Dios mío! Get up!”

We leap out of bed, fumbling for clothes and stumbling over each other.

At the front door, she turns to me. “Sonorita, I read in La Opinión Felipe has a fight coming up.”

“Are you sure?”

“Next Friday. We could go together.”

“He wouldn’t like that. It’s too violent.”

“Ask him, beg him. Don’t forget.”

I open the door to a key held in mid-air by a stocky, gray-haired woman who hops back and nearly screams.

“Tía Fulvia! Sonora, this is my aunt Fulvia—”

“Sonora. Mucho…gusto…” says Fulvia. She edges past me, hangs up her jacket, and sits down wearily in the Lazyboy, pulling off her shoes. “Your friend is here at this hour?”

“We’re going to church. Early service.”

Fulvia reassesses me. “Muy bien. But you can’t go dressed like that, mija. I have a faldita you can wear.” She grimaces at my Timberlands. “And maybe you can fit my shoes.”

8

“Thanks be to God for the gift of love. Love as varied as the flowers in a garden, as seashells on a beach…”

In Target Mary Janes, a long sleeve blouse, a head scarf, and a skirt, I hunch in a folding chair, hoping nobody recognizes me. The pastor, short, pink-faced, perspiring slightly, smiles at the handful of women, one old man, and kids scattered in the half-empty rows.

“The love of your friends, your brothers and sisters, your father, and God knows, your mother…” the pastor drones, and I can instantly feel Ma and Pop sitting a few rows behind me. The last time I attended church was my confirmation at Holy Family, and when I finally got out of there, I turned cartwheels in my white dress in front of the cathedral steps. Ma found out that Pop cut me a deal that if I got through confirmation, I wouldn’t have to go to church anymore, and she didn’t speak to either one of us for a week.

“Love is His greatest gift, and we glorify Him by giving and accepting it…” For a second, I think it’s me he’s looking at, but no, he’s beaming at Milagros, who is snuffling and heaving sighs. His sermon, like every sermon I’ve ever heard, is half right. Aren’t we supposed to give love equally? I always loved Pop best.

June two years ago, not long after I got fired from Target, I came home to an empty house and decided to celebrate with a blunt in the backyard. I had barely lit up when Don Juan Luis Vayo Gomez rounded the corner. In his orange dockworker vest, the mustard hardhat in one hand, he sat down next to me and started in on: what do you think you are doing, why are you wasting all your potential, you are so smart, you are so talented, you are throwing it all away, that stuff ruins the brain, it messes up your memory—

I was so annoyed and bored that I just dropped: “Did you know I’m a lesbian?”

He said, “Yeah, I guess I knew that” and went right back to Just Say No, then finally eased up and started telling his old time L.A. stories: Helter Skelter, Ruben Salazar, The Clash at the Hollywood Palladium, growing up with his brothers and sisters and his cousin Esme, who he said I kind of favor.

By August, he was gone. An accident on his way to work.

If they could see me in church dressed like this, Ma would give one of her little smirks, and Pop would laugh his ass off.

Kids yell and run, and their mothers fold up chairs and stack them against the wall as the fluorescent lights go dark. Milagros says, “Let’s say hi to Pastor Gil.”

He is greeting worshipers at the door and blushes when he takes her hand. “Milagros! So good to see you.” He gives my hand a soft squeeze. “Welcome. We hope you come again.”

We head up Denker Avenue, and I look back to see Pastor Gil staring after us, confused and hungry, until a cantaloupe-shaped woman shakes his arm, demanding his attention.

9

“Padre celestial, venimos a ti…”

In a Commerce Casino dressing room, we hold hands as Ma prays, her eyes closed behind her glasses. She wears her violet dress and silver lucky star pin.

Elena’s eyes are also closed. My eyes travel from the stiletto sandals on her flawless feet, up her slim, caramel legs, to her shimmering, orange minidress. I hate her. Ana Belen and Ma don’t like her either. They always give her identical, fake smiles.

“Thank you for blessing Felipe with talent and discipline, Señor. Guard him and guide him…”

Ma and Ana Belen hold Felipe’s hands. They haven’t been taped yet. Thick, short-fingered, with gleaming, half-moon nails and heavy wrists, they are formed from the same molten bronze as his abdominals and biceps. Ana Belen cut his hair and trimmed his goatee. He looks handsome and somber. Ready to go to work.

Jorge gives my hand a squeeze. I like Jorge. He won the IBF middleweight title in 1996. His hair has gone silver, and a huge scar forks from his scalp through his right eyebrow, but he’s still got that rugged fighter’s body.

Together we intone, “Amen.” Elena shrink-wraps Felipe until he peels her off to speak with Ma and Ana Belen. Jorge leans toward me.

“What’s up, killer?”

“Same ole same ole.”

“You’re wasting time, Sunny. You could go places.”

“I am going places.”

His gold tooth winks at me. “‘Same ole same ole’ ain’t going nowhere. You got it, mija. You got that power, ese ánimo–”

“What are you two whispering about?” asks Ma.

“How lovely you look tonight, Esperanza.”

“I see right through you, Jorge,” Ma snaps.

Felipe shows me his fists. “See this? This is scary.”

I roundhouse him in the bicep, he slugs me back, and we file out to let him get ready.

“Ohmygod, what a crowd,” says Elena, flipping her hair and swiveling in her seat to see who is scanning her. “Mrs. Pinel, you are so brave to watch Felipe fight.”

“I’ve just come to see my son win,” Ma says coolly.

“And what’s so brave about that?” Ana Belen seconds, crossing her long legs to give Elena a better view of her three-hundred-dollar Jimmy Choo slingbacks.

The announcer, from center ring and from two enormous, overhead screens, calls, “In this corner, in the green trunks, weighing in at 162 pounds, from Dallas, Texas, is Bobby ‘Cold Cash’ Coooooooooooooole!”

Café with a little leche and baby-faced, Bobby Cole salutes the crowd. A chorus of boos rises, and behind us, a woman shrieks, “Pinche MARICÓN – you FUCKER!” In triplicate, Cole shrugs and strolls to his corner.

The camera pans back to the announcer. “And in this corner, in the black trunks, weighing in at 168 pounds, from Los Angeles, California”–The crowd roars–“is Felipe ‘El Verdugo’ Vayoooooooooooo!”

On the big screens, Felipe’s heartbreaker smile crossfades to the titles: “SUNNY’S MESSED UP LOVE LIFE — MÁS PENDEJADAS POR SUNNY,” accompanied by a soundtrack: “Sí… sí, mi amor…”

Felipe and Bobby Cole smack gloves and back off, crouching behind their fists. “Así… así… Cuando tú me tocas así … si suave… por favor…” whimpers Milagros. Felipe opens up with a high and low jab. Cole dodges, jabs, and sends a low, lead hook that bounces off Felipe’s forearm block. But up on the screens, there I am, on my knees, between her thighs, contemplated by the serene gaze of Jesus. “Me vuelves loca…” The neat, textbook moves have stopped, and Felipe and Cole thrash each other until they stumble into a clinch. The referee pulls them apart.

“Sí, FELIPE!” screams Elena. “Ay, Felipe…” moans Milagros. Suddenly I’m on my feet, trembling.

“Don’t ever call me that again.”

Felipe throws a jabjab and a high cross that Cole evades and answers with a lead shovel to the gut. Milagros looks up, dazed, her eyes more unfocused than usual. A high hook drills Cole in the ear so hard I feel the pain. We are all on our feet, hoarsely screaming. A man roars, “MÁTALO!” Kill him.

Cole staggers then drops behind a shell, his head and upper body barricaded by his forearms.

I imitate her whimper of “FelipeFelipeFelipe!” and then: “Felipe doesn’t even know who the hell you are.”

He backs Cole from ring center with a jab-feint-cross-shovel-hook. Cole does a Sugar Ray sidestep, and then slams back with a brutal, low, rear hook to the ribs.

Milagros struggles up from the tangled sheets, her right eye drifting further right and the left one blazing at me. “He loves me. And I’m going to see him at that fight.”

“You can’t do that.”

“You’re going to stop me?”

“Mami, there’s nothing there! Forget it!”

“¡Puta marimacha!” I grab my jeans as she spits curses. “¡Sí, que se vaya, chingada!”

“Oh no,” breathes Ana Belen.

On two screens and in center ring, Felipe reels, blood pouring down his face. I didn’t see what hit him, and apparently, neither did he. Ma’s hands clutch the armrests, but her face is almost as expressionless as Bobby Cole’s as she watches Felipe topple to the ground. Everyone says my brother gets his hígado from Pop, but Pop was a softie. That rock hard core comes from Ma.

I am yanking my sweatshirt over my head when Milagros tackles me, sobbing, “I’m sorry, por favor, perdóname, Sonora, Sunny…” I shove her away and straighten my clothes. I can still hear her calling, “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean…” when I shut the door.

10

I show up at Eddie Romero’s at 5:30 sharp. The converted warehouse is painted sea green, and walking inside is like diving into a vast aquarium. Dior Sauvage, sweat, and Lysol float in the air. The evening crowd jumps rope, crunches sit-ups, pounds bags. A blue-haired chava curling free weights slides me an icy glance. Jorge is watching Felipe and some guy I don’t know sparring in one of the rings.

“Mucho mejor. I’m seeing some focus now. Tomorrow, same place, same time.”

Felipe turns and stares. I’m in shorts and a tank top, carrying a head guard, chest protector, and gloves, and my eyebrow piercings are gone.

“I’m going to be working with Sunny,” says Jorge. “She wants to get serious.”

Felipe gives me a hard look. “Yeah…? Mind if I watch?”

“Go ahead.”

Walking home later that evening, we cross MLK, chugging ginseng sodas. I wait for the lecture, but all he says is, “What took you so long?”

“I thought you’d be pissed.”

“Me? It’s your life. Since when do you care what I think?”

“Ma won’t be happy.”

“Yeah, Ma’s another story.”

“You think you could tell her?”

Felipe starts laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“I wanted you to tell her I’m moving to Jorge’s ranch in Eastvale.”

“Where? Why?”

“Middle of nowhere. That fight was a disaster. I need to focus, and I can do that better at Jorge’s.”

“Esperanza Pinel Molina is going to lose her mind.”

As we round the corner, we see Ma, Ana Belen, and Javier in our driveway. Felipe lets out a low whistle. Milagros is draped over the hood of his Cherry Lifesaver ’98 Corvette.

She is candy too: Strawberry Jolly Ranchers, Red Vines, Atomic Fireballs, Red Hots. Her breasts peek over the crimson neckline of her cheap, silk dress, and she wears a black eye patch. A china platter of flan rests on one crossed thigh. Felipe frowns at her.

“Mami, what are you doing on my car?”

A Dodge Charger swerves around the corner and blasts past us. A chorus bellows, “Aaaaayyyy SEXY! VEN R-R-R-RICA! WAAAAAH!” Milagros tosses her head, and a black flag unfurls.

“Look, get off my car. You’re going to scratch the paint.”

“I brought you flan. You like flan?” she purrs.

“Yeah. Please get off my car.”

Milagros plunges a finger into the creamy, golden pyramid, draws it out, and sucks it clean. Felipe watches with a crooked grin. I am dissolving like a half-eaten Tootsie Pop.

11

Around the table chime sighs and cries of pleasure. “¡Qué bueno!” “¡Sabroso!” “This is so good…”

Milagros gestures toward the eye patch and whispers, “Do you like it?”

“Uh yeah I yeah–”

“Muy sexy, mami.” Felipe gives Milagros a smoldering wink. Her cheeks flame as a fist clenches my heart.

“I know not everyone likes to share recipes,” ventures Ma.

Milagros blushes like a virgin on a botánica candle. “I would love to give you my recipe. I have so many. I love to cook.”

“You are lucky,” says Ana Belen, licking her spoon. “I can’t cook to save my life.”

“But she can cook to end a life,” cracks Felipe.

“Mom, tell her about the time you started the kitchen on fire!” Javier guffaws, and they join him.

“Cállate,” snaps Ana Belen. Javier does quiet down as he studies the eye patch, and then blurts, “That’s so cool. Where’d you get that?”

“Don’t be rude,” warns Ma.

“No, it’s OK … Did you hear about the big, 2016 earthquake in Mexico?”

The left eye gleams, turns heavenward, lowers, and drops a tear. Her hands press to her heart and flutter around a story of martyrdom: her rescue of an infant cousin in a collapsed building, a falling beam knocking her unconscious, the injury of her eye. She lifts her hands in a benediction, and I almost expect to see stigmata.

“Tía Fulvia says I am Milagros de verdad.” They all chuckle.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I order.

“Oh, this is so nice. Let’s just have more flan.” She doesn’t even look at me.

“I’ll go with you,” says Felipe, and Milagros bounces out of her chair. She glows, I burn, and Felipe is his usual cool, calm self as we step into the night. Palm trees line our street of faded apartment buildings and Sweet-Tart colored bungalows. Kids race past on scooters.

“Isn’t it a beautiful night?” sighs Milagros. I could choke her.

Bad Bunny rumbles from Felipe’s pocket, and he reaches for his phone. Scanning the text, he pulls his face into a mask of woe. “I’ve got to run. Previous engagement. Ladies, I’m going to ask for a rain check. Nice meeting you, mami.”

Milagros stands on tiptoe, leaning after the disappearing Corvette like it pulls her with an invisible cord.

“We could walk to Café Tropical, get some coffee.”

She glances at me with that one miraculous eye. I could be a stranger telling her the time.

“It’s late. I better get home. I’ll check you tomorrow. ‘Night, Sunny.”

She sashays off, head high, hem fluttering, stilettos clikclikcliking away from me. Halfway down the block, she passes the Nieves brothers playing dominoes on their porch. They wolf whistle and “Aaaaaaayyy…” At the corner, she turns left and disappears.

What else can I do? Like any lovesick pendejo, I follow her.

For Sallie.

By Picture Day in November, Sophie had perfected the downward stab and counting to twenty. She clenched her soft fingers around her rainbow pony pencil, raised her fist high, and then smashed it down on the practice balloons, barely wincing when they popped, scolding when they escaped. The other children rallied to bounce stray balloons back to her desk. She got thirteen, fourteen at last, and from there it was an obstacle-free trip to twenty with her peers chanting along. She hadn’t yet mastered our Go protocol for intruders, but neither had a handful of the general education students. However, Caleb could shout Go instantly and often got to the Rubber Man first, tackling its knees to disable the joints. Jazzmyn was the most formidable of all the students; when the Rubber Man dropped from the ceiling, she’d grab my scissors on the way and disembowel it in two slashes.

Picture Day is tense for second-graders, with the boys trussed up in buttoned shirts, the girls eyeing each other’s frilly dresses, and the lunch cart loaded with chocolate pudding and meatballs with marinara. Caleb endlessly adjusted his bowtie and Jazzmyn fretted over a smudge on her yellow pantsuit. But Sophie was thrilled with her rustling crinoline and the biggest blue bow that anyone had ever seen. When they lined up for their scheduled foray to the library for pictures, she sashayed to the end of the line, tossing her cascade of red curls and humming softly, off-key. Todd was the only one left at his desk, digging out torn pages and broken pencils—looking for one of the pocket treasures I pretended not to notice, his tiny plastic dinosaurs.  Sophie called out, “Todd, we go now!” and jabbed her finger at the spot in line behind her, right beneath our Superstar of the Week bulletin board where a large-as-life photo of Sophie scowled at flashcards, surrounded by an array of exploding stars.

Todd pretended not to hear her. They used to be the best of friends, building tiny dinosaur colonies in the sandbox and sharing their turns to feed our guinea pig, but then his mother met Sophie at the Food Culture Festival last week, and he had ignored her ever since.

“Come on, Todd!”

He turned from his desk at last and jostled into the line in front of Sophie, muttering something that I didn’t catch.

It must have been bad, because Jazzmyn decked him. Fist to his cheekbone, she sprawled him right out on the floor, then loomed over him with her fists on her hips, her face resplendent with fury. “We don’t use that word in this class,” she shouted. “We don’t use that word ever!”

“Jazzmyn!” I swooped in to inspect the damage. No nosebleed, and his eye was intact.

Jazzmyn burst into tears when she saw my expression, then collected herself enough to run to the sink and wet a paper towel for Todd’s swelling face. Ms. Jackson, my morning aide, logged into our classroom portal to open an incident ticket.

By this time, Sophie had flung herself to the floor beside him in a swirl of yellow and white skirts. “Todd, you okay? You okay?”

Todd finally caught enough breath to begin howling.

“He’ll be fine,” I told her. “Go with Ms. Jackson so I can take care of him.”

Ms. Jackson gathered up Sophie and guided the children down to the library for the scheduled pictures, and then I buzzed the office for security clearance to walk Todd to the nurse. He still whimpered and clutched the towel to his eye. Jazzmyn came, too—she’d be wanted at the principal’s office.

We escorted Todd to the clinic, and then I steered her toward the main office. She stopped me outside Melkan’s door with a hand on my sleeve. “I had to do it,” she said between sobbing breaths, and then leaned in to whisper, “He called Sophie a tard.”

That word, in all its forms, is banned in my classroom.

“Jazzie,” I said. “You can’t hit another student, ever. Not even when they say something horrible. It’s your job to protect each other.”

Jazzmyn nodded once, quickly, her lips pressed together. My policy is to not have favorites, but I loved Jazzmyn for the meticulous care she took of everything: wiping the crumbs from her bento boxes with a paper towel, coloring every millimeter of the day’s vocabulary coloring page with crayons–even the bubble letters and the background spaces–and persisting with practice drills until her form was perfect.

“Will they call the cops?” she asked, almost keeping the quaver out of her voice.

“No.” She may be Black, but she’s only seven years old.

“Will I get suspended?”

If Todd’s mother raised hell, Jazzmyn could get expelled, but I didn’t tell her that. “Let me talk to Mr. Melkan first,” I said.

“If I get suspended,” said Jazzmyn, “I will never get into Wellesley.”

Melkan buzzed me in then, so I was spared the need to answer. I entered his lair while Jazzmyn perched in the center of a chair in the reception area, fists tucked together in her lap.

Melkan liked to carry gallon-sized promotional mugs from gas stations. That day he stirred half a dozen scoops of protein powder into his 64 ounces of coffee while I explained the situation.

“She’s out,” he said.

“Please,” I said. “Todd used a slur against Sophie, and Jazzmyn responded instinctively. She won’t do it again, now she knows what she’s capable of. Review the surveillance tape. Her aim was perfect. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“We shouldn’t give her the chance to do it again,” said Melkan, but he was already clicking through the surveillance queue, intrigued. The walls of his small office were lined with large-screened monitors, barely leaving room for his collection of ultra-marathon numbers, the plaque declaring Stoney Creek Elementary last year’s Hardened Target Regional Winner, and the AR-15 hanging over his office door.

“Plus, her first quarter grades are off the charts. We need her here next week for standards testing,” I said.

“You need a genius around to offset Sophie Clark. That child can’t even count to ten. You chose her for your class. You worry about the test scores.”

I kept quiet and let him watch the video. He winced when the punch, replayed in slow motion, sent Todd flying in a smooth arc to land on the floor, where he bounced gently—one, two, three times. Melkan looped the video and leaned in closer.

At last he turned back to me. “Her aim is flawless.”

“They’re the best group I’ve had. Jazzmyn is so good—have you looked at the Rubber Man logs? They took him out in 12 seconds last week.”

He looked impressed, then doubtful. “That’s impossible. Just number two pencils?”

“Jazzmyn had my scissors. She punctured all the vital pockets single-handedly.”

“You started second graders on teacher scissors?”

“Just the ones who can handle it, if they want to stay in from recess to work. Just Jazzmyn and Caleb.”

He swiped through the logs, comparing our performance to the other second grade classrooms. We were leagues ahead of the others.

“Sure you aren’t inflating the reports a bit?”

“No, sir. You know it’s automated.”

Melkan leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, and nodded to himself. I hated it when he looked thoughtful. Hated it. Something new, something ill-considered, something downright stupid was likely to result. With lots of fanfare.

But he just buzzed the nurse and asked her, “You examined the Lawrence boy?”

“He’s here now, sir.”

“His eye okay?”

“No permanent damage.”

He rang off. “We’re done here, Campbell. Send Jazzmyn in. I’ll talk to her. No recess for the rest of the quarter, but keep training her on the scissors.”

It was much better than I expected.

“But if the Lawrence boy’s mother complains…” he warned.

“I know. But I hope we can avoid a suspension. It would break her heart.”

“We’ll see.”

He actually smiled as he waved me out. I almost felt neutral about him as I left the office and gave Jazzmyn a departing pat on the shoulder, but then I remembered what he said about the test scores, and Sophie.

Sophie, short, round, and wise-eyed, had established herself as the small Mayor of Stoney Creek Elementary by the end of first grade, high-fiving everyone all the way down the hallway with her soft hands. However, she was in danger of becoming a mascot. She’d been pushed out of her class for longer portions of the day as the year went by, and by the end of the year was brought out of the resource room only for feel-good forays into the mainstream classroom. Melkan gave her a nominal placement in my class, but insisted she would do better spending most of second grade “in a more supported environment,” especially given the rigors of the new programming. I argued that there was no better support for her than the examples of her own peers. Her parents agreed, and they had a lawyer.

She became, as I hoped, the heart of our class; she would applaud when we finished with the subtraction workbook activity for the day, and the rest of the class got into the habit, too. They also caught on to her victory dance each time they vanquished the Rubber Man, with lots of stomping and fierce whoops and high-fives. The children competed for the chance to help her with her counting bears and sight words, and sharpened their own reflexes as we drilled again and again with her, Danger, Danger, Go!

Parents, however, were thrown off by Sophie. Inclusion was still new. When we were growing up, the special kids were always kept in a special room, ketchup counted as a vegetable, and anyone could walk right through the front doors of the school.

The week before Picture Day, two mothers took me aside at the Food Culture Festival, each to whisper that her son called Sophie his best friend, but she hadn’t realized until just tonight who Sophie was. “I mean, Leroy hadn’t said anything about how she was different,” said the first, over her Crock-pot of Mac ‘n Weenies.

I could see the story writing itself behind Leroy’s mother’s shining eyes, how her son had befriended a little Downs girl, and wasn’t he such a big-hearted hero?

“It’s such a good thing for Leroy that Sophie took him under her wing, isn’t it? He’s too timid for almost eight. She’s really helped him to break out of his shell.” And it was true.  I explained how Sophie coaxed him to scale the peak of the climbing structure in our reinforced play yard. I doubted that Leroy even ranked in Sophie’s top five friends, but I was glad she made him feel at home. “She’s quite socially advanced,” I said.

But Todd’s mother, one of the West Coast refugees, reeled me in over her quinoa tabbouleh (labeled free of gluten, genetic modification, dairy, and cruelty) and asked me to encourage her son to play with different children: “It’s sweet that she likes him, and I’m glad he doesn’t mind playing with a girl, but now I see that she’s not the best playmate for him. You know we don’t want to stunt his social development while he’s adjusting to his new life. He needs strong children he can look up to.”

I wound up to give her six different pieces of my mind, but by the time I had organized and prioritized them, she had already pulled Todd out of the circle of kids gathered around Sophie for an impromptu Danger, Danger, Go! drill and was steering him over to Caleb’s parents to arrange an advantageous playdate.

Maybe Todd’s mom wasn’t always like that. I heard she escaped the Siege of San Francisco in a pontoon boat, in the bloody days after the Repeal Riots, telling Todd they were going on a picnic. I heard her husband didn’t make it out, and she told Todd they got a divorce. You hear a lot of rumors these days. It’s hard to know what’s true.

After the Food Culture Festival, Todd stopped playing with Sophie or even high-fiving her. He took the long way around the room to get to his desk each morning. Her eyes followed him, but she didn’t say anything.

When I rejoined my class at the library, picture-taking was almost over. The students were making faces at the photographer, well over the initial wariness they have of strangers in the school. We often remind them that people with visitor’s badges have been screened for safety, but then we tell them they need to be alert to the behavior of every adult, even the trusted ones, because madness has no method.

Sophie clambered up onto the photographer’s stool, but instead of giving her signature crooked-toothed grin for the camera, she just stared. Her face was still bloated from crying.

“Come on down, Sophie,” I said, and let her initiate a hug so that I could wrap my arms around her. “Now what is it?”

“Miss Campbell,” she snuffled, “Todd okay? Todd hurt bad?” She rubbed her snot-nose on my sweater.

“He’ll be okay,” I said. “The nurse is taking good care of him.”

I had her wipe her eyes and nose and convinced her to try one more smile for the photo—then told the photographer we would hold out for the make-up day. When the line of students entered the hallway to our classroom, Sophie waved and took off in the opposite direction, towards the clinic.

“I go see Todd,” she said.

“No, Sophie. You don’t have safety clearance. Time to go back to class.” I took her arm.

She narrowed her eyes and shrugged away from me. I hadn’t seen that look before. Sophie’s first grade teacher had complained to me that she was unmanageable, “a real handful,” a dropper. I’d never had trouble; I got to know Sophie, so I knew what she needed: warnings about transitions, a clear routine, and as much praise as the other children. Sophie had never dropped to the floor to resist my suggestions, but now, watching her stubborn face, I had an inkling of how that might happen.

“Miss Campbell, I really need to go see Todd.” A nine word construction. I’d tell Speech later.

I got clearance for an unscheduled trip down the hall, and Ms. Jackson took the class to Bathroom Access to prepare for lunch.

Sophie greeted the nurse with her usual high-five, then tiptoed to peer around the curtain that divided Todd’s cot from the rest of the room. “Todd, you okay?”

I followed her. Todd was sitting up, holding a cold pack to his eye. He looked at Sophie, opened his mouth, closed it, and then rolled over to face the wall, drawing up his knees in a fetal position. I would talk to him about what he called Sophie later. That wasn’t the Todd I knew. I loved how Todd chatted all through the morning gathering with Sophie, and giggled over his pocket treasures and armpit farts with her, and how he remembered to check the guinea pig’s water every morning—until this week. Avoiding Sophie had made him downright sullen.

Sophie confronted the nurse. “Where’s Todd mom? He need his mom.”

“Can she come for him?” I asked.

“I left a message. He’ll be fine. No lasting damage, but that eye might not be back to normal for awhile.”

“Make-up day for photos is Monday.”

“His face is going to be a lot of interesting colors by then.”

Todd’s mom would love that.

“Well, send him back to class if he gets bored,” I said. “Or if you need space.”

“It’s quiet so far. But rumor has it Melkan’s bringing in a gator this afternoon. I might need to clear the beds.”

“So early in the year? Are the fourth-graders ready?”

“Maybe just a rumor.”

Sophie just gazed at Todd’s forlorn back. She didn’t care about the gator, maybe didn’t even know what the Gator Drill was. This is what Sophie cared about: The colony of salvaged pencil stubs in the back of her desk. Being ready to dance when the music started. Salisbury Steak day. Laughing at Todd’s fart jokes.

“Time to go, Sophie,” I said, and buzzed for clearance to enter the hallway.

She bent over the cot and tucked something orange into the fold of Todd’s pinstriped elbow. “Todd, come back soon.”

“He okay,” she told me confidently, watching for the green light above the door.

Todd peered around the curtain at her, but she didn’t notice.

Jazzmyn returned in time to be kept in from recess, and Caleb opted to stay in for practice. She drew me aside while he practiced switching grips on the teacher scissors, and whispered accusingly, “You said they wouldn’t suspend me!”

“I didn’t know.” Todd’s mom must have called at last. “How long?”

“Two whole days. Mom was supposed to pick me up right away, but she couldn’t because there’s no one to watch Grandma, and Mr. Melkan said he was busy this afternoon, and his assistant said she couldn’t have me crying in her office all afternoon and they sent me back here. Without even a safety escort.”

If I would have had the chance, I would have explained to her how lightly she’d gotten off, and how Mr. Melkan and I were impressed with her work and doing our best for her. She was a rational child, and that could have been the end of it for her, but I didn’t have the chance, because the nurse buzzed Todd into our room. Apparently, Mrs. Lawrence could give Melkan an earful about Jazzmyn, but didn’t want to pick up her son off schedule.

Jazzmyn had the grace to look embarrassed at his entrance, as did he. Then she shrugged. He made a half-hearted fart sound with his armpit.

“Come on, Todd,” said Caleb, hailing him over to my desk.

“Okay,” said Todd, and pulled out his newest treasure to show Caleb. “Check this out! An orange pachycephalosaurus!”

Caleb gave an appreciative dinosaur roar, Todd made T-rex hands, Caleb made his own, and they sparred ineffectually with their shortened arms. Then Todd asked, “Whatcha doing in here?”

“We’re gonna practice with the teacher scissors.” Caleb swiped them from my desk and demonstrated a slash hold. “Ms. Campbell, can Todd do it, too?”

“Why not?” I said. “I think you’re ready, Todd.” He had made astonishing progress in his few months at our school. This would give him something to feel good about. I would pull him aside later to talk about Sophie. “Now, remember, these stay on my desk at all times, except—”

“I know,” said Todd, reaching for them.

“Start with the downward stab,” I said. “Just like you do with your number two pencil, but you hold it like this.” Caleb helped him adjust his fingers.

Jazzmyn stared at us for a moment, then slouched over to her desk.

“Do you want to help, Jazzie?” I asked.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” she hissed at me, then put her head down on her desk.

She was still glowering that afternoon after story time, when we took a break to practice Go reflexes, my own innovation on the usual training. In case of an event, I wanted each one to be confident enough to shout “Go!” Jazzmyn is usually the first one to shout “Danger!” when I pull a colored ball out of the practice basket, but she watched stonily as I lifted the green one into sight.

“Danger!” shouted Adam.

“Danger!” chorused a dozen other voices in response. Not Jazzmyn’s.

The children held their breaths, ready.

I threw the green ball to Leroy. “Go!” he shouted, before it even touched his fingers.

“Excellent response time!” I surveyed the class, looking each student in the eyes in turn. “That’s what I want from each one of you. Remember, if you are the one closest to the threat, everyone else will get ready, but they will wait for your signal. We’ll lose precious seconds if you aren’t ready to yell ‘Go!’ Remember Peoria.”

I pulled out a purple ball. “Danger!” they all shouted, then giggled when there was no answering call.

Natasha recovered first. “Danger!”

Most of them hovered over their seats, their hands eager to catch the ball. Sophie, in the front row, was bouncing up and down. I dropped the ball on her desk. Sophie loved to holler a good, clear, “Go!” Still, it took her about five seconds to register that this ball had landed on her desk, to wind up, grab it, thrust it into the air, and shout “Go!”

The other children clapped politely, because they loved Sophie, but we all knew we would have been dead by now in the case of an event.

“I’ll come back to you in a few minutes, Sophie,” I said. “Be ready.”

I turned to the rest of the class. “You’ve seen the news. We all believe that we’ll be the lucky ones, that it can’t happen here. Well, it can. And if bad luck comes our way, it’s up to us to make good luck. Good reflexes make good luck.”

I passed the orange ball to Todd.

Blue to Casey.

Pink to Jazzmyn, who couldn’t help but catch it and shout “Go!” Her reflexes are too good to sulk.

I pulled out the yellow one.

“Danger!”

“Danger!”

I slammed it down on Sophie’s desk. Her eyes went wide, and after barely a beat, she shouted, “Go!”

The room erupted in cheers. Even Todd joined in. “Go, go, go!” Sophie chanted, for good measure, waving the yellow ball above her head.

“Okay, balls away! That’s enough for today.” I passed the ball basket. “Check your pencils, and make sure they’re sharp. The Rubber Man hasn’t dropped today, and you never know when you’ll need to be ready.”

“Or where he’ll fall,” added Caleb, testing his pencil point.

“That’s right,” I said. “He might fall right next to you. We’ll be depending on you to shout Go!”

Half a dozen children glanced apprehensively up at the ceiling, then lined up at the pencil sharpener. Jazzmyn stalked to the end of the line. “Miss Campbell?” she snapped, raising her hand.

“Yes?”

“When will we get to have a real intruder?”

“Never, I hope, but if you’re prepared, you don’t have to be afraid.”

“Will they have a gun?” asked Todd.

“They don’t have to. They just have to pose a danger. That’s why you have to look. That’s why you have to agree as a group that they are dangerous.”

“But most of them have guns. All of them I’ve seen on the news,” Todd persisted.

“Why can’t we have guns?” Caleb asked.

“Guns are for grown-ups,” I explained.

“Who decides that?” asked Jazzmyn, resharpening her pencil until the tip gleamed. “Oh, right. Grown-ups.”

“Yeah,” said Todd. “Why can’t we just get rid of guns?”

I said, per my contract: “People want to be able to choose to have their guns, children. It’s what we call a fundamental right.”

Jazzmyn turned from the pencil sharpener to stare at me calmly. “Grown-ups are the real danger. All of them.” She pointed straight at me. “Danger!”

Like a kid in a pool, answering “Polo” to her “Marco”, Caleb sang out a confirmation, “Danger!” and reached into his desk.

The children balanced at the edge of their seats, gripping their school supplies, unsure. I was standing right next to Sophie’s desk. She took it all in, looked at me, almost past me, and then her eyes widened and she shouted with glee, with pure delight, “Go! Go, go, go, go, go!”

And the children swarmed, pencils raised.

It was a gator. It took me far too long to realize that Melkan had deactivated the locks in our classroom door and ushered in a gator behind me. Gators are primeval and scaly and horrible, and they do not belong in a second-grade classroom. There’s a reason that they’re the only large animal approved for child defense drills. No one feels sorry for them. As it twined past my desk and then, when the wave of children broke upon it, scrabbled across the carpet in a desperate bid to escape, I just stood and watched. In my defense, they didn’t train second-grade teachers for the gator drill at the time. It wasn’t expected. By the time I remembered that I should be using my greater body weight to incapacitate its thrashing midsection, the children had neutralized it. It wasn’t dead yet, but pinned and winded, and twitching as the children caught the rhythm of the stabbing. Sophie finally found her own sharp stub of a pencil and stood at the periphery, pencil raised, looking for an opening. Jazzmyn darted in and out between the other children, stabbing, testing methodically for weak spots. McKenzie anchored the end of its nose. Caleb, pinning the gator down at the base of the tail, shouted, “Someone go for the eyes! Go deep! Get the teacher scissors!” Todd had already snagged them from my desk and was gouging the gator’s flank.

“Get the eyes! Get the eyes!” the other children hollered at Todd, making way at the head. With the lateral thrust we had just practiced at recess, Todd blinded the gator in one eye.

Sophie shrieked and applauded. “Go, Todd! Go, go, go!”

Todd turned, grinning, to see her teetering at the edge of the melee, the only child without something to do, and waved her in. “Get in here, Sophie!” he shouted, and wrapped her fist around the teacher scissors.

“How?”

“Down, like your pencil, right at the eye.” The other kids leaned further away from the head. A broad stain of blood was spreading across the carpet, and the gator was barely twitching anymore. “Sophie! Sophie!” shouted the children as she raised the teacher scissors.

Her first blow bounced off the bony socket and tore down the gator’s cheek, but she was already raising the scissors and got it square in the eye on the second blow. She kept going.

“Sophie! Sophie! Sophie!”

Eventually it dawned on them that the gator was dead, and they fell easily into the Rubber Man victory dance, stomping and whooping. Sophie flung the scissors up in victory, and the wicked points of them lodged in the ceiling tiles, where they stayed, and she slapped Todd so hard on the back that he stumbled across the gator’s body.

The children giggled and shouted, giddy with victory. Everyone high-fived Sophie. Sophie high-fived everyone. But one by one they fell silent, looking at what was left of the gator. Not much, really. “I thought it was bigger,” said Caleb. I had, too. It looked shrunken, there in the spreading pool of blood, its scales torn. The only formidable thing about it was the stench of blood and feces. With its clipped claws and the duct-tape muzzle around its jaws, it had never been much of a threat. Hardly six feet long, it couldn’t have weighed much more than I did.

“Did it hurt?” asked Todd, finally.

I found it hard to answer.

Jazzmyn said, “It was going to die anyway. It was a nuisance and was going to be culled. My sister is in fifth grade, and she says they give the gators drugs so they don’t feel pain.” She wiped her bloody hands on the lapels of her yellow jacket. The hems of her pants had soaked up four inches of red, and the rest of the suit was splattered with gore.

Bruce from maintenance buzzed in to clear up the remains, and I ushered the class down the hall to Bathroom Access, where they took turns silently signing in to wash their hands. There was nothing to be done about their Picture Day clothes, hanging in bloody tatters of khaki and tulle. The nurse came by to apply butterfly strips to the deepest scratches. And then the children gathered around me in the authorized holding area to hear what I had to say about the drill. Our stats: 3:07 from release to probable death, twelve broken pencils, four cuts requiring bandaging, one pencil puncture wound.

For a second there, when Sophie gave the signal, I actually thought—no, I won’t say it. It was a foolish thought. The children would never. At least, not to me. What we were doing was a good thing. They knew it. We were giving them a way to protect themselves. A chance to fight back.

When I was sure my voice wouldn’t shake, I congratulated them. “Pretty good work. That gator bled out in under three minutes. But you’ll have to do better. If it had an AR-15, at least fourteen of you would be dead by now.”

They nodded soberly, but in the back Jazzmyn whispered, “My big sister’s class finished the Gator Drill in five minutes, and they were best in the school.”

I made myself smile then. I would wait until later to remind them that they could have flipped the gator over to quickly access its vitals. “You’re right, Jazzie. This class is good. This class is the best. I am going to have that gator made into a purse.”

And I did, although there wasn’t enough skin left on the gator to make a purse bigger than this little coin clutch. I keep it in my pocket still, and in it, right here, is the stub of a rainbow pony pencil that Sophie gave me the day she was promoted up to the middle school, ecstatic and resplendent in another blue bow.

“For luck, Ms. Campbell,” she said, patting my cheek with one soft, gentle hand.

“We make our own luck, Sophie,” I said. “You of all people should know that.”

You see how sharp it is?

GoodSouthernBoy™ is born to a RegularAmericanFamily! in Tennessee. You won’t learn where exactly, and if you do, you won’t remember. It’s not important. GoodSouthernBoy™ stands over six feet tall, has blond hair, and you shudder to think that at one point in time, GoodSouthernBoy™ was ConventionallySexuallyAttractive. GoodSouthernBoy™ has the trappings of a nice smile, white teeth and with enough cheek dimple for RegularAmericanMoms! across the country to swoon and say things like You Found A Keeper! and What A Heartbreaker! and there’s never enough time for you to say it isn’t your heart that GoodSouthernBoy™ will break. GoodSouthernBoy™ is a Marine Officer in his spare time, could be a poster boy, you can almost see him on the highway billboards proclaiming the few, the proud, can almost see his dress blues cover tipped forward to reveal the quatrefoil and some hefty under eye shadow. The manufacturers really go for that. Mystery! Intrigue! GoodSouthernBoy™ has it all. The RegularAmericanMoms! are so proud.

GoodSouthernBoy™ comes with accessories like SoftGreyTShirt and AlcoholicDrinks and Excuses!

GoodSouthernBoy™ has a pull string that says lines like let me walk you home and I insist and reach for the sky. Well, maybe not that last one but it sort of fits? See, GoodSouthernBoy™ has this effect where you remember the acute things, the contours, but some of the specific details are sold separately. The manufacturers and makers of Marine billboards call it CHARM™, and although you were also a Marine Officer in your spare time, you don’t get a billboard. You know it’s not fucking CHARM™ but this story is about GoodSouthernBoy™ so you know what, you don’t get a say.

GoodSouthernBoy™ is everywhere and nowhere, he lurks around every corner, attends every planning meeting because you’ve been assigned to the same 80-piece playcastle that’s really a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle of an old World War II facility. Even though you know the likelihood of him being at the same meeting as you, or crossing the crosswalk at the same time is slim, thanks to Reassurances™ from your JobManager, the malleability of GoodSouthernBoy™ makes it so your JobManager’s words ring hollow. You stop walking to that coffee shop at the far end of the work complex, the one where you know

GoodSouthernBoy™ is most likely to have clients and comrades, but just when you think you have a Routine!, GoodSouthernBoy™ will emerge from some adjacent stairwell and when your JobManager asks why you’ve slowed downyour normally very Purposeful and Powerful walk, you’ll say you left your notebook in the conference room, and when your fucking JobManager points out you’re carrying a notebook you snarl no, the other one. JobManager became a JobManager when They realized that he’d be LeastLikely to cause a problem. In his performance report They wrote “HighlyCompetent” and “Client-Focused.” GoodSouthernBoy™ isn’t rated “HighlyCompetent” or “Client-Focused” but when you have CHARM™ They don’t seem to care.

Extension packs for GoodSouthernBoy™ feature drunken texts months later with prompts like hey are you out? and hey did you just start working here? and i don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself, and though you’ll start to wonder, you trust the manufacturers that it’s not a defect. Even if it was, there is no return policy, no extended warranty. All sales final is in GoodSouthernBoy™’s fine print.

GoodSouthernBoy™ isn’t a T R A N S F O R M E R™, he doesn’t shapeshift into a car or a truck or a shark. You’re not a T RA N S F O R M E R™ either (what you’d give to be one of those lucky bastards), but you don’t really know what you arebecause your manufacturers can’t seem to make up Their mind on what to call you. They’ve done reissues like: SoccerGirl™, LIMITEDEDITIONMARINEOFFICER! -NEWWITHPARACHUTINGCAPABILITIES™!, BackcountrySkier™, and queer™. Your collectors’ items have included soccer balls and combat boots and plastic skis with felt climbing skins, ice axes, and rainbow flags. You’ve had collectors. So you still can’t understand why They prefer GoodSouthernBoy™ and his stupid blond hair even though you’ve done better in sales, outperformed and outlasted and in every reissue, your accessories have never broken.

The announcement of your latest model is particularly infuriating because there was never any preparation or marketing campaign for it. You just woke up one day and like GoodSouthernBoy™’s Excuses!, your new release just circled around your brain like a halo, because that’s the technology They’ve settled on for mass announcements. When They announced the release of V ! C T ! M, you tried to tell them it’s not how you feel for a reissue but They insisted. V ! C T ! M, defender of virtue and honor, comes complete with YouShouldSmileMore! and a 50-yard stare and a POWERsuit. It’s all about power, They say. You don’t like the way people look at you as V ! C T ! M, you don’t feel they can see what you’re defending.

The manufacturers create a special, limited edition dual set, “V ! C T ! M vs. GoodSouthernBoy™.” Even then it doesn’t make sense, because you’re the one defending honor and virtue but that’s not what marketing is reporting back to us as what the people are responding to! They say.

They tell you the reissue includes a tete-a-tete with GoodSouthernBoy™, who’s evidently been preparing for months. They tell you don’t worry, GoodSouthernBoy™ is scared, he’s sweat through all five of his SoftGreyTShirts, has downed the last of his AlcoholicDrinks and will be forced to rely on his Excuses! You already know you’re stronger, you’re just not sure you can look him in the face.

You tell JobManager you’re taking a vacation (it’s not), and he says to make sure your OutofOffice™ is on (it is). He never thinks to ask you how you’re doing. In his performance report They wrote “EmotionallyIntelligent.”

You’re supposed to have a Law!yer but there isn’t one available. Your fate and the city’s rest in Their hands. GoodSouthernBoy™ has a Law!yer issued to him named Eric. You shift uncomfortably in your seat because V ! C T ! M’s cape and collar are made of itchy, scratchy wool and it’s ninety-seven degrees in this cardboard courtroom.

You cough but They programmed your catchphrase to Let’s get ‘em! What you hear is a voice not your own, a register belonging only to V ! C T ! M.

The city’s burning, They say. Whatever will we do? I meant no harm, says GoodSouthernBoy™.

I told him I didn’t need to be walked home, says V ! C T ! M.

He was just being Nice™! says Eric.

In the fight for justice, V ! C T ! M vs GoodSouthernBoy™! We wish there was someone to save us, They say.

I said no, says V ! C T ! M.

She invited him inside, says Eric.

I was confused, says GoodSouthernBoy™.

That seems really confusing! They say. We’re so confused!

He wouldn’t leave, says V ! C T ! M. He’s over six feet tall and weights over 200 lbs.

But weren’t you a LIMITEDEDITIONMARINEOFFICER!NEW,WITHPARACHUTINGCAPABILITIES™? They say.

Yes, but, says V ! C T ! M.

Ah, the lady™ protests too much, says Eric.

I never was a lady™, says V ! C T ! M.

There’s silence as sweat drips down yours—V ! C T ! M’s—collar. They say YouShouldSmileMore! and you feel the corners of your mouths involuntarily turn upward in smirk. Eric paces on the floor in front of you.

We’re gathered here today in V ! C T ! M vs. GoodSouthernBoy™ to witness a most remarkable occasion. As we watch our city burn, we pay our respects to all those who perish beneath the flames. But we find renewed solace in the judicial proceedings that have taken place today.

Eric pauses.

I remember when I was a GoodSouthernBoy™, life was, indeed, so scary! Surely, you will show my client mercy.

Your legs stick to the plastic chair, you feel V ! C T ! M’s weaponsbelt™ conform to your hips. This is who you are now. They look at you with daggers in their eyes.

Thank you Eric! They say. We’ve considered all the evidence laid before us today and we thank you both for yourradicalcandor™. In the case of V ! C T ! M vs GoodSouthernBoy™, we are pleased to announce, 

You wish you They assigned you a rocket ship to blast off into the cosmos. You and V ! C T ! M hope that your RegularAmericanMom! will understand.

GoodSouthernBoy™, we are pleased to name you Jeff.

An old unsolved murder mystery in a foreign sea-port. Ship Captain the victim, done nobody any harm. Who killed Captain S. Palori and why?

Why was Palori’s mission kept quiet from the populace of the island country that received his cargo three full years? This was the further and larger question, one ultimately of State and international relations.

Poor, unfortunate Palori. Second-Mate Rashid was still grieving the man more than thirty years later, in the midst of his own recent misfortune.

Palori’s misery might have been over instantly with a single bullet, no lingering or hardship. Rashid’s lot on the other hand would be hardship and trouble all the remaining days of his life.

The tale of Palori’s end and Rashid’s own present difficulty were bound up together. You could not have the one without the other.

Usually Rashid kept a fine and sunny disposition. Even eighteen months after his accident he had learned not to complain and irk listeners with his troubles. People could not listen more than a little to tales of woe. That kind of thing could not be endured more than once in a while. Little wonder Rashid adopted that uncomplaining manner.

It’s OK. A nuisance, but you know. Not so bad.

In the first place, Rashid would do himself no good at all moaning and groaning.

How does a man turning sixty cope living suddenly with one half-leg and a half-foot? Eighteen months after his accident Rashid had time to consider and rake over the past. There had been the lying prone in a hospital bed a good time too. Out on the water seamen were tutored in reflection by waves and far-fetched skies. Rashid showed all the signs.

One thing Rashid had surmised was that amputees had a shortened life span. The problem was something to do with the circulation, the truncation bottling up the blood somehow. In his remaining limbs Rashid could feel the change, even in the unaffected arms. The former strength in Rashid’s hands had been lost, his secure, tight clasp never returning. A simple double-knot was beyond Rashid now.

*

Just as Palori and the ship’s story came in segments, the matter of Rashid’s condition and his particular circumstances followed the same pattern. The wheelchair was one thing, presenting the general case plainly enough for anyone to see. Enquiring after details and examining more closely needed a number of meetings.

Vietnam came up somehow without warning. Being a younger man still short of sixty, Rashid seemed an unlikely source for anything touching the war in Vietnam. Developing the account of sailing days, the usual roll-call of countries and ports was tallied. All the old sailors brought out the extensive experience. There were something like two hundred countries visited during Rashid’s career on the water, numerous ports among them. Mombasa, Panama, Texas… Ho Chi Minh was finally included in the list of impressive, out of the way points on the compass.

Following which full circle, Rashid’s last, fateful trip to Vietnam, where he had gone to investigate a business opportunity. First Palori’s fateful trip to Vietnam; followed thirty years later by Captain-in-his-own-right by then, Rashid the Malay.

*

Palori never made it out of Vietnam; Rashid had gotten more than three quarters of the way home. On the Peninsular highway in Negri Sembilan, Malaysia, riding his big Kawasaki 900 through the monsoonal downpour, the rear tray of a Double B it may have been suddenly swinging across in front of Rashid and pulling him under its wheels.

Through the early telling, before we had arrived at Palori, it had been assumed the shoe on the end of Rashid’s good leg enclosed an intact foot. Not the case; therapeutic item.

On the fourth or fifth meeting, Rashid waved a hand at the shoe with its adhesive straps rather than laces, only then observed for the first time.

Though wasted, both arms and hands were whole and undamaged; ribs and shoulders well-healed.

Divorced. An eighty-nine year old Ceylonese mother, who spoke a language unknown to her children, living alone out in Bedok South. Estranged sibling relationships made things harder again.

The former sailor’s grass-widow encountered her first husband across at Geylang Serai Market recently for the first time in twenty years. A small island like Singapore, yet even so the former wife had heard nothing of Rashid’s accident of more than a year and half ago. Their two daughters the same no doubt, ignorant of what had become of their father.

The former wife had asked after Rashid’s new wife and was surprised, shocked indeed, to learn there was none.

(Had Rashid rehearsed what he would tell his wife when they finally, inevitably met? It was impossible to tell and difficult to ask)

I have only one wife. Never another, Rashid told the woman who had divorced him twenty years before.

Pointing at his heart when he delivered the encounter at the Labu Labi table.

It made the former wife cry. Seeing him suddenly in a wheelchair; then comprehending the solitariness on top.

*

Almost certainly, one assumed, Rashid had led the wayward sailor’s life away from home. Rashid himself had been the victim of a port shooting, at a table outside a bar in the Philippines. Jealous husband or boy-friend involved, Rashid had surmised.

In fact, on the contrary, Rashid maintained, the usual seaman’s dissolution did not apply in his case.

A handsome man still, Rashid held to the position. There had been no whore-houses, no girls in any ports, no girlfriends of any intimate kind. An irony for such a Sea-salt to lose the loved one blameless like that.

Rashid’s good leg carried the marks of his earlier lucky escape in the Philippines: one wound from the bullet that went in above the knee and the other grazing the thigh. That incident too had required a period of hospital recuperation. Put in the shade now by subsequent events.

*

Palori had collected his bullet in the head. Early nightfall, Ho Chi Minh City.

Dusk was a strange time in Ho Chi Minh even five years after the war. It was as if the smoke of bombs and chemicals still rose up from the fields despite the intervening years, bringing a premature close of day. Some of it was the peasants burning off, though this was different to what Rashid was accustomed to in Singapore from the Sumatran and Malaysian burn-offs.

Shrouding dusk that rose from the ground in the port of Ho Chi Minh and drew unexpected nightfall in strange, unfamiliar hues.

Even when not on his watch, Captain Palori came up to the bridge, ordered coffee and handed round cigarettes. Palori often sang tunes like the troubadour Malays.

Palori had taken his cigarette over to the port-side window. There beside the bearing compass, at the open window, the Captain blew toward the cranes loading the Seasweep’s cargo. Marines below working in the compound, trolleys rolling over the jetty back and forth.

Second-Mate Rashid was down in the Mess Hall taking an early supper when the shots rang out. After the heat of late afternoon, all the port holes were still wide open.

*

Rashid was scheduled to attend regular medical check-ups for his wounds at two different hospitals. Transport was a problem. One morning Rashid waited from eight until well after noon for the friend who had agreed to drive him. A lift for the appointment would have been a great help. Rashid did not ask that anyone wait for him to finish with the doctors, just drop him.

Without money for cab fare, a few weeks previously Rashid had wheeled himself back from Tan Tock Seng out in Balestier Road. Cars honking behind. Rashid had kept to the kerb and pushed on. Luckily some Bangla boy helped him over the Kallang Bridge. The soon-to-turn sixty former bike enthusiast enjoyed the rush going down on the other side.

Sore shoulders and fingers afterward, thumb and forefinger especially. Three hours in all. Twice now Rashid had returned from the hospital under his own steam.

As Rashid’s story emerged the news-reports of the death of the famous old Viet general Nguyen Vo Giap,  reminded of the figures. Two and one half million Vietnamese casualties during the course of the war; 58,000 Americans on their side, Rashid was told after some double–checking.

No surprise this for former Captain Rashid. The population of Singapore three decades ago dying in a long, protracted war against the French and then the Americans.

Fifty-eight thousand Americans tallied roughly for Rashid too. A short while Rashid had revolved the latter figure, calculating quietly for himself over some minutes.

*

Second-Mate Rashid signed on from the beginning with Captain S. Palori, in 1979. Full three year term on the Seasweep. After Palori was killed a Filipino Captain was brought in to take command.

The job could not wait; as soon as the Seasweep was loaded, anchors away. Some kind of investigation dragged on for a while behind them at the dock. It was a hopeless, futile endeavour. Palori’s killer would never be found. Five years after the war, not only Ho Chi Minh, but the whole region was awash with guns of all kinds and no end of marksmen.

All the ports were dangerous, Ho Chi Minh particularly. The World Vision International Chief and the Shipping Agent had warned the men never to stray from the compound on the dock. It was highly dangerous. No-one had anticipated the deck or the bridge could prove equally so.

*

Rashid gave the well-known report of the returning sensation of the missing limb. Chuckles at it as if at the captivating play of a favourite child. Funny that.

One evening raking over the details, recapitulating key points, a small, precocious boy happened by and stopped directly before Rashid in his chair. Clearly the pair was known to each other from the footpath outside the kopi shop.

The boy had not forgotten Rashid. Not forgotten and perhaps dubious and unsatisfied at the man’s by-play.

Hey Mister. Where’s your leg?

Again Rashid repeated the tale of his fishing accident that he had told the boy previously.

Hanging over a line, no bite. Waiting. Waiting.

The boy was looking into Rashid’s chair harder than he was listening.

Like a rifle barrel suddenly raised, the stump twitching up from Rashid’s shorts and surprising more than just the boy.

TWANG!

Oh Gee! Fishy got dinner now. The Burger King one. The other leg was too spicy for Mr. Fish’s taste. Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.

After the theatrics the child was peering closely again. That was what it looked like, alright. But really?

The Grandpa behind the young lad had showed chattering jaws for apology.

You know how it is.

Which was unnecessary for Rashid. No harm done; the boy was understandably curious.

*

It had been assumed Rashid had a flat of his own, rented if nothing else. More than thirty years a seaman; sixteen as Master.

The chaps around Geylang Serai still honoured the former Captain. Local businessmen establishing new ventures picked Rashid’s brain for various particulars.

How had the Captain let all that money slip through his fingers, never thinking of rainy days ahead?

By the mid-‘90s the shipping game had changed, barter trade becoming the norm, which priced Singaporean Masters out of the business. Far cheaper Indonesian and Chinese officers had been readily available. For a number of years Rashid led the local protests for native Masters on Singaporean ships.

In his chair Rashid slept nights there by Labu Labi. When the place closed for the day the old Sea-salt pulled up one of the red plastic chairs for his leg. An improvised sailor’s bunk.

When some money came his way Rashid took a hotel room, washing his clothes and using the aircon for drying. Being always so clean and presentable, one assumed other arrangements.

Luckily for Rashid, there would be money coming from insurance and also CPF, once the paperwork and procedures were complete.

*

A few years on there would come a whiff of the con man about Rashid. After four or five months of regular nightly sits at the kopi shops, Rashid disappeared for a stretch and on return said little about his absence. A hot scheme was afoot, a project that promised rich returns. Only a few thousand was needed, $4-5K for a nice windfall. Timber or sand it might have been, bundled with the usual oil. One of the Javanese Sultans was on board. If you or any of your Australian friends were interested.

A rift with Bee Choo preceded another absence. Surprisingly, Bee, who always pleaded straightened circumstances, had advanced the Captain a thousand or more dollars. A short-term return had been promised; the time blew out and Bee became importunate. Rashid fully intended to repay; Bee would be duly recompensed. But she could not get about making false accusations; Rashid would answer the police, or any other authority. The money had sunk in some kind of hole and Rashid was in no position to produce a sum like that at the drop of a hat.

Another disappearance saw a turnaround—here was the Captain flashing a wallet thickly stacked with fifties, easily over a grand. There was more in hand too. Had you eaten? Could the Captain buy you a meal or drink? Rashid’s numbers had come up on the 4D or Toto.

Rashid’s innocence in the rupture with the wife rang somewhat suspiciously too. Remaining faithful and supportive himself, there had been no reason; the woman had simply abandoned her husband. It was rare in that conservative Muslim milieu. The two daughters “followed” the mother; they had become estranged. One would have liked to have heard the other side.

*

Eight or nine day round trip, depending on the weather. Two voyages a month over three years. Palori was killed around the half-way mark of the cartage.

How many body bags had the Seasweep carried? On one particular trip there had been almost fifty in the hold, Captain Rashid reported over the richly sweetened kopi that he favoured.

Rashid was in a position to know the numbers. Second-Mate’s duty had included going down into the hold with the Marines to verify figures. Numbers correlated with names showing in the clear plastic pockets of the bags, where any personal effects were also placed.

Second-Mate counted off carefully for each delivery, presenting the documents to Captain Palori, and then the relieving Captains after him.

All present and accounted for, Captain.

The ship could not leave port without the clearance.

Verifications could be difficult for the Second-Mate when there was some kind of inconsistency, larger batches usually throwing up problem on top of problem.

So many Browns on numerous occasions, seven or eight not unknown on a large, single loading.

Browns in opaque bags of that colour, zippered tight and tagged.

After the exhumation of corpses that had been in the ground ten years many of them, there should not have been such stench rising from the hold and penetrating the entire ship.

Down in the hold masks were useless and the odour saturated clothing and hair. Some of the sailors took their meals on deck rather than the Mess Hall.

Some of the sailors surmised the chemicals the Americans had dropped infected their dead and possibly posed a threat to themselves now in turn. What might be in store as a result of their work on the Cross and Bones Seasweep?

It was the Devil’s own wages. Long-termers on the job were given cholera shots every three months; special pills were available to help the men cope, one morning and one night. Second-Mate didn’t like the whooziness and only took a single pill at most.

The bags were supposed to be air-tight.

Forklifts pulled pallets from the rear of delivery trucks. Sometimes the ship waited two or three days for a single truck to arrive, the officers on the Bridge watching the marines lounge, play cards and smoke below.

On the dock they carted ten at a time, slowly and carefully on trolleys pulled by motorized carts. Ten was the maximum on the trolley.

From the jetty alongside, the pallets were craned aboard directly into the hold and sorted into racks.

Second-Mate Rashid had needed to stand on his toes to get the particulars of the topmost bags. Occasionally watched by high-ranking American officers, once even a general of some kind, who climbed down into the hold to inspect.

Second-Mate was specifically charged with ensuring each tier was double bound and securely tied against the typhoons and other weathers.

Out on one side of the port the jungle came down almost to the water, tall trees in the midst that became the centre of suspicion after Palori’s killing. Captain Palori’s was not the neat, piercing wound from close range. A sniper awaiting his chance in amongst the lush greenery could have bided his time until Palori presented a clear target.

120-30 metres. Single bullet only ever found, though some of the men reported a hail of fire.

Another body-bag was added for Palori.

*

An easy, mostly uneventful passage down through the Gulf of Thailand, past some of the resort islands. Along the East coast of Malaysia and around into Sembawang.

Same route taken by land-lubing Captain Rashid on the Kawasaki more than thirty years later, not far inland from the coast.

Through the war there was good business from the Americans come down on R&R into the naval base at Sembawang. Like many other ports of the region, Singapore had prospered with the American presence. The soldiers on a break from the jungle were ready to spend up big. The prostitution industry in South-East Asia essentially derived from the Americans in Vietnam.

The trade in living flesh was an open secret in Singapore, well-known even to schoolchildren. That of the repatriation of foreign war dead much more closely guarded.

The matter was so sensitive that there was not a whisper of any kind. No one had heard of the arrangement in Singapore. Three years’ transport to-and-fro.

From Sembawang the bodies were trucked to Changi, where U.S. aircraft took the cargo the last leg home. Local carpenters were engaged for the pine caskets that would present the remains to kin in the States.  Military bands, draped flags and saluting guards of honour.

*

Nothing surprising about the secrecy for the City-State. Nothing shameful about repatriating war dead. On the contrary, it was an honourable, compassionate service performed for an important ally.

A certain prudence was all. The Malaya Emergency was some years before. Soeharto in command in Indonesia. The Near and Far East continued at the time very much full-blush Red.

No need provide information unnecessarily to the public. Why would one do that? No harm occasioned.

The Red Alert at embarkation at Ho Chi Minh ran counter to the usual story of the ready Vietnamese forgiveness and charity toward the former foe. Every war left grizzly, hard-arse tough guys up in the hills or jungles, continuing their private struggle. How could one blame renegade Vietnamese units?

Poor Palori, ni kriv, ni duzan; neither guilty, nor indebted, as the Montenegrins, well-versed in warfare, concluded for such personal tragedies.

For a while there Rashid had been selling the dried and seasoned packets of cuttlefish and cigarette lighters from one of the Labu Labi front pavement tables, earning a few dollars while awaiting his compensation. Smiles and good cheer maintained.

Memorable scenes of the Captain lighting up one of his Gudang Garams beside his eighty-nine year old mother, with her own expertly rolled tabacci.

*

In the first months listening to Rashid’s unfolding of the Seasweep you could not help wondering. A three year operation of that scale, without a whisper. Asking around, combing the newspapers of the period, the parliamentary record—nothing. Men from the marine sector, the army and police quizzed; politically engaged, educated citizens.

Eventually, five or six years after Rashid left the scene for good, it seemed—he had mentioned a plan to retire in Indonesia—an independent source emerged. Mohammed Noor from Joo Chiat Complex had worked a couple of decades at the Seletar airport, where he sometimes liaised with the port at Sembawang. No word in his time of the transport. But in his retirement, at the Haig kopi shops Modh frequented most days, a pal, chap called Man—Osman—an Indian, told of his sewing at Sembawang. It might have been others filling the bags; Man was tasked with the stitching of the fabric, working with industrial machines. Bodies of a single limb, or trunk only; ambiguous bodily segments bundled. Two left arms; a pair of heads. Man saw them go into the bags. They might have been sorted better on the other side. Telling what he had heard from Man at the Haig, Mr Modh swivelled in his chair with a chuckle and grin.

The Pretzelman died yesterday. He was shot on his corner half a block from his home, and if he has family they’ll pile stuffed animals, and one of his boys will spray-paint RIP, and someone will take his corner. Old ladies will sometimes mention him, but that will die out as well, and the neighborhood’s memory of him will fade like the colors of the teddy bears’ fur and the sharpness of the letters RIP and the print of the newspaper clipping in its vinyl sleeve stapled to the telephone pole.

Dana knew the Pretzelman. She was a fifteen-year-old girl from up the block. She knew of the Pretzelman before he had the corner, because her eldest brother had fucked the Pretzelman’s cousin for a few months, but the two of them never met until the Pretzelman took the corner and began to make himself known.

He stayed on the corner all day, unlike the men who owned neighboring blocks and took breaks on the hot days to drive around in their cars with their music and air-conditioning blasting, just to make themselves seen. He just walked down in the mornings and stayed there all day, every day. He and his boys would talk to each other, and stare down cars whose drivers they didn’t recognize, and sell to those who bought.

Dana first met him one morning when her grandmother sent her out for a forty of Olde English. It was a hot Sunday, and her grandmother’s favorite treatment for the brutal heat of their home was to drink something cold. The house smelled of death from the time that a great-aunt had declined and passed in the living room. Because the family had no money to keep her in a hospital, and because her bed couldn’t fit up the stairs, for six months she had been in the center of all activity in the house. The stench of her sheets and her disease had slowly permeated everything, and then she had died. Dana liked being sent to the store for forties and half gallons of milk and packs of Newport 100s because it got her out of the smell.

She walked down the street, looking out for any of her friends who might be awake and out on their stoops. She didn’t see anyone as she walked the block, so she crossed diagonally through the Pretzelman’s intersection toward the store that stood on the corner where he usually stood with his friends. The small white awning read, “Complete Grocery and Deli,” and there was a sign that said, “Hoagies Snacks Cigarettes We Appreciate Your Business.”

Dana knew enough to know what groups of boys said to girls walking alone, and she knew that her age was no longer a protection now that her body had changed. That day there were three others besides the Pretzelman. As she walked up to them, and they looked at her flip-flops and her shorts and her beater and her purple bra underneath, she prepared herself to deliver an insulting reply to their comments, but no one said anything. The Pretzelman smiled at her, and she passed through them into the store.

She walked up to the glass, spoke loudly, “Olde E,” to the distorted image of the lady on the other side, passed through the slot the five-dollar bill her grandmother had given her, waited for her change and the brown bag to spin on the carousel to her side, and left. As she passed back through the group, the Pretzelman said, “Have a good day now,” and she didn’t say anything.

That day the heat endured, so Dana was sent back to the store two more times on the same errand, and by the last trip, she had smiled at the Pretzelman. He told her to have a good night.

The Pretzelman lived in an abandoned house around the corner that he and his boys had fixed up a little bit. He said hello to the old ladies. He threw his trash in the can, at least when he was on his corner. Dana wasn’t sure if he made his boys do the same, but there wasn’t much trash on his corner compared with the other three of that intersection, so she thought that he did.

He got a puppy from a man he knew who bred pits. It was a brown-and-white dog with a light nose and light eyes. He walked it on a leash down to his corner in the mornings, and then he tied it to the stop sign, and it stayed with him and his boys. They fed it chips and water ice and other things that they bought from the store. The old ladies sometimes would stop and pet it.

Dana loved dogs, and she asked the Pretzelman one day if she could pet it, and he said, “Of course,” so she petted it and talked to it. After that, on trips for Newports and chips and hug juices, she would always kneel down quickly and whisper in the dog’s ear, “Good pup,” or “I love you.” The Pretzelman would smile down at her, and she would tug on the dog’s ear and then run in and finish her errand. One day as she knelt down to pet it, she looked over at a parked car and she saw a pistol sitting on top of the rear passenger side tire.

She got more comfortable around the Pretzelman through her relationship with the puppy. She asked him one day if she could see his gun. He chuckled and he said, “That stuff isn’t for girls like you,” but when she asked again a few weeks later, he reached into the wheel well and picked it up. He did something to it that make it rasp and click, then handed it to her. The weight of it frightened her, and she stared at it in her hand, thinking in a haze that it must weigh more than the puppy. She put her finger to the trigger, and the gun was so big that only the tip of her finger could reach around. She stood up and pointed the gun at the Pretzelman, and she heard her own voice say, “What now,” and she saw the Pretzelman’s face drain.

Her hand shook and her knees shook, and the Pretzelman took one step forward and snatched the gun from her hand and slapped her in the face. She didn’t cry out, but she shuddered and cried a few tears and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t like that.” She had scared herself as much as she scared him, and the Pretzelman saw this, and he said, “This ain’t no joke. Why you think I said guns aren’t for girls like you.”

She talked to him a lot about guns after that. They sat on the stoop of the house next to the store, and he told her that most boys held their left arm over their face while they shot with their right because they didn’t want to see what the bullets did. He said that only the crazy ones or the liars said they didn’t cover their face. She asked him if he covered his face, and he didn’t answer for a minute. Then he said, “Not the first time.”

He took her behind his house to shoot the gun, because she asked him if she could try it. They walked through the high nettles and the broken glass and the needles, and he said, “Watch out for dog shit.” He made her stop and then walked ten feet and set a bottle on the back of a chair and came back and handed her the gun and said, “Here.” She pointed the gun at the bottle, and her body jerked, and her ears rang, and the smell made her eyes burn. She looked at him after the first shot, and he said, “Try again, but hurry up ’cause they’ll call the cops.”

She shot six more times and hit the bottle with one of the shots, but she couldn’t tell which one because the cracks and the flashes didn’t match up. The wall behind the bottle was soft quarried stone with lots of mica, and the divots and craters where her bullets hit were a fresher shade of gray than the rest, and they sparkled in the light. She thought through the roaring in her ears that if someone were to shoot the whole house, it would look newer than it did.

She told people about the Pretzelman because she was proud to know him. She told her friends about him and introduced a few of them to him. One Saturday night she had her friend Kiana sleep over, and they whispered about boys until late. “He don’t say anything ignorant to you, and he’s even nice to the old ladies,” Dana said. Kiana rolled her eyes.

“You know he’s too old for you. You wouldn’t even know what to do when he started to try out that nasty shit.”

Dana shrieked and rolled over onto her belly. Then she said, “I would too know what to do. I would too.”

That night after the girls had fallen asleep, they were awoken by a string of gunshots and then tires squealing. When it ended they ran to the windows and looked up and down the block, but they didn’t see anyone. Kiana fell back asleep soon after, and Dana lay there for a long time listening to her steady breathing, thinking about situations that could be, and in them what she would do.

On her way to the bus the next morning at seven, Dana walked past the poppy store and saw the Pretzelman in his normal spot. He nodded to her, and she ducked her head. She felt a quickness in her chest and heard a buzzing in her ears. When she got on the bus, she tried to close her eyes and take a nap like she usually did on the way to school, but she couldn’t find a comfortable position in her seat.

In English class that day, Dana’s teacher talked about how the best characters always seem very real, yet a little too large for life. Dana raised her hand and said, “I know someone like that. He’s got the corner on my block, and he has this nice dog. They call him the Pretzelman because his skin color is like the pretzel part, and that stuff he sell is white like the salt.”

“He sounds like an interesting character,” said the teacher. “I would enjoy reading a story about the Pretzelman.”

After that Dana couldn’t help but think of the Pretzelman as a character. Everything he did was covered with a thin gauze of fantasy. One of the boys on the block wanted to work for him, but they already had a lookout and the boy was too young for any of the other jobs, so they sent him on little errands. One of these errands was to take the bus to Target and buy sheets, because the Pretzelman was tired of sleeping on a bare mattress. Or at least tired of hearing his girls complain about it. The boy took the hundred dollars he was given and rode the bus for thirty-five minutes and went into Target and bought the sheets. The Pretzelman had said to him, “I don’t need no change, understand?” The boy knew that the change was to be his payment for the errand, but in order to avoid looking like he was trying to profit too much, he bought the most expensive set he could find. He brought back a set of king-size sheets and proudly presented them to the Pretzelman, but they didn’t fit the twin-size mattress. According to Dana, the Pretzelman didn’t make the boy go back to Target and exchange them because the mistake had been his to not give the boy more specific orders. They made fun of the boy and called him King Size, and the Pretzelman slept on a twin-size mattress with sheets for a king. Dana looked at sheets the next time she was in Target, and she saw that the most expensive sheets sold there had a thread count of six hundred and cost $89.99, plus tax.

Another time Dana walked down to the poppy store and came upon the peak of an argument between the Pretzelman and one of his girls. She was standing in the street screaming at him and making motions with her arms like she was throwing something at him. The motion was like a Frisbee, and the girl did it over and over again with each hand, and sometimes with both. But the Pretzelman, like a character in a different movie, was just standing against the wall of the store. He wasn’t looking at the girl, and he wasn’t looking away from her, and it looked to Dana like he hadn’t noticed that there was anyone else there at all.

There was a certain face that the Pretzelman used when he was out on the corner, but this one was different. His normal stern-faced grill would crack sometimes. The corners of his eyes would crinkle up if he caught her spitting or stopping to adjust her belt or her shorts. His eyes would crinkle, and she would know he had watched her the whole time.

This face wasn’t crinkling at all, no matter what the girl screamed about his shithole house and his dirty, grubbing life. Suddenly Dana saw him in the same pose, leaning with his shoulders against the wall and his feet planted, but the vista had changed. The tan car in front of him and the picket fence across the street with its peeling paint were gone, and instead he was at the edge of an enormous, planted field, looking out at the work he had done and the work yet to do. Or he was at the top of a rocky hill, and he was looking down at the river below, at the cattle or the buffalo. Or he was on the balcony of a high-rise, looking past the skyscrapers toward the lower buildings, the row homes, and the narrow streets that he owned. Or he was in the tunnel at an arena, waiting to be introduced over the loudspeakers. Waiting for the roar of the crowd. The girl in the street was still yelling, her hair and her cheeks shaking with rage. He could have been made of stone.

Dana tried to talk to the Pretzelman about how she saw him, what she thought about him. Every time she tried it, her words ran into the obstacle of his eyes on her, the smile starting to play in the corner of his mouth. One time she made it as far as telling him, “You know, you’re nice. Really nice.” She wanted to continue, but she could tell he was making fun of her when he replied, “Well, some people think so. I’m glad you think so.”

In English class her teacher made the class do a writing exercise called “What everyone knows vs. What I know.” Dana continued the first sentence. “What everyone knows about the Pretzelman is his puppy, and his nickname.” She quickly wrote a full page in her looping script, smiling as she pictured his eyes, his hands.

She was still going when the teacher said it was time to begin the second part. She wrote, “But what only I know is that he…”

She stopped writing then, and thought about what would happen if she wrote what she knew—really knew—about the Pretzelman. Or if she told it to him out loud. How would his eyes look if she wrote it—all of it—and then handed this letter to him, rather than turning it in to the teacher? When the class ended, her ellipsis was still open, waiting to be filled with what she knew.

Before long the Pretzelman died, and here’s how it happened. He woke up on his mattress on the floor between the sheets he got by sending his boy on the bus to Target. He grabbed his gun from the floor next to his bed. He put the leash on the dog, and he hollered to the others to get up. He let himself out the back, which is what they always did so that the front could stay boarded up and keep its abandoned look. He walked around to the front of the house. He didn’t carry the dog over the broken glass, as he had done when it was a smaller puppy. He might have waved hello to an old lady. He might have stopped to wait while the dog took a shit.

As he walked down the street, he heard the engine of the car roaring, and he looked up to see why someone was going that fast. He saw clearly the face behind the wheel, and then the tires screeched, and he saw clearly the other face in the back seat, before the bright flashes. He went for his gun, but the bullets spun him around and knocked him onto his belly, and his arm and the gun got pinned under his body. The dog ran off. The Pretzelman bled out onto the sidewalk while one of the old ladies called 911, and his boys came out and saw what had happened and they ran off. Dana left her house to catch the bus and saw the cops taping off an area around a body that was covered with a heavy sheet too small for the whole creeping stain. She didn’t know it was the Pretzelman until she came home that afternoon and her friends told her.

As she lay in bed that night, she thought about the dark red color and feared that she might never be able to think about anything else. She searched her feelings, wondering distantly if she was going to cry. She fell asleep thinking, but she slept well. It rained that night and the whole day after, so the stain was gone. The Pretzelman’s mother placed the news clipping of his shooting inside a plastic sleeve and stapled it on the telephone pole, with a note about a reward for evidence leading to the killers. Before long the corner belonged to someone else, and there was a colorful cairn of stuffed animals piled against the fence where he’d lain, and one of the walls nearby read RIP. Dana noticed these things when she walked out to the store or the bus stop, and she passed them again whenever she walked back home.

Thank you Thank you for your service Thank you for going Thank you for coming back Thank you for not dying Thank you for taking the bullet, the mortar round, the shrapnel that is making its way to your heart by micromillimeters every year Thank you for eating that god-awful food gritted with sand so we don’t have to Thank you for eating Thanksgiving dinner on a paper plate Thank you for living in a metal shipping container for the first three months until they got their shit together and built proper housing for you and your men Thank you for driving a Humvee without armor while ambassadors and visiting senators and country music stars were going around in bulletproof SUVs Thank you for carrying a gun for slinging it across your body for wearing it like a heavy necklace that, after the first week, you hardly noticed was there Thank you for the magazine of bullets you polished every night Thank you for dripping with sweat Thank you for leaving your wife for eighteen months Thank you for telling your children you’d be back before they knew it Thank you for punching the walls of your shipping container Thank you for your bruised knuckles Thank you for screaming Thank you for crying quietly in the porta-potty when you thought no one was listening Thank you for enduring the stink and heat and filth of that entire year-and-a-half Thank you for writing back to that fifth-grade class when all you really wanted to do was sleep after a hard day of walking Thank you for looking through the tear-blurred sights of your rifle Thank you for crying over the dead Thank you for the sucking chest wound Thank you for the partial loss of your leg Thank you for your blood caught in a sterile metal tray shaped like a curled cheese puff Thank you for hating and killing Muslims Thank you for the hard clench of your jaw Thank you for thinking of us back here in the United States of Amnesia going about our war-free lives Thank you for our amber waves of grain purple mountains majesty bombs bursting in mid-air Thank you for Fox News and the pretty girl who reads the headlines Thank you for the freedom to fill my lungs so I can howl across the bandwidth of Twitter Thank you for this Big Mac and this Whopper and this Domino’s pizza Thank you for almost dying in order that I might live to gain another twenty pounds and then Keto myself back to normalcy two years later Thank you for the chance to marry Kevin S., to fuck him, to bear his two children, and to file for divorce when I was through with all of that Thank you for giving me the freedom to move from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon Thank you for my Golden Retriever Thank you for my God-given right to enjoy the rain Thank you for my new breasts and the blue pill which cures my erectile dysfunction Thank you for infomercials and the operators who are standing by Thank you for this cigarette and this beer and this fried pork rind Thank you for the chance to uncork this ’41 Cabernet and eat this Bernaise-smothered filet Thank you for the three Starbucks in my neighborhood Thank you for American Idol Thank you for my amazing Amazon Kindle Thank you for the Mall of America Victoria’s Secret Dippin Dots The Gap Best Buy and the weight of shopping bags that turn my fingers white Thank you for my Prius and the $3.34 per gallon which fills it Thank you for giving your blood for my oil Thank you for leaving and returning Thank you for limping through the airport on your half leg Thank you for that little American flag sticking from a side pocket of your rucksack (long may she wave) Thank you for your smile on a stiff upper lip and the way you tried to conceal your limp by swinging both legs in equal cadence like you were in a Sousa march Thank you for catching my eye Thank you for allowing me to stop you on the concourse Thank you for taking this stranger’s hand Thank you for saying You’re welcome No problem Glad to do it.

 The original version of “Thank You” was published in F(r)iction Magazine in 2015.

I fill the big bucket with soap and water and start heading across the field. It’s early on a Sunday and Gran Flower will want his solar cells cleaned, which they say isn’t really necessary, but Gran insists it helps. So I have woken up early and am hoping to reach Gran before he starts screeching and riling up the crows.

I pass through our low, flat garden plot. It used to be a marsh, and the rain still feels free to run downhill and stay awhile. From there, I head up the dusty northern hill, under the checkerboard shade of its acre-wide awning, half solar panels to farm the sun, half glass to keep the dust dry so we can farm that too. Then, descending the hill, I reach the desiccated riverbed fringed with crusty little succulents, which is where our property ends and the Gibsons’ begins. Gran wanted to be set up there last Sunday so he could spend the week swearing about them, the Gibsons, his synthetic voice cracking and popping at max volume, then—I imagine—going silent with awe the moment he saw a quail. The Gibsons don’t even live there anymore; the Government removed them decades ago. Gran knows that, but I think he just likes the solitude and the quail and a place to say “motherfucker” where the Holy Father can really hear him.

I get to the property line, and there’s Gran just where I left him.

From behind, Gran Flower looks like an aluminum sculpture of a sunflower. He has a long metal stem which sticks into the ground, and about five feet up, big metal leaves curl outward and upward. Hexagonal solar cells tessellate on the leaves’ upper surface; it is these I’ll need to clean.

As I walk around to face Gran, his head comes into view. It’s his own human face from before he was a Gran, cast (I assume faithfully) in metal like Agamemnon’s death mask. His head emerges from among the petals, as though they were a high starched collar and he a count.

“Hi, Gran,” I say.

WHO ARE YOU? comes the scratchy monotone of his synthesized voice. He’s probably filled up the tiny thumb drive stuck behind his head. Swearing at the Gibsons and God and country occupies a surprising amount of writable memory. He’s probably dumped unimportant stuff like who I am, who anybody is now.

I take a solid state drive from my pocket. This one’s much more capacious but nearly full just the same: eighty of a hundred petabytes. “Just a second, Gran. Don’t be scared.” I remove the small drive he’s currently using and swap it out for the other. Eighty petabytes of Gran Flower, the Gran that tells me stories, the Gran I went to the city and the museum with. My Gran.

GUHGUHGUHGUH SSSHIIIIT SHIT SSSSSSHHHHHIVER MY STAMEN, goes Gran. He gets glitchy when I swap drives since I am effectively replacing a bit of his brain.

“I’m here to clean your solar cells,” I say.

OH BEES OH BEES OH NO OH OH OH NO OH JONAS, he says, WEREN’T YOU HERE JUST AN HOUR AGO?

~

Gran Flower would be my sextuple-great-grandfather. He was among the first wave of Grans, or at least the first after the program became public.

A group of scientists had found some birds living in the most uninhabitably toxic places on earth, these big landfills full of old phones and computers and batteries. Places where the temperature reached 45, 50 Celsius all year round, and the ground was so acidic you could never go barefoot. The people had to wear masks and hazard suits and take pills, and their hair still fell out when they hit thirty.

But somehow the birds were doing fine—thriving, even. The way pigeons and rats live off human cities’ heaps of garbage, and not just live but live large, this one species of crow had found a way to turn people’s insistent fuck-ups into vitality and food.

So the scientists did the logical thing and caught a bunch of the crows and cut them open. The birds’ brains were all in various stages of conversion to metal. So they cut the brains open too and discovered that the metal was forming these perfect replicas of the nervous structure, down to little conductive nanotubes where there had been axons and dendrites.

Then they started experimenting on people. It was about two hundred and fifty years back, Gran Flower says. Nobody knew why all of a sudden there were so few homeless people. The poor and desperate just started disappearing off the streets, out of the campers they lived in, out of the factories and warehouses they worked in. People thought the president must be doing a great job, the economy improving, all that. But really some corporation was just plucking people up and taking them to labs to feed them bits of old laptops and see what would happen. And eventually that same president, who was president for life and had already had all his organs replaced three times, disappeared also.

The government held a candle for him and somehow installed an interim president. Then, five or six years on, the executive office called a press conference. Gran says everybody watched on the Internet as three secret servicemen wheeled something out on a hand cart under a giant purple mantle. They brought it out and stood it up and whipped off the mantle and revealed the likeness of the president, standing nine feet tall and made of titanium. A big POTUS golem affixed eternally to a podium.

When the golem started to speak they realized it was really him, it was President Gran as he came to be called, and not a sculpture or robot or art stunt. He explained the Gran technology and said we had finally achieved immortality, “we” being wealthy and powerful people (but he made it sound like the United States of America), and “immortality” being innately desirable. Then a bunch more Grans came out on stage under an aurora of flags as coronets blared. Some were carried or pushed, and some walked under their own power on weirdly-jointed metal centaur limbs. They were all these old rich guys, CEOs and the like, whose disappearances over the years had garnered various degrees of conspiracy-theoretic attention.

President Gran served as head of state for thirty more years that way. My Gran says he went crazy after that—REAL CALIGULA STUFF. When President Gran declared himself a pacifist and a socialist and an environmentalist, the Senate realized he was too far gone and voted to impeach, then melt him down. They then released a series of commemorative dollar coins, made of titanium and bearing his image.

~

I’m cleaning Gran’s solar panels and explaining to him that it’s been a year since we last loaded this version of his memory, not an hour. He says it’s disorienting when somebody swaps out his writable memory, like waking up from one dream into another. But he understands why I did it. The last time I left him with a full memory like that, he raved for a week straight and could barely string together a sentence by the end of it.

I’M GLAD YOU LEFT ME ON THIS SPOT, Gran says. THIS USED TO BE A RIVER, AND THE GODDAMN GIBSONS LIVED ON THE OTHER SIDE BUT THEY KEPT TO THEIR OWN, AND IT WAS PEACEFUL DOWN HERE BY THE WATER. THE DUCKS USED TO SPEND SUMMERS HERE, DUNKING THEIR BILLS UPSTREAM TO CATCH GUPPIES UNDER THE SHADE OF THE OAKS.

There’s not a tree for kilometers in either direction now, but I believe him.

~

Grans choose how their bodies look. Or, more often, their families or caretakers or lack of money choose for them. In Gran Flower’s time, they couldn’t efficiently compress neural structures to digital memory, so a Gran would only be able to remember new things for a few hours or so. This meant their minds were basically static: they could hold a conversation, but eventually they’d start to forget how the conversation had begun, and who you were, and hey why were you talking to them anyway?

Gran Flower hadn’t been able to afford the procedure; it was a benefit for military service. He’d been in The War for a long time: central Asia, then eastern Asia; then all over Europe; then putting down dissidents in unquiet cities throughout the U.S. But it was all The War. He got a leg and an arm blown off, so while he was becoming a Gran—doing the breathing exercises, reading the books, feeling his body and brain ossify—he designed his floral body plan. And once he was metal and his internal organs were useless, the family took him to a metalworker who forged his torso and remaining limbs down into a stem and welded the leaves on.

We went to Chicago once, Gran and I, to visit my mom’s side of the family. They had owned a few properties there in the city, and had been pretty well-off from landlording, enough that my great-great-great grandmother had been able to become a Gran. Gran Sticks, they called her. She had been really into video games. Of course now we don’t have “games” as such, just massive virtual worlds that you have to remind yourself every few minutes aren’t real. But in her time, you sat in front of the computer with a controller or a brain shunt. So that’s what Gran Sticks does. She plays games on a computer so antiquated the family can barely find parts for it.

That side of the family’s down to just one house now. They rent half of it to make a little cash and live huddled in a few rooms downstairs. You can hear Gran Sticks cackling at all hours in the singsong tones of her cutting-edge voice synthesizer as she blasts away virtual Communists, Fascists, extraterrestrials, insects, or disgruntled workers. The family wipe her memory once a week and delete her games’ saves, too, so they don’t have to buy her new ones.

~

WHAT ARE WE PLANTING THIS YEAR? Gran asks.

I’ve explained to my version of Gran the dust bowl, that we can’t plant much anymore, how it’s mostly a solar and sand farm. “We’ll have okra, and some wild cherries, black-eyed peas, nopales.”

THE CROWS WILL BE WANTING TO GET AT THE CHERRIES, I EXPECT, says Gran. SET ME UP THERE FOR THE WEEK; I’LL SEE IF I CAN’T SCARE ‘EM OFF.

Even after two hundred years of dust bowling, and climate change, and droughts, Gran still knows how to work the land. And I think he enjoys playing scarecrow.

I pull his stem up out of the ground and strap him across my back, into a kind of bandolier I’ve made for this purpose, and start walking.

~

That’s how I got Gran to Chicago on our trip—I carried his long, light body. I hitched a ride in the bed of a pickup truck from the farm to the train station with Gran balanced on my crossed legs. On the train, I leaned him against the window, and his metal nose tapped the glass as we bumped over rail ties.

Walking the streets after our visit with Gran Sticks, I kept Gran Flower in the bandolier, slung diagonally across my back. The sidewalks were full of people and Grans of all shapes. Somebody had placed their Gran in a baby stroller, a smooth little eggplant of a Gran with an artfully etched face. A pair of Grans across the street terrorized the sidewalk in wheeled go-cart bodies, their heads mounted like hood ornaments. An old man held hands with a humanoid Gran and rested his head on the round chrome shoulder. The pair trundled along aristocratically, careless of the impatient crowds.

We didn’t head back to the train station immediately but checked out the natural history museum, where they had an exhibit about human evolution. I walked Gran down the line of taxidermy and animatronics, from rhesuses to orangutans to gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Finally us, “us” being humans who haven’t become Grans.

At the end was an art piece consisting of two busts: a furious-looking chimpanzee and a surprised, wilted-looking old lady. The chimpanzee wore glasses with an archaic, silver chain around the frames, and he stared the old lady down. The old lady wore a plastic tiara.

In front of the art stood a placard outlining an evolutionary theory. It talked about how, sometimes, evolution works by lopping segments off an organism’s life span or adding new ones. How maybe humans were just chimps that never grew up all the way. “Neotenous apes,” the theory was called. It noted that most other mammals stop being so plastic and tolerant and apt to learn after a certain age. They get set in their ways, like an old dog you can’t teach new tricks to.

I peeked over my shoulder at Gran, his stem crossing my back like a greatsword, his petals nearly poking me in the eye. Sweat soaked my still-flesh ape back where the stem pressed into my skin. Gran was a bit languid in Chicago, the weather being so cloudy and he being so solar-powered. But I thought maybe this metamorphosis into a sleepy, near-deathless Gran was like humans’ next stage of life, the one we neotenous apes were missing. Like old dogs who can’t learn new tricks but somehow know when their human has a seizure, or that an earthquake’s coming, or not to trust the guest you’ve invited home. We won’t all reach that stage. Unless I get rich like Gran Sticks, or go to The War and manage not to die like Gran Flower, I’ll live a few short decades as an unfinished mammal, sweating and stinking and never setting in my ways.

~

I arrange Gran in the bandolier and take him to the cherry orchard. He’s facing backward and telling me bits of family history as we pass.

THAT’S WHERE WE SET UP THE STILL; OH, THE PARTIES WE’D HAVE AND THE MOONSHINE FLOWING TILL SUNUP, Gran says, AND AUNTIE STERN’S FIDDLE COMMANDED OUR FEET TILL THE DEVIL BANGED A BROOM ON HELL’S CEILING.

I am trying not to think about average memory formation rates. How many megabytes per minute are filling that drive, the one that holds my Gran. How many more times I’ll be able to talk to him like this. When the drive fills, that’s it, and I don’t have anywhere to back him up to. He’ll start babbling and swearing as virtual neurons half-overwrite each other. And I guess I’ll have to delete this bit of him, the memory of Chicago and the museum, and introduce myself again: “Hi Gran. You don’t know me; I’m your great-great-great- …”

We reach the orchard and I plant him. I wipe away a tear. SWEATING SO MUCH? DON’T TELL ME THAT LITTLE WALK WORE YOU OUT, BOY. HA. HA. HA. WHEN WILL I SEE YOU NEXT?

“Soon, Gran,” I say, as I remove the solid state drive.

OH NO OH OH OH NO, he says.

I know what you’re thinking. What could this story possibly be about. Let me catch you up.

First of all, you’re wondering whether I shot Angela’s kid or Angela. The answer is: I shot neither. I shot a jihadist who spotted me. The next half hour was a blur of sniping, shooting, and explosions. Here’s how it ended: me bursting into Angela’s room and disarming her. I don’t remember many details about what happened to get me there, but I remember quite clearly what happened when I entered her bedroom. She tried to shoot me with her AK, it missed, and I wrenched it out of her hands. She tried to attack me with her fists, and I held her by her arms.

“Angela, it’s me,” I said, pausing her furious assault, but sparking no recognition in her blue eyes. I removed my helmet like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. “It’s your neighbor, from high school. I’m here to rescue you.”

In fact I had been sent there to kill her, but the plan changed. You’ll be happy to know that I made her my wife, and adopted her kids (we weren’t able to find her jihadist husband, I heard he joined up with ISIS later, after Angela became my girl). Now they’re at Choate, and me and Angela have a couple kids of our own.

Big changes, huh!

This story isn’t about Iraq, though—not the parts from the first story, or the parts from when I went back to do more sniping in Mosul in 2017. It’s not about my happy marriage to Angela either, though that’s somewhat relevant. No, this story is about what happened when, after a long and illustrious career, having just retired, through a strange series of coincidences and serendipitous happenings I found myself in Ukraine, fighting against Russia’s wicked and immoral invasion.

In Ukraine, where I encountered the greatest test of my life—one that nearly ended me, and from which I emerged triumphant only by the barest of margins.

***

How to set the stage for Ukraine better than to explain that my heroic rescue of Angela from the clutches of evil jihadists wrought in me a profound and lasting change? A change that, given what you already know of my sniping aptitude, probably won’t be all that surprising… that’s right: after marrying Angela, it was no longer necessary for me to jack it before killing some bad guy or another.

Throughout the various places I was deployed with the Navy SEALs and then later Delta, Special Activities Detachment (SAD) and a Task Force that occasionally pulled me up for off the books black ops missions, I did not fap once during a mission. People in those units already knew me as the “American Fapper” owing both to the fame of my story (with which you’re likely familiar) and my unimpeachable combat record. But as is so often the case with fame and the things that bring people notoriety I had already moved on… I was no longer “fapping,” nor did Angela’s prodigious sexual appetite leave me much energy for anything beyond recuperation. I would look forward to two- or three-month deployments as only these were able to give me the time and space to adequately restock the vital energy I needed to do the level of sex Angela required to a standard that I felt was acceptable.

It got to the point where I could barely even remember the person who’d needed to rub one out before achieving the quiet clarity required to make a 900m headshot kill without flinching. Who was he? What odd neuroses consumed him? It was like thinking about a fictional character or trying to recollect the optimism and enthusiasm of a Christmas morning during childhood.

Countless missions later, I’d been promoted and aged out of combat operations. Angela didn’t mind and neither did I. Closing in on retirement with two bad knees and a broken down back, the desk job I had once regarded with revulsion and fear came to represent a goal. Nothing pleased me more than to think about quietly retiring to my hometown to teach history or maybe join the police force. As I remembered, and observed during trips back, the sleepy town was ideal for older people to wind down their final days.

The pent up and volcanic energies of my youth, satiated and slacked by the accomplishments of my adulthood, no longer compelled in me a reckless gallop for the unknown. I was admired within my company of peers, and that group was (who could disagree?) objectively a company of heroes.

This is all to say, nothing artificial pushed me to Ukraine; it was not an escape or a restlessness. The circumstances of my life were pleasant, comfortable, and satisfying. I was perfectly content.

Then Putin invaded.

***

In 2014 I’d done a training hitch in what Ukrainians call “polygon,” the name for a training area, somewhere in its north. It was an off the books rotation, I’d taught a strange crew of old and young men how to do sniper activities. I’d done training missions before all over the Middle East but could honestly say I’d never had a group ingest my lessons so quickly or completely. In fact, one of the older soldiers, a 55-year-old man named Yura who’d been in Afghanistan with the Red Army, taught me a couple tricks about concealment that stood me in good stead. That hadn’t happened in a long time; I considered him a master sniper and a peer, though his rank was that of a regular sergeant. Their promotion system was a little wacky.

My time in Ukraine gave me a sense that this was a serious people, and I never completely forgot about them, especially as they fought against the Russians over the next years. Occasionally I’d get a note from one of them, inquiring about my health or sending an update after a particularly fierce battle. My training of them seemed to have a profound impact on their development and confidence and I tried to offer them support and conversation as I could.

One of the updates, in 2019, came from Yura’s wife; Yura, it seemed, had been seriously wounded in an artillery strike in a town called Avdiivka. She related the details of his injury — the loss of his left (non-shooting) arm — asking for small monetary assistance and I thought, not for the first time and not for the last time, how different a war like his was. Getting injured or killed by a battery of Russian 300m rocket artillery pieces was never a conceivable end for me. Shot by the Taliban or AQ or ISIS, maybe, but a bomb or rockets? Forget it.

The Ukrainians were in the kind of war I’d only ever imagined or watched on TV. Even the battles for Mosul paled in comparison. I thought about this, and wondered at their ability to keep fighting against the Russians. We wired him $1000 which his family said was a godsend. Several months after his injury and with the help of a prosthetic, Yura was back in uniform and carrying his trusty Dragonuv rifle.

I thought about that, too.

***

There had been a foul energy building in the world. A bad moon. Even so, when Russia invaded, I was surprised. I didn’t think things like that could happen anymore.

Angela’s parents, who admired me (especially her father), were nonetheless owing to their German roots somewhat skeptical of Ukraine, and I would even go so far as to say passively pro-Russian. At least in the sense that they’d totally written off Ukraine once Russian tanks crossed the border.

This prejudice against Ukraine and for Russia was deep-seated with them. Angela’s grandfathers had both fought in WWII and I think after Germany’s defeat were inclined to view the Russians and Soviets both as horrible and paradoxically also at the same time superior to Germans — the Russians had proved this on the battlefield. To resist or defeat the Russians was seen somehow as impossible, or not worth the cost.

They swore (Angela’s father, and her mother supported him in this) that Russia would have the whole of Ukraine in two weeks. I told them as respectfully as I could that the Ukrainians would fight, knowing the people I trained, and fight they did; bravely, honorably, and against all odds, successfully. The invasion was parried in the north and south, then pushed back. In the east, however, it turned into a brutal shoving match. Mariupol and Melitopel were lost. The war itself darkened.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first weeks of the war the Ruhrs went from seeing things their way, to seeing them my way. I shared photos that Ukrainian friends sent. Then I shared photos that friends of mine, folks who’d retired or gotten out years ago, started taking. They’d gone over to join the International Legion or volunteer. very quickly, some of them stopped coming back, either committed to the fight or dead somewhere.

Those photos and the stories you probably all saw in the media had a dramatic impact on me. Simple and humble men, good people, standing up to what everyone knew was certain death and winning, making death itself uncertain. Defeating the bullet, the red horde, standing up to it chest to chest and stopping it cold.

It got so I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and then thinking about going over to do something, to help. I cleared it with Angela, who wasn’t thrilled, but who basically understood, and I reached out to Yura, who was serving in the Azov Battalion. He got back the same day. “Come on over,” he said on Facebook.

***

I probably should say a few words about Azov. You read about them in the news and in Russian propaganda where everyone in Azov is supposed to be a Nazi. I can’t say how things were in the past; the symbol they use looks like SS lightning bolts, and everyone there (Yura included) just about admitted that the unit was founded as a neo-Nazi paramilitary (funded, somewhat confusingly, by Kolomioski, a Jewish oligarch) in 2014. But times change. By the time I got to Azov, in March of 2022, it was a top-tier volunteer unit in the national guard, composed of experienced veterans and motivated volunteers. Maybe something analogous to the US Army Rangers. They took their tasks seriously and had obviously trained and prepared for the fight that was unfolding around them in Mariupol. Nobody was “far right” in the sense that Russia or pro-Russians in the west attributed to them. That was all old-guard Azov; people whose influence in the unit was to tell stories about 2014 (and those stories were quickly eclipsed by the actions of 2022 and 2023).

Why didn’t I go into the international legion? This is an excellent question. Mostly, I had no sense of what it was as an organization. If the Ukrainians had found a man to lead it, that might have been one thing. Certainly there were individuals — Westerners — who were suitable for the job, and had reputations that might have imprinted discipline and unity on the organization. But these individuals were never recruited — nor, as I understand it, even asked — who’s to say whether a Petraeus or McChrystal would have even said “yes” to such an uncertain proposition? In any case, the organization was shrouded in opacity and mystery. As a SEAL, I instinctively mistrusted such an organization…

How did I get to Azov? By helicopter. Things weren’t as difficult as they’d get in April, but it was still pretty tight. I flew to Bucharest in Romania, crossed the border, took a car to Odesa, and from there, hopped a series of cars to a point that was still contested across the Dnipro, where two MI-8s were loaded with ammo and personnel. Mine had a Soviet-era camouflage paint job, and flew low, below treetop for much of the journey, until at night we reached the city and our drop-off point.

These flights were extremely risky, though I happened to be lucky; neither of the helicopters on my flight were shot down or even received much harassing fire. In the very early days, Russian soldiers hadn’t learned to shoot at everything, and owing to their local air superiority, they assumed our helicopters (the same model as their own) were Russian, though that changed later. The pilots were, like so many Ukrainians, veterans of many conflicts and much combat. The pilot on my helicopter was, like Yura, a veteran of Afghanistan, and had also been employed as a contractor in Iraq, in 2007. Small world, I thought.

Disembarking from the helicopter, my knees and back groaning after the ride, I helped unload the ammo and equipment quickly, then loaded five casualties aboard— everything was done with great urgency for reasons that would soon become apparent — and two English-speaking soldiers hustled me into a basement as the helicopters took off. The entire operation from landing to liftoff took less than five minutes.

Five minutes after that, artillery came crashing down around us, plastering the courtyard and the surrounding buildings with 152mm shells. It was a storm the likes of which I had never before endured, and it lasted for almost 15 minutes straight. They must have put an entire battery to the task of destroying the helicopters; sadly for them, the Mi-8s were long gone.

This was it, I thought as the dust settled. Real war; the kind I’d always imagined. Not gun battles, the likes of which I and my special operations comrades had touched during the invasion of Iraq, and encountered sporadically since. No—this was authentically and unarguably war, Mars walking up and down streets in BTRs and tanks, swinging his red sword and laughing joyously as it struck business, apartment, car, soldier, and child alike. It was chaos.

For a moment, during the artillery barrage, I had even experienced something I never expected to encounter — concern. Had I made a mistake, coming here? Would I ever leave alive?

Using my American optimism and iron Will, I easily shook off that morbid thought. These were Russians, not supermen. They had advantages in personnel and equipment, but who knew better the price and blind spots of pride better than a Navy SEAL… those vulnerable areas were things I could exploit as easily as shaving errant hairs from my face in the mirror.

The soldiers brought me to Yura that night. I was equipped with a sniper rifle taken from a dead Chechen, one of Khadyrov’s henchmen (Azov had ambushed him in broad daylight as he walked down the street with a squad of his soldiers), and given the four magazines of ammo they had for it, totaling 120 rounds. “Make each bullet count and look out for Chechen snipers,” Yura said, shaking my hand with his good hand.

“I will,” I said, though this was unnecessary.

Yura made a jerking off motion, then winked. “American jerker,” he said. “The best.”

“Number one,” I said. The nickname didn’t bother me, and I didn’t bother to correct him — it was Fapper, not jerker, or masturbator, both of which I had heard. Getting hung up on that particular always felt like a waste of time, for one thing, and for another, appearing to care about anything usually produced the opposite result from which one hoped, in the military.

I chatted with Yura and his boss, and got a basic sense for the AO. We hammered out a plan for where I could operate, and how to get in touch with Azov if I got cut off (as I planned and hoped to do — one does one’s best sniping behind enemy lines). They gave me a manageably light ruck with a couple days of food and water that I would replenish during my forays through the city, warned me again about the threat of Chechen snipers, I grabbed a few hours of sleep, and set out into the early morning before sunup.

***

Mariupol — what to say about the city. People told me after I returned home that it was a formerly Greek, and this was true up to a point. The city was built on the site of an Ancient Greek colony, but the modern city was a much more recent phenomenon — and attempts to “Hellenize” its identity, similar to attempts to retroactively Hellenize other parts of Ukraine in Crimea and on the Black Sea were inventions by Catherine the Great and other Russian leaders hoping to connect their nation’s history more firmly to posterity.

What I saw in Mariupol was a shattered city; nothing of Greece, or anything beyond pro-Ukrainian spirit among the residents, a desire for peace, and a lot of Russian targets dancing through rubble.

Yura had explained to me how the Russians would attack, and I figured out pretty quickly a solid plan for taking as many of them as I could. First, I’d set up a position adjacent to where I knew there would be a firefight, but offset by 150-200m, preferably with a nice bit of stand-off from streets directly adjacent to the fight. When Russian soldiers popped up, I’d track one, and as soon as the shooting started I’d shoot, my fire masked by a machinegun or tank, then retreat from my wall or apartment or window or rooftop. I’d say my hit rate was around 100%; I can’t say for sure about the wounded / kill rate, body armor or helmets might have cheated my bullets, but as I understood from media coverage afterwards the Russians provided very little field medicine to their soldiers during that stage of the invasion, and even a relatively minor wound could result in a kill. In this fashion I was able to hit about 10 soldiers a day without taking any fire.

For about a week I was able to keep this up, old and battered as my poor body was, and in my head I started to think that I was probably informally closing in on Chris Kyle’s mark. As we were working, though, we were also falling back — always retreating — the noose slowly closing around our neck. It dawned on me that, American and rather notorious in certain circles as I was, doubly so as a sniper, my odds of surviving captivity were pretty slim — and the means by which they’d dispatch me were almost certain to be unpleasant.

Block by block, house by house we fought, and at some point during that second week, the Russians seemed to figure out that I was there. Maybe a prisoner talked, maybe I had worked enough squads that folks sort of figured out the routine. I suppose it was inevitable. Still, not knowing bothered me; I wasn’t sure what I’d done wrong, so I could correct it in the future.

By then I’d shot (again, I want to be careful to caveat that I never stuck around long enough to see the result) nearly 100 Russian soldiers, and going by the killed/wounded ratio my guess is that at least 50 of those had been kills. But I really can’t say for sure.

Some of the kills I’d seen — the Chechen fighters Kaderov sent didn’t always like to wear helmets for some reason, and I headshotted about a dozen of them — those, I know I killed. There was something familiar and comfortable about those kills; I suppose the targets reminded me of Taliban or ISIS, with their beards, and swaggering overconfidence. I didn’t headshot many of the regular Russian soldiers. Most were wearing helmets, and even a lousy steel WWII era helmet can deflect a bullet at the right angle. Russian soldiers I tried to killshot to the gut, I suspect with some effectiveness.

I noticed that they had noticed me, or were aware of my presence, when near the end of the second week, squads began scanning windows and rooftops before charging into an area. It could be I suppose that they had encountered snipers in other, different locations — that it had nothing to do with me, personally. But there they were, looking — seeking. And where soldiers look and seek, where they take precautions, one can be sure, there are other snipers lurking — Chechen or Russian.

***

My numbers fell — I had to change my standard operating procedure. I needed the break, anyway, my body had unlocked new ways of experiencing fatigue and pain. Now I wasn’t plinking soldiers or officers — I was in counter-sniper mode. By any reasonable measure my work in this department was exceptional; as soon as I started looking, I found the new or unseasoned or experienced but not battle-tested snipers in their usual spots, and was able to take them out using precisely the same trick that I’d used to shoot soldiers. The snipers I knew that I killed, as everyone was headshotted while they looked for me, or someone like me. One. Two. Six, I tallied them all.

It took me about a week to kill 10 snipers, and by then, I felt a kind of confidence that’s difficult to describe. I knew — the way one knows that a table is a table or a tree is a tree — that I was the best sniper in the city; something like a master of the place.  Nobody else in the city could do what I was doing. Furthermore, nobody could, now; the opportunity had come and gone, the low hanging fruit was almost all gathered, picked up from the grass with the minimum necessary effort.

The Russians moved in my area only with great caution, perhaps with something bordering on terror. Many people believe that the word terror is synonymous with horror, but this is not the case… horror is a type of extreme fear, whereas terror is spiritual or religious, the state one enters when confronted by the divine. People would peer and creep where before they had run. Snipers were rarely seen at all; more often, what would happen now was tanks or APCs would spray the windows of upper floors whether fire was coming from them or not. Artillery fire and rocket artillery fire was applied liberally on similar logic. The Russians and Chechens had encountered mortality — death, in the form of my steady hand — and they did what they could to destroy instead of fighting the war incompetently, as they had before. Rather than evolve as an army, they devolved — they were little better than heavily armed gangsters with artillery.

Even under these conditions I was still able to work. I tripled my precautions and began hunting, firing opportunistically and with as little rhyme or reason as I could muster, like a serial killer throwing detectives off his scent. In this way I was also able to replenish my ammunition somewhat, which was down to critical levels. One day I took the uniform from a Russian soldier and infiltrated far into the city, taking a terrible risk (I spoke no Russian or Ukrainian) until I found a headquarters, then crawled in the window of a former bank, walked and lifted myself up a set of stairs, my worn muscles afire with exertion, and (finally) set up in a room across from an emergency exit that fed out onto the roof of an adjacent building. I waited until someone important appeared, canoed him, then made good my escape as the HQ erupted in gunfire and confusion.

This audacious act (one of many) was, though I did not realize it at the time, to create the conditions by which I would encounter my greatest test of all. Jogging along my escape route, all I could think of was the surprised expression on the large, bulldog-faced man — colonel? General? ‑ who had until he met my bullet been under the mistaken impression that he commanded a unit, a group of men, a space in which his authority was absolute.

***

This very lesson was nearly imparted on me scarcely a day later. Our defensive perimeter was shrinking by the day, collapsing onto the massive Azovstal factory-fortress where Azov regiment and many Ukrainian marines would make a last stand. Almost as soon as Russia invaded again, Azov had begun preparing the factory as a redoubt of last hope, stockpiling food, water, ammunition, and everything necessary to withstand a siege.

Between the factory and the city was a fetid swamp, which as the ground rose to the north, turned into a ghetto or shantytown. Then, more substantial buildings emerged, and one could say that the city itself began, atop the ridge line. We held that, and about a half a kilometer further.

Ill omens had arrived as the sun rose; a murder of crows had flown overhead as I moved toward my sector, the zipper on my jacket got stuck halfway and I realized I’d need to discard it, and “Yankee sniper go home” had been spray painted overnight on the wall of a prominent building. With a start, I realized that it was the 15th; the Ides of March. When I reached the line of contact to set up a position, struggling to move a table into place quietly, one of the two magazines I had remaining slipped out of its pouch and onto the floor. My pouches were customized for my rifle’s magazines, and the narrower Soviet-era magazines used by the Russians and Chechens were an imperfect fit, which drove me crazy.

In this case the accident was serendipitous… the magazine slipped out of the pouch, and as I bent to retrieve it the concrete wall where my head had been an instant earlier sprouted a deep divot.

I’d been fired upon; a sniper — a talented sniper — had me zeroed in. I grabbed my rifle from the table and knocked the table over for concealment, pocketed the magazine, and made my retreat; another two bullets punched through table behind me as I left the room, scrambling on my hands and knees and barely avoiding an ass full of splinters or bullets.

I didn’t stop in the hall; I made for the staircase and engaged my evacuation route immediately. Just as I exited the building, it erupted — a tank had begun pummeling any room I could be in. I went through a couple buildings and paused, then moved to the first floor of an abandoned house to take stock and recuperate, gulping in air like a drowning man, ragged with adrenaline and vitality.

When I checked my gear, I saw that there was a bullet hole in the collar of my uniform’s jacket. That’s how close it had been. Sheer luck, and I’d made it out alive.

My first rational thought, examining the situation calmly, is that the sniper had been waiting for me. That was the only explanation. They’d set up to catch a sniper, and I was the sniper to catch. So they’d tried to kill me, personally.

It felt personal, anyway.

Three choices confronted me. One: chalk it up to coincidence and go back to work — work that still urgently needed to be done. Or two: go into emergency protocol, and hunt this specific sniper. Three involved telling Yura I was done, but I wasn’t ready for that. No, now something needed doing, and a head needed taking.

***

I’d been tracking snipers and taking them out for nearly a week, but this was different. A high-level sniper — elite, certainly. They’d laid a trap for me, and sheer chance had robbed them of the kill. I had to acknowledge that before anything else. By all rights I should have been dead. God had preserved me for some other purpose, though I had no idea what that purpose could be.

I made a quick survey of the area and calculated what would be necessary to spring my own trap. First I’d need this person to think that I was taking the first course of action. Leaving was leaving — staying was staying. I’d have to gamble that the sniper I was fighting — a Chechen? Had to be — would both feel cheated by fate, and suppose that I was the type of proud person who’d go out for revenge and/or ignore the incident as bad luck. Besides, we had to protect our territory. Just that day we’d lost an entire block to the Russian forces to our west.

This gave me a day, three streets or so, worth of houses to make my move. I’d have to get as high as I could without going onto a rooftop (where drones could spot me), but not so high that tanks would bring me under fire before I could find the sniper stalking me. I’d have to predict the rate of advance of the Russians, and also predict how the sniper would predict my own movements. There was a lot of guessing involved. I’ve never played chess, but this felt a lot like it. I felt like both a King. Or a Queen. Or both. You get the point.

Over the next several hours I scoured our territory looking for the perfect place to spring my plan. Nothing seemed adequate — where my room was good, there was no suitable place for an opposing sniper. Where my enemy had excellent fields of fire (like those he’d encountered in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria, I assumed, trying to get into his head) there was no good place for me to establish my counter-position.

Just as I was ready to give up, I found the position that made perfect sense. It was 1500, and I had plenty of time to prepare a fake position using a mannequin, watching over a likely sniper location *but not* the location an expert would take — this was the bait.

I clothed my doppelgänger with my uniform and rifle — everything needed to be the same — and concealed them. Yura had brought up another sniper rifle (sadly there were more rifles, now, than people to use them), an old M14, one with which I was familiar owing to time spent deploying to assist the Army earlier in my career. As the fighting around us raged I zeroed the rifle and made sure that its optics worked. Actually, it felt great in my hands — brought back memories of a younger me, one who had their entire future ahead of them. A me who never could have imagined that one day I’d end up with Angela.

Yura also handed me a set of thermals, which I’d need to spot the sniper’s infil, though not to shoot. I’d make sure the rifle was already in position, so when he showed up that night to take up his position, I’d be ready to pay him back the favor he’d done me.

Wrapping myself in a Mylar poncho, I found my place in a room behind a shot-out window overlooking what had been a rich man’s balcony. The overwatch was itself concealed by a large and well-manicured pine bush. It was an improbable location, which made it perfect — the sniper wouldn’t, in the darkness, even know that it was there, and if somehow he did notice it, the angle was off from his perspective. I chuckled to myself. Once again, I felt in sync with the world and the city. As it breathed, I did. As I exhaled, it did. Then I waited.

***

It happened at 0200. The city was quiet — sleeping, mostly, with sporadic gunfire erupting between soldiers and APCs, or artillery booming nearby or in the distance. I felt it before I saw it. The sniper entered the room; tentatively at first — moving delicately and with care — and I recoiled within my thermal-dampening suit reflexively as the sniper scanned my room, presumably with some cheap (but sufficient) Chinese knockoff. He hesitated — something compelled him to look more deeply at my position — and I thought, did I leave a chink of warmth uncovered? Had I walked into a trap of my own? Was this the end of “The American Fapper?”

But then, the sniper continued scanning, until they found my dummy position. I’d placed an electric heater under the mannequin and concealed it, so while visible, barely, it was not conspicuous. When the sniper started setting up to shoot my double, I knew I had them.

Once they were settled on a table, I got ready to end things — no point in extending it, I thought, I’d had plenty of luck on my side and didn’t feel like testing God twice. Just before I lay the thermals down to site in the M14, though, a movement by the sniper startled me. They were undoing their pants and — was it possible? Were they about to do my move on me?

A wave of anger rolled over me, but before I had time to process the uncharacteristic emotion, I was struck by another, even greater shock; the sniper, as I could see from the means by which they were satisfying their vile urge, was a woman.

I’d heard of female snipers and knew the Ukrainian military fielded them (I saw none during my time in Mariupol but believe several were stationed there at that time), but for some reason it had never occurred to me that my own foe would be one — that the second greatest sniper in the city was, in fact, a woman. One who had by rights killed me, but for a trick of fate.

The thermal could tell me that much, but I did not know anything else about the target; whether she was old or young, pretty, or plain. One thing was certain: she was observing a version of me that I had placed to entrap her, and had, and was vigorously pleasing herself.

Here I encountered my third shock of the night. I went to leave the thermals, shrouding myself in darkness, to take the shot with the M14, and… I couldn’t. Suddenly, I was back in Iraq, paralyzed by an inability to take and therefore make the necessary shot. My target was writhing in ecstasy before me, helpless, and there was nothing I could do.

Should I retreat, I thought? No — I probably wouldn’t get another chance like this, certainly not after she realized the ruse. This was it. Do or die. I was trapped, paralyzed. There was nothing to be done.

Unless…

Then I realized. Of course. It had to be this way. I could explain to Angela later. Or maybe not. Maybe this would never come between us. Maybe, it was this one moment, this last target that the universe was offering me, some kind of redemption for my past, here in a fallen city.

Without touching the rifle, I did my thing, quickly and efficiently. I finished, then slowly felt for the M14’s cold wooden buttstock, laying my hands on its worn grains, bringing my cheek to the correct place, lining everything up. A flash in the sniper’s window briefly illuminated her in the scope, allowing me to move the crosshairs ever so slightly over her (as I could see it) short-cropped blond hair and yes, attractive face, and placed my last shot as a sniper square between her gray eyes.

The story of how I managed to escape Mariupol before its fall, and Yura and Azov’s brave stand alongside Ukrainian marines in the Azovstal fortress are stories known to all, and don’t bear repeating. For myself, I’ll always look back on those days as the pinnacle of my sniping career. Sometimes you get lucky. I did. Twice!

She came from the south, wearing a bright red dress and carrying a light blue backpack, weaving through the well-worn paths on the banks of the Euphrates that had been carved out by foot traffic and various other forces of erosion for millennia. The same ground carried her ancestors and bequeathed them their fertile crescent, upon which they birthed a cradle of civilization and set forth the foundations of human history and society, with all its triumph and suffering. For all that had changed in the sweeping conquest of ecological momentum and Westphalian geopolitics, the beauty of the Euphrates remained. Its flora flourished, hosting palm trees and wildflowers, poplar trees and different species of reed, camel thorn and prosopis, that all combined to a bright, magnificent green to the armed predator drone circling 25,000 feet above. She may have heard the slight hum of its engine as it watched over her with its hellfire missiles and multi-spectral targeting system that held several high-quality cameras to broadcast the feed of her image to SPC Yates’ screen, but it’s unlikely. Drones circled over her head everyday while she went to school and went on with her life, oblivious to SPC Yates’ existence as a set of eyes that was capable of seeing her every move and even ending her entire existence.

His real name was Brian. If it were not for the college loan forgiveness program that brought him into the Louisiana Army National Guard, that’s what he would have preferred to have been called. But it did, and the Army named him SPC Yates. He sat at his desk in the base defense operations center (BDOC) of Al Asad Air Base and watched his screen. Around him, other SPCs carried out similar tasks, monitoring drone feeds and security cameras littered throughout their area of operations in Al Anbar province. Together, they looked for things that could kill them, rockets or drones riding in the bed of a Toyota highlander or being loaded into the back of a trailer. SPC Yates was good at his job. He tasked drone pilots, far away in their air-conditioned trailers on an air force base somewhere in Nevada, to survey certain areas and strike certain targets depending on the needs of the day and the orders he received from the battle captain that sat at the back of the room. He stared at suspicious trucks and dangerous looking people. More often than not, they were nothing. A group of insurgents loading rockets into a pickup would end up being a family moving a mattress. An individual fitting the description of a known terrorist would be an old man herding goats. Through these laborious tasks and the daily monotony of his screen, SPC Yates came to know the village of Al Baghdadi, ten kilometers to their north, its winding roads and paths, and all its nooks and crannies. He immersed himself in the foliage of the river that cut between it, colorful and bright, and yearned to be around the green of his childhood, the marshes and swamps around New Orleans where his father taught him how to fish, instead of the bleak and barren landscape of sand and dust that waited for him outside the door of the BDOC. He came to recognize the people, the shopkeepers and merchants, schoolchildren and insurgents. But he had never seen anyone quite like this, the little girl in a red dress.

She walked with an ease and absolute lack of concern or awareness about the dangerous world around her. In the strikingly vivid and detailed quality of the drone’s cameras, SPC Yates could see the pattern of her dress, floral and white, as it blew with the breeze that swayed the green all around her. She skipped up and down, and bobbed her head from left to right, holding the straps of her backpack with both hands as it bounced gingerly with each leap. She had dark brown hair that she let flow past her shoulders, free of a bun or head scarf, which was uncommon. Brian thought he could see the sun reflecting off of it when she tilted her head in just the right direction. Every few steps, she would stop, and pick a rock up off the ground and skip it across the water to her right. He found her fascinating. She was unlike anything SPC Yates had seen in his eight long months sitting at his screen in Iraq. The simplicity with which she existed astounded him. He wondered what was in her backpack, books about the history of Mesopotamia, or perhaps mathematics, maybe even literature filled with pros of faraway lands. The joy he felt in her orbit was almost unrecognizable after being away from his true joy along the Mississippi for so long.

Along that magnificent and mighty body of water that cut through his small town in Louisiana all the way to Canada, SPC Yates was home. He was Brian. He remembered skipping rocks with his sister as a boy. When he was older, they would play hooky and sneak down to the banks where they watched the barges go by, as they drank cheap beer and cheaper cigarettes, speaking of days when they would leave their Louisiana outpost along the river. He thought of his sister, Laura. She wanted to be a makeup artist and work on movie sets in Los Angeles. After an unplanned pregnancy and an unreliable boyfriend, she ended up staying on those same banks and raising Brian’s nephew, Ben. Before he left for the deployment, Brian promised he would send him a picture of a camel, but he never did. He didn’t even call for his birthday last month. It’s not that he didn’t want to. He just didn’t have the energy to fake the smile and laugh he knew he would have to muster to reassure them he was okay. But, watching the little girl in the red dress prance along the Euphrates, Brian decided he would finally call Laura back and tell little Ben about the camels he saw in Kuwait to wish him a late happy birthday.

Then it happened. The alarm blared. He was no longer Brian.

“Incoming, incoming, incoming.”

SPC Yates’ heart stopped and jumped into his throat. Before he could think, he was on the ground where his heart raced again, beating like a drum into his chest that threatened to break through his sternum and spill onto the floor. He scrambled to reach for his kit, the Kevlar vest and helmet that lay next to his seat, reaching his left arm out to cling for the facade of protection. The explosions were distant at first. But as Brian pulled his vest across the plywood floor, they grew closer. The ground shook. The walls shuddered and the ceiling sagged with each thud that grew louder and louder. He couldn’t make his hands work. He flopped and flailed on the floor, trying to get on his vest and helmet, grappling with clasps and fighting with clips in his desperate attempt to live even though he knew it wouldn’t save him. Those around him did the same, completely disregarding their assigned duties and tasks as all semblance of order collapsed and everyone embarked on a journey of personal survival, no matter how in vain. The room filled with dust when a rocket impacted a T-wall outside, tearing a hole into their plywood fortress and filling it with smoke, soot, sawdust, and sand. Brian couldn’t hear. He inhaled the toxic mixture into his lungs and nostrils. He gave up on the vest and hugged the ground as tightly as he could. He made himself as flat as possible. He wished that he could dig through the earth and come out the other side. The ground around him continued to shake. The grains of sand in front of his face bounced with each additional thud and he felt that he was one of them, a victim of circumstance and location that left him completely at the whim of the explosions that rocked across Al Asad Air Base. He could hear again. People were screaming. Help! Get the fuck down.

They were anonymous screams that Brian could not identify. He was too paralyzed to try. His surroundings and all of his bodily senses collapsed onto him into a single mass of noise. The explosions. The screaming of orders. Get that gun up! The pleas for help. Holy Shit. Jesus Christ. The inaudible cries from friends. The beeps of the monitors and systems. The alarm. All of it, even the unheard, the smells and vibrations, combined into a terrible cacophony of noise that paralyzed Brian completely. Frozen and resigned to his own death, Brian thought of nothing. He did not think of God, or his sister Laura, or his nephew Ben, or even his friends who could be dying around him. Fear, fear, fear, was all his body could muster. The fear gave him no purpose or drive, nothing to combat or defend against. The fear simply was. It ate alive at his insides and propelled his heart harder and harder against his chest. Nothing in the biological array of his body, no organ, no frontal cortex, nothing, could sustain a thought or sensation other than absolutely paralyzing fear. And then it was over.

The explosions stopped first. And as the mass of noise evaporated, it created a vacuum that was filled with utter silence. The mosh pit of yells, and screams, and barking of orders was replaced by a tense quietude. It was as if anyone spoke or made a sound of any kind, it would all begin again. The dust in the air slowly settled back onto the ground as the earth no longer shook with fury, but instead lay there like the inanimate rock that it was before. The smoke began to clear from the room. And in that silence, they were brought back. The fear and panic dissipated, replaced by a slow, burning anxiety that sat like a tripwire. It could be activated at any time when chance would again return the chaos. The people around Brian became aware of their surroundings. He himself was no longer paralyzed. Instead, he felt hungover. He was stuck in a deep sludge, like a dream where your feet never move fast enough, and you can’t outrun the monster chasing you no matter how much you try to make your legs move. People checked themselves for wounds, feeling and looking for blood. They did so for their friends around them. Brian patted slowly around his torso and down his legs, praying that the adrenaline wasn’t so strong that he hadn’t noticed a chunk of flesh missing. He wasn’t hit. Aside from a couple superficial wounds, lacerations to faces and extremities from shards of plywood and other shrapnel, no one was seriously wounded. They were alive. Finally, someone spoke. It was the battle captain.

“We up?” he spurted out through his cracking voice. “Everybody good?”

The NCOs responded in the affirmative. After the brief shock of realizing they were alive, their duties and responsibilities sprang back into their collective mind. The base needed to be defended. There could be more attacks. Accountability of personnel needed to be collected and the wounded tended to. The chaos returned. This time, it was in the form of orders being barked and confusion running rampant as people sought answers for important questions. Is that gun up?! Where did it come from, I need a grid?! Where’s the mass cal?! Do we have a medevac en route to that location?! How long until the QRF is up?! Do we have air support on station yet?!

Brian sprang back up to his station and started directing all of his drones to various locations to find where the rockets had been shot from. He looked along the MSR that weapons were regularly transported on. He scanned abandoned lots in Al Baghdadi. He searched known firing areas and recognizable landmarks where previous attacks had been carried out. He tasked his drones to every location he could think of, changing their course intermittently as orders and the person giving them changed by the second. He searched frantically for the mysterious ghost that could begin shooting again at any second. Every truck was carrying rockets. Every house was hiding insurgents preparing the next wave. Every individual was a spotter who guided the rockets to their target.

“Point of Origin located, prepare to copy grid!”

Finally, someone found it. As Brian directed his drones to the location, he heard people shouting. So focused on his own task, the words blurted out around him were blurred out. Truck. Mosque. Burning. Civilians.

When Brian finally got a predator over the location, he put the pieces together. He made out the scene through a cloud of smoke. The vibrant and gorgeous green that he had fallen into earlier was replaced by utter devastation and sheer turmoil. A truck blazed with a powerful surge of bright red and orange. Twenty meters away, a trailer smoldered, disconnected from the burning cab, and emitting a large and continuous plume of black smoke through its twisted steel. Secondary, smaller explosions set off throughout the frame. To the right of his screen, Brian saw a building split in half. A wall was caved in by the blast. Cinder, concrete, and wooden shards were strewn across the ground. Through the smoke, he saw a crescent moon on the remaining part of the roof and realized it was a mosque. It was a Friday, the holiest day of the week, and people were certainly inside. Zooming in with one of the cameras, he saw a mass of red. Body parts, legs, arms, and the unrecognizable alike, combined to make a ghastly mural of blood, flesh, and bone. Brian quickly averted his eyes and began dry heaving off to his right.

“SPC Yates, get your eyes back on your fucking sector!” shouted his sergeant.

Covering his mouth with his fist, Brian continued to gag as he resumed his scan of the area. The drone pilot was in control of the flight path and the cameras, so Brian simply watched the carnage like a helpless onlooker of an interstate car wreck. The pilot continued circling above the site as it completed its battle damage assessment, until veering off to the Southeast. The camera slowly followed a blood trail that led out of the larger, unidentifiable mass of red. The size of the trail grew. It began with small dots that grew bigger as the drone flew Southeast. Then it turned to a steady stream of dark red that grew thicker and thicker the farther it went. The drone slowly followed the trail down the banks of the river until it reached a thick area of brush where the trail stopped. As the camera zoomed out and the pilot reoriented himself, Brian noticed a red figure at the top right of his screen right along the water. The camera zoomed in and Brian saw her.

The little girl’s red dress was still red, but there was a dark stain covering her right abdomen and the lower portion of her back. Her blue backpack was gone. She lay face down with her right foot caught in the root of a tall poplar tree. Her left knee was bent as if she was climbing up a steep cliff. Her left arm was curled under her torso and out view, while the right was sprawled out to her side as if she was reaching for something. Her hand was open and palm facing up towards the camera of the drone. In it, she carried something, but he couldn’t make out what it was. Her face rested in the mud, inches before the river, and her hair was sprawled out into the water in front of her, revealing the back of her neck. The current slowly drifted her dark brown locks back and forth. As she slowly crept out of the frame of the camera, Brian watched the water ripple off the top of her head and the bottom of her dress blow delicately in the wind. Then she was gone.

Brian finished the rest of his shift. He sat there in silence, staring at his screen until his replacement arrived a few hours later. He grabbed his rifle and his kit and walked out of the room, noticing the full scope of damage for the first time. He saw splinters all over the dust and sand covered floor. He saw the hole in the wall at the other end of the BDOC where the rocket’s blast had blown through. When he walked out, he saw T-walls blasted and Hesco barriers torn apart by the more immediate blasts. Further off, he saw smoke from small fires that continued to blaze throughout the base. He walked back to his chu and saw he had a text from Lauren. He ignored it. He laid down in his bed and rubbed a picture of him and Ben playing fetch with his parents’ dog in a creek bed that ran off the Mississippi. He took a bottle of NyQuil he had stored under his bed and drank the half bottle that was left. He opened the bottle of sleeping meds that the base doctor had prescribed and swallowed a handful. He fell asleep.

That is how Brian finished the last month of his deployment. When he wasn’t on shift, watching his sector, he’d go back to his room and take enough sleeping meds to fall asleep. He would direct drones over to where the little girl in the red dress had died every once in a while. There was nothing there. Just an empty patch of mud and a tall poplar tree. Sometimes Brian would stare at the empty space and dream of sneaking off the base and leaving a flower at the site, or maybe a book that she would have liked to have in her backpack. The rest of the deployment was uneventful. There were no more attacks. Their replacements eventually arrived, and Brian did his best to teach the new SPC that sat in his chair everything that he could. But the kid didn’t really listen. His name was Hanson and he talked about wanting to get into a fight. He wanted to get attacked. He wanted to transmit an order to a drone to conduct a strike. He wanted to see the blast and carnage. He wanted to feel the power of holding death in his hand. He talked about the Iraqis he saw on his drone feed like they were actually just little specs in a video game. Brian ignored him.

Just before he finally went home, Brian went down to the bomb yard where they kept blown up vehicles and trash. They had brought the truck that shot the rockets at them there the day after the attack. The insurgents hid all thirty of the rockets behind bags of flour to get through a checkpoint, causing them to ignite and cook off the rockets inside halfway through their launching. That’s why the truck blew up, the mosque was destroyed, and the little girl in the red dress slowly bled out alone on the banks of the Euphrates. It’s also probably why Brian survived. He stood there at the gate of the bomb yard and stared at the smoked out twisted steel that remained of the truck that tried to kill him and his friends. He wondered if it was a piece of shrapnel from the twisted mess that had pierced the little girl’s red dress and dug into her liver or another vital organ. He thought of flour and how a simple cooking ingredient had decided who would live and who would die. He considered how and why no combatants from either side were killed, only innocents. He thought of the fourteen innocent men, women, and children who had been torn to shreds in that mosque. He wondered how many more had been wounded. He thought about how he could find no mention of it in any US news sources. He thought of his friends and fellow soldiers he didn’t even know who were wounded. He remembered the little girl in the red dress.

Two weeks later, Brian was home. He moved in with Lauren because, after he gave up his lease for the deployment, he had nowhere else to go. He was remote and cut off. She would try to get him to come out for social occasions or family get-togethers, but she couldn’t even get him to come outside of his room for dinner. She left a plate outside his door every night. Eventually, the extra sleeping meds he stashed from Iraq were gone, and he had to come out. No longer able to sleep, he set himself out to fix Lauren’s crumbling porch. He used up about half of the money saved from the deployment on lumber, tools, and finishing, and got to work. It was August in Louisiana, and it was hot. Unlike Iraq, it was humid. He demoed and worked to put in a cinder block foundation so that it could ride out the hurricanes and flooding that had brought it to such a state of disrepair in the first place. Lauren would bring him out water and plead with him to get out of the heat and come inside to the air conditioning. Anything to get him to talk. But he just kept working.

Finally, in October, the work was done, and the deck was finished. Brian had done an outstanding job. The foundation was solid. From it, six solid posts of cedar rose up. A finished staircase led up to a deck of pressure treated tropical hardwood. Ben helped him build some Adirondacks out of fresh pine. Together, they sanded and treated the wood, so the chairs looked rustic and modern at the same time. Once the foundation was finished, Lauren planted a garden around it of beautiful hibiscus and phlox. With all the work done, Lauren was worried what Brian would do next. He hadn’t returned to school like he planned. He was going to study to be a marine biologist and move to Miami. After getting back, when he would answer her questions, he’d just say “eh, I’ll figure something out.” But she wasn’t so sure. She often thought she questioned him too much and should leave him alone, but she was genuinely worried and felt a responsibility as his big sister. She decided to take a family trip to Brian’s favorite spot on the river to celebrate the completion of the porch and Ben’s good grades from the fall term. She was surprised when Brian agreed.

When they got there, it was exactly as Brian remembered it, a small hideout in the River State Wildlife Refuge where the noisy barges couldn’t be heard, and the drunk New Orleans’ tourists wouldn’t be found. Sitting in the blue, still water, oak and cypress trees let their leaves sway back and forth in the wind while the wildflowers bloomed on the shore. Lauren set down a picnic blanket and took a couple of beers out of the cooler for her and Brian. There was a juice box for Ben. She prepared both of their favorites: fried shrimp po’boys. She looked over at Brian, who stood on the shore of the river delta, and thought she saw a slight smile. Ben ran alongside them chasing a dragon fly.

Brian looked out at the still water and smelt the air through his nostrils as he inhaled deeply. He looked down at his feet and saw the water slush up between his toes as it mixed with the mud and turned into a milky brown. He looked up at the sky and wondered what he and his family would look like to him from a camera on a predator at 25,000 feet. He knew the answer was specs among bright green. All around him was the beauty of the wildlife that he had yearned for in that desert where nothing lived. He looked back at Ben, who was now running around Lauren and playing with her hair and thought about how carefree his nephew was. He considered whether that was for the better or worse. Brian crouched down, placed his fingers in the water, and started making little circles in it. He bent down onto his knees and sunk his fingers in the mud. He dipped his hair, now long and curly, into the water and felt the ripples wash up against it. He felt himself in the river, in the mud, in all of it.

As he closed his eyes, he saw himself amidst the beauty of the Euphrates, surrounded by the same luscious green. He walked the well-worn paths he had watched on his monitor for countless hours during those 9 months. He followed a pair of footprints along the water that did not have a discernible pattern, zigzagging back and forth, stopping and starting, and leaving rocks unsettled from their natural place. He kept walking. He heard laughter. As he turned the corner around a tall poplar tree, he saw a little girl in a red dress dancing in a clearing of mud between the foliage. She laughed as she rocked her head from side to side and twirled in circles, amused by how her dress flowed up with her movement. Her innocent smile and sparkling eyes were oblivious to Brian’s presence until he took another step and snapped a branch. Surprised but not startled, she turned towards him and smiled, saying something in Arabic that Brian could not understand. She giggled again and reached her hand out towards Brian, gesturing him towards her. Unthinkingly, he followed, taking her hand and following her down to the water. They walked out into the river, as the water passed her ankles, then her knees, and eventually rose to her hips. She let go of Brian’s hand and leaned back, floating atop the water, and let the current take her downstream. Brian began to follow.

“Hey, you okay?” Lauren whispered into his ear. She was crouched beside him with her hand on his shoulder.

Brian pulled his head out of the water and sat up on his knees, turning towards her, tears bubbling in his eyes.

There was a long silence before he said, “there was this little girl.”

Lauren got down on her knees with him and nodded her head earnestly.

“Over there?” She asked.

Brian nodded, “she was just so little, not much bigger than Ben. And she was beautiful, Lauren.” A slight grin broke through his tears.

“You know, just this beautiful little girl skipping along the river. And she had on this red dress.”

He paused before exhaling sharply and looking out at all the green across the water. He gazed at the oaks and the cedars and the cyprus. He looked at the marsh land’s vegetation sticking out from the river’s surface. He looked up at the sky and thought he heard a slight humming sound.

“Would you look at all that green,” he said to Lauren.

“Yeah, it’s really something isn’t it?” She responded.

Brian took off his shirt and slowly waded out into the still water until it reached waist height. Lauren looked on from the shore. With his jeans still on, he leaned back and let himself float freely, completely at the whim of the light tide. He stared up at the sky around him and saw nothing but clear, blue air. He imagined himself riding the river all the way down to the Gulf, getting caught in the loop current and finding his way to the jet stream that would carry him across the Atlantic. From there, he’d latch onto the warm water flow around the horn of Africa and go up into the Indian Ocean, where he would have to find his own way to the waters of Oman and all the way up through the Persian Gulf. At the mouth of the Euphrates, he would travel north along its banks until he found that inconspicuous patch of mud on the shore just south of Al Baghdadi.

Sadie was a do-gooder, someone who was aware of the deeply rooted systematic injustices that perpetuated oppression throughout the world, and who wanted to do something meaningful about it. She was a liberal cliché and she knew it. Sadie found it interesting how drugs caused the woman who lived behind the grocery store to give an outward physical representation to the inner processes of her mind. Which is to say, while most of us carted around incorrectly remembered personal histories, useless grievances, and unhelpful fantasies, this woman had found a way to bring her mental garbage into the physical realm; she filled shopping carts full of non-redeemable waste, trash which was result of overproduction which was caused by capitalism. Sadie could admit that she did not want the transient woman in her own apartment, and she didn’t believe handing money to the woman would be helpful, but almost involuntarily, Sadie cultivated empathy for the woman. Sadie’s mental garden of empathy was bathed daily in love, and attention, but it was admittedly hard for Sadie to share the fruits of this garden with anyone. Sadie strived to pass out her excess empathy at her workplace, as though her empathetic thoughts were lemons that grew in unneeded quantities in her front yard and could be left up for grabs in a plastic bag by the cash register. Sadie worked for Saint-Loup, a high-end clothing boutique.

A stocky woman, wearing expensive boots and a fashionable top entered the store. The woman maintained a powerful-yet-clumsy gait, as though she were important but unsure of herself.

“Villeparisis dress, size forty,” the woman said.

It took Sadie a moment to realize the woman was requesting a garment. Sadie fetched the dress from the back and brought it to the sale’s floor.  The shade of the dress channeled a rosé targeted at hip young women. The dress had a sash in front which, if asked, Sadie would describe as sexy-Michelle-Obama chic. Had the designer not added a few almost imperceptible qualities, the piece would resemble something a punk girl could wear to prom to both sincerely celebrate and ironically comment on the occasion. The Villeparisis’ touch ensured the garment was worthy of a stylish and well-mannered rich woman. The outfit was cliché, original, traditional, and new, all at once. Though, in Sadie’s opinion, the garb was a few years out of style. The woman tried it on and nodded.  Some women, who were spending upwards of four thousand dollars on a dress, wanted Sadie to spend the better part of an hour engaging in flattery. Sadie sensed that this woman wanted as little human emotion as feasible to seep into the interaction. The woman paid with a card, and Sadie learned her name was Rachel. When Sadie handed Rachel the bag containing the dress, Rachel grabbed it without a word and walked out.

Sadie, who was thirty years old, lived with her mother and younger brother in Napa. For a time, she had paid sixteen hundred dollars a month to rent a detached in-law unit, which consisted of four hundred square feet of livable space.  That space had been cramped with her mattress and boxes containing psychology text books, much loved novels of her childhood and books she had not yet had the chance to read.  Most nights, her seventy-year-old female landlord invited her into the main house to watch TV. Sadie accepted. After a year and half of watching murder shows on the couch of her landlord, she figured that if she was going to spend her nights watching TV with an older lady, she might as well save sixteen hundred dollars a month and live with her mom.

At dinner that night, a pizza her brother brought home from his job at King’s Pizza, Sadie recounted her interaction with Rachel. Though their exchange with Rachel was wordles, Sadie believed she had allowed her acceptance of Rachel to shine through her eyes.

“It’s possible she just didn’t want to talk,” her brother, said. “Like, maybe she was holding in a fart.”

When Sadie was twenty-one, she had graduated from the University of Irvine with a Bachelors in Psychology. She knew that to utilize her degree and training, she would need either a masters or a doctorate. Instead of immediately applying to graduate school, Sadie increased her hours at Target. She had no illusions about the American health care system. She knew that an individual’s insurance might cover a year of therapy sessions, but by the time a provider had an opening, six months of that year had passed, and then the individual might be seen less than once a month. Sadie daydreamed about opening her own clinic where financially strapped people could walk in and receive free therapeutic attention, but she also knew that earning a doctorate would put her in six figures in debt. As a woman in her early twenties, she had believed she was using everything she had learned from the university when she helped Target customers, some of whom could clearly benefit from mental health services.  She gave them as much validation and encouragement as she could. For Sadie, the logical next step was to work for a high-end clothing boutique that paid its employees more, and had fewer customers. That way, Sadie could shower the relatively small number of shoppers with meaningful attention. Sadie had recently begun working for Saint-Loup. She had embarked on her dream job. She was beginning to understand that her brother and mother viewed her life choices differently.

Two weeks later, Rachel returned to Saint-Loup. She said was wanted a conservative cocktail dress, something that would be appropriate for her son’s birthday party. Rachel had offered a detail about her personal life and Sadie would not shirk from the opportunity to support her.

“I couldn’t imagine being a mother. The cooking, cleaning, waking the kids up, being a chauffeur, it’s like you work twelve jobs,” Sadie said.

“My son is twenty-four,” Rachel said.

Sadie nodded empathetically.

Sadie wanted to be absolutely present. With her facial expression, she yearned to say that even if Rachel was addicted to pain pills, even if she interacted with her child as little as possible, even if she spent every day burning through her husband’s money, and had never had a job of her own, Sadie would give the woman something that she lacked-something that she needed. She smiled as though she would give her soul to Rachel, as though, if she had her druthers, she would run away with Rachel to a concert, a night club, or a cabin in the woods, where the two friends would share with each other, from the infinite patience dwelling inside of them, except, it wouldn’t really be patience, because patience wasn’t needed with friends who cared so deeply about each other.

Rachel found a dress, tried it on, and decided not to buy it.

Sadie’s mom made turkey chili for dinner that night. Her brother Evan ate quickly, putting away more than his two female family members combined.

“At work today, this old boomer was screaming, you make people eat out of a box at this restaurant? Cause I accidentally entered his order in as to-go. I put his pizza on a pan and he was fine. Anyway, it’s too bad you weren’t there Sadie. You could’ve given him your phone number, and told him that when he woke up in the middle of the night, weeks later, upset that his pizza was in a box, he could’ve called you, and received comfort and support,” Evan said.

His smile indicated that he had thought up this joke hours ago and had waited all day to deliver it at the world.

“And it’s too bad you’re not a stand-up comedian, because humanity would benefit immensely from your witty observations on life,” Sadie said.

After dinner, Sadie went to her bedroom and browsed Tinder. The first profile she saw belonged to Tony, a man she knew in high school. Sadie acknowledged the significant drawbacks involved with online dating in her hometown. She swiped left on Tony and blocked his profile. Almost immediately, her phone rang. She cursed herself for maintaining the same phone number since she was fourteen years old.

“Yes?” Sadie said.

“It’s nice to hear your voice,” Tony said.

Sadie said nothing.

“I’m wondering if you told people… about our thing… because, I’m an important person in tech now. … I want to know you’re not disparaging my reputation,” Tony said.

“Oh,” Sadie said.

“If you told anyone, you should tell them you forgive me.”

“I don’t forgive you,” Sadie said.

She hung up her phone and blocked the number. Once, when Sadie was in high school, she had found Tony attractive. He invited her to his house when his parents were out of town. She drank the whiskey and cokes he handed her. She had been able to keep her clothes on, but he had forced himself on top of her, grabbed parts of her body, penetrated her with his fingers, and brought himself to completion. At the time, she told no adults of the incident.

At the store the next morning, Sadie noticed a short man in a starched, tucked in, checkered dress shirt, and grey slacks. Sadie asked a number of times if he needed help, but he always demurred. He was content to watch the store while writing things on his phone. The other employee on the sale’s floor ignored the man completely.

A couple in their sixties walked in. The woman wore heels, faux leather pants, and a flowy grey cashmere sweater over a white top.  The man, who was shorter than his wife, dressed in worn blue jeans and an old Kirkland flannel, as though proudly flaunting his wife’s fashionable inclinations. The woman admired a long, Verdurin scarf. Sadie stood by eagerly. The man locked eyes with her.

“This would make a great addition to my rape kit,” the man said.

“He’s so wild,” the woman said, and patted his arm.

“I’m looking at woman’s clothes, I just want my life back,” the man said.

“We admire your sacrifice,” Sadie said.

After the couple left, Rachel entered the store. There were customers who called out to Sadie because of their obvious need, a need that perhaps only Sadie could perceive. Sadie wanted a valid connection with Rachel’s core.  Rachel exited the fitting room wearing a twelve-hundred-dollar sweater.

“It looks fine,” Sadie said.

Rachel reentered the dressing room.  As Rachel changed, Sadie thought about a time when she was a child, when she viewed her friends as a natural resource that enabled her to live, no less necessary to her existence than clean drinking water.  Sadie saw her current life as relatively empty. She had excess energy to devote to Rachel, but had absconded from her duty.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said you looked fine. You looked absolutely incredible in the sweater. It was stunning,” Sadie said.

“It’s okay,” Rachel said.

“No, you’re an incredible woman, and the sweater brought out your incredible nature. I should’ve told you that you’re incredible. I’m just off today,” Sadie said.

Rachel said nothing.

Sadie took a deep breath.

“I’m off today because this boy sexually assaulted me in high school and last night he called me on the phone,” Sadie said.

“Oh, I hope the rest of your day goes better,” Rachel said.

Rachel looked like there was more she wanted to say, but whether her unspoken words contained support or an admonishment, Sadie could not tell. She left the store. Sadie had not noticed, but the man in the starched shirt was typing furiously on his phone during this interaction.

The next customer Sadie helped was a blond hipster woman who wore tight blue jeans, black chunk heels, and a grey V-neck shirt. The woman was beautiful and she had expertly applied her makeup, but compared to the other customers, her clothes were heavily used. The woman was younger than Sadie. She tried on a number of La Petite Bande tops. Finally, she approached Sadie, holding a La Petite Bande garment.

“Do you ever have sales, or offer discounts?” the hipster woman asked.

Sadie held the blouse in her hand. She looked at the woman and understood how badly she wanted it.

“Would a seventy-dollar discount work?” Sadie asked.

“Yeah,” the woman said.

“Some of our clothes get stained with lipstick, when people try them on. The lipstick comes out easy, with just a little bit of vinegar. If this top had a stain on it, I would have to give you the discount,” Sadie said.

The woman brought the top to her mouth and kissed it.

“That works,” Sadie said.

She rung up the blouse, subtracting seventy dollars from the total.

On Tuesday, Sadie had the day off. She went for a run and was back in her apartment, covered in sweat, getting ready to take a shower, when her phone rang.

“Sadie, this is Celine Diaz.”

Celine was the owner of Saint-Loup. Sadie had met her only once before, during her job interview. A woman named Ashely worked as the store manager, handling all of the day-to-day operations. Sadie had heard rumors that Celine was a multi-millionaire, if not a billionaire, who had purchased Saint-Loup during a period of brief-but-intense interest in clothing retail. According to the rumors, Celine had recently become interested in learning how to fly a helicopter, opening sustainable sushi restaurants, and making wine. Saint-Loupe was receiving less attention.

“I want to thank you for your hard work and attention to detail when arranging clothes,” Celine said.

“You’re welcome,” Sadie.

“Do you know who Marcus is?” Celine asked.

“No,” Sadie said.

“That does explain some things. Marcus oversees a lot of my business ventures. He acts as my eyes-on-the-ground when I’m otherwise occupied. He informed me that you had told a customer about a sexual assault you experienced.  He mentioned the customer was Rachel Feldman. She’s been a loyal patron for years. He took the liberty of calling her and she agrees that we should let you go. Marcus also said, that you advised a customer to damage a top in order to receive a discount,” Celine said.

“Yes, I did those things,” Sadie said.

“We’re going to discontinue your employment, but the problem is, we don’t have anyone to replace you at this moment. If you’re willing to stay on for a few weeks, I’ll give you a good reference. You can quit right now, but then you wouldn’t be able to apply for unemployment,” Celine said.

“I can stay,” Sadie said.

Sadie wasn’t in a position to turn down any income.

Sadie put on a holey pair of jeans and a Lou Reed t-shirt. For a moment, she fantasied about wearing the outfit to her remaining shifts. She imagined the conversations the outfit would spark. Sadie loved an ice cream sundae that was available at a popular fast-food restaurant, but she found it difficult to justify the treats’ plastic cup, which would outlive her. Being fired was a good justification. She bought the sundae and began walking around downtown.

She passed a number of restaurants that had only a few, if any guests, which made sense, as it was a dead time between late lunch and early dinner. The outside patio of Baddiel’s was completely packed. A sign indicated that the space was reserved for a private event. Sadie sat on stone bench in front of the patio and surveyed the scene. Many of the men gathered were guys in their twenties, who wore dress shirts, and gave arrogant looks to the other people present, as though every man thought they were the next Mark Zuckerberg. Within five years, the most interesting aspect of the other people present would be the stories they would tell about the future tech celebrity, the man they were now sitting across from. Sadie guessed correctly that she was looking at tech workers. A few of the men were in their fifties, but they had hip haircuts and were in good shape.  A youthful and industrious energy permeated the group.  A few women were present but Sadie was able to get a good look at only one lady, a redhead with colorful Ed Hardy style tattoos. She wore lipstick and kept a cocky smile, as though she was more than used to holding her own in a roomful of men.  Despite her loneliness, Sadie was not in the habit of openly gawking at groups of strangers. She assumed some men noticed her, in her terrible jeans and questionable t-shirt, but something about the scene had piqued her curiosity. She wouldn’t stop staring until she determined what it was. Most of the men sat at one of five giant tables, conversations were conducted across several tables at once.  At the far end of the patio, away from the loud men, a pair of women sat at a two-seater. One of the women appeared to be in her late fifties or early sixties, the other in her thirties. The ladies looked at one another with a laser focus, but it didn’t seem as though they were particularly enjoying each other’s company. Sadie assumed they were afraid to look at the guys. The older woman was Rachel.

Two men wearing dress shirts exited the patio and walked in front of Sadie.

“Excuse me. Sorry, I have an awkward question. Like a really awkward question. Why are those two women over their sitting by themselves?” Sadie asked.

“That’s our boss, Rachel, and her secretary,” one of the men said.

“And why are they sitting alone?” Sadie asked.

The men exchanged looks. Their facial expressions indicated had had a few drinks each.

“Rachel is a little girl who took on a man’s job. We make predictions about the specific demand for medical equipment over the next sixteen quarters. Our work impacts a billion-dollar industry, but Rachel doesn’t even know what an algorithm is. She can’t spell it,” the man said.

“I got my first job when was I seventeen working for Jack in the Box.  My boss there was better than Rachel,” the second man said.

One of the men on the patio caught the eye of the guys talking to Sadie. With a happy drunk grin, he pointed to Rachel. He had inferred who they were talking about.

“Our boss has Downs syndrome. That’s why she’s alone,” the man on the patio said.

He spoke loudly. It was likely Rachel heard him and possible Rachel saw Sadie, though she tried to hide behind the men she was talking to. Not a single person spoke in Rachel’s defense.

During Sadie’s last shift, Rachel walked in. She surveyed the clothing, and refused to look at Sadie. Ashely, the only other employee present, was helping a customer. After Ashely finished, she ran to the back to complete her managerial tasks. Rachel finally approached Sadie.

“Sachar skirt, red, size forty,” Rachel said.

She went to the back to fetch the skirt.

He remembered that day. God, did he remember it! His worst day in a year of worst days, a day he’d spent the last six months trying to bury. A day he’d regret for a lifetime, even though he himself had done nothing to regret.

Roger White sat on the unscreened porch of sister’s house in North Carolina, watching the morning fog creep up the hillside like a ghost without feet. He held a can of beer and a cigarette.

At first, he told himself that his guilt over the dead girl was karma for everything else he’d done, for the ones he’d killed. And maybe it was.

In Vietnam, they’d all been soldiers, good soldiers, and except for a little luck, his own bones might be there now, rotting in some jungle stream or skewered in a pit of punji stakes on an overgrown trail.

Why feel guilty about one girl? Wasn’t her death a blip? A one-off sin. Who punishes that, an aberration in the chaos of war? Can there even be an aberration in chaos anyway? Isn’t chaos, by definition, well, chaos?

But emotions were indefinite things, not measured like spoons of sugar.

Who was answerable for her death? Al Pfeiffer? For sure. The war, the Goddamn American Army? Probably. But only Al was a real person, and he had no conscience. So, the onus fell to Roger, as the stand-in, as the designated conscience for her death. Somebody, surely, owed her memory some measure of contrition.

“A little early to start drinking, isn’t it?” said Judy. His sister was a small, dark-haired woman, and she peered at him through a screen door off to the right.

“Oh, you mean this?” said Roger, smirking. He raised the beer can and winked. “I found it on the porch when I got up. Didn’t want it going to waste.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said.

Above, a slight, chilled breeze rattled though the reddish leaves of the Black Oak that stretched across the eastern edge of the roof. Roger wore shorts and a shirt he wore before going into the Army. His feet were bare. There was an ugly red scar on his right thigh.

After going a year without getting shot, he’d been wounded three days before the end of his tour. Shot by a newbie who’d been in country two days, a kid from Maine who’d fired into the latrine, thinking he’d heard a VC sapper sneaking around in the dark.

“I can’t believe you’re wearing shorts. Aren’t you cold?” said Judy.

“I’ve had enough hot weather to last me,” he said.

“I thought you wanted to go back to Florida.”

“Eventually,” he said. “But it takes money, you know.”

“Well, you could get a job…”

“I’ve been looking,” he snapped.

She frowned. “I know it’s hard to adjust. But drinking’s not going to help.”

“Not going to help what?”

“You’ll feel better if you get out and see people. Find something to keep you busy. Have you given up on finding a job?”

“I said I’m looking.”

Through the screen, Judy’s face looked waxy, like a marble bust in a frame of dark hair. “I know I don’t understand everything you’ve been through. But you can’t just give up.”

“Everything I’ve been through? What does that mean?”

“You know. Vietnam.”

“You sound more like Mom every day,” he said, wedging the beer between his thighs. He felt the frosty nip of the can, but he didn’t flinch. Perhaps his fear of weakness died harder than his fear of pain.

Was that something he’d learned in Vietnam, he could have wondered. But didn’t.

“You never listened to her either,” she said.

Ever since he’d moved in with Judy, he’d tried to stay out of sight. The less anyone knew about him, the better. After all, hadn’t Al warned him to be on the lookout for trouble?

Still, he wondered if he’d already listened to Al too much. But loyalty in a combat team was rock hard.

Five months ago, Roger had been lying on a stretcher, his leg wrapped in bloody bandages, waiting for a medevac chopper. Despite his pain, the whomp-whomp of the approaching chopper was sweeter than the Christmas morning he’d gotten his first bike.

“They’re getting close,” Al whispered, bending over him.

Roger grinned. “I hear them.”

“Not the chopper. That whore in Saigon. They’re asking about her.”

Roger froze. “What?”

“Next month, I’m outta here. Three tours are it for me. I’m done. I’m going to find me a cabin somewhere in Idaho.”

“Who’s asking about her?” Roger said, not expecting an answer.

“You better watch out. Remember, they can’t prove a Goddamn thing, no matter what they say.”

Roger waited motionless as two men arrived to lift his stretcher.

Al whispered something unintelligible, but Roger didn’t look at him. Above, white clouds covered the eastern line of trees. The morning sun was already bright and hot. Too hot. Sweat beaded on his naked skin, under his fatigues.

A medic approached, grinning. He tapped Roger’s good foot.

“Doc,” said Roger.

“You’re going to be fine, Rog. You’ll be eating stateside chow in a week.”

“Hey,” said a stretcher bearer. “Stateside? Wanna trade?”

Roger felt himself hoisted.

“Remember,” said Al. “When they come…”

Roger’s trip back to the States was long and tiring. On the way, he tried to imagine himself shedding Vietnam like a snake molting unwanted skin. It didn’t work.

He wanted to go back to Florida. But that would come later, in a few years. Right now, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Instead, he moved in with Judy. Later, he’d move to Charlotte or Atlanta. You can get lost in big cities. And lost is what he wanted.

“I’m going to town, if you want to come,” said Judy. “But I’m not going to take you if you’re drunk.”

“I can use a haircut,” he said, running his hand over his head.

“Get ready then,” said Judy, reminding him of the way their mother used to sound when she was irritated.

Roger finished the beer and set the empty can on the porch. Rising, he walked to the rail, showing a slight limp. Judy didn’t want him to smoke in the house, so he took a long drag on the cigarette and flicked it into the upper tendrils of fog.

He changed into a pair of old jeans, unwilling to explain the scar.

“You wearing those?” said Judy, standing beside her Ford Falcon.

“Wearing what?” he said, scrunching across the pebbled path.

“Those sneakers,” she said, pointing. “The soles are coming off.”

“Nothing wrong with them.”

She stared. “Is that how you looked on job interviews?”

He smirked. “You want me to interview the barber for a haircut?”

“Roger, they look awful.”

“They’re supposed to look awful. They were old when I went in the Army.”

“Why don’t you buy a new pair?”

“If I had money for shoes, I wouldn’t be running low on beer and cigarettes.”

She shook her head, climbed into the car, slammed the door.

On the way to town, they rode in silence, descending the narrow asphalt road that cut through the trees and waterless creek beds. Judy drove with slow precision, the way she’d done everything since she was a little girl.

Nothing like the way he did things. As kids, she’d always complained that he didn’t think things through. That he let his friends get him into trouble.

If she only knew.

After he went into the Army, Judy kept him updated on hometown news until she moved to North Carolina with her boyfriend. Regularly, she complained that he didn’t write.

She got a part-time job as a cashier at Greene’s Grocery and invited him to stay with her when he was discharged. By then her boyfriend was in Vietnam too, somewhere in the Delta, and she was having a hard time making ends meet.

At first, Roger thought he’d be able to hide, to jump start a new life. Instead, he felt isolated and alone. The world he grew up in no longer existed. Perhaps never had.

It wouldn’t be long, he realized, before Judy would need more money than he could give her. Yet he didn’t know what to do about it. He hadn’t found a job, even when he’d looked.

He’d been having a hard time adjusting to civilian life. After two years of hating the Army, of wishing himself home, he’d been strangely confused and angry when he got out, as if he’d landed on a distant planet, unable to cope with the new language and customs.

How could he explain that to Judy without sounding paranoid and petty? And crazy.

In Vietnam, he’d saved some money, because he didn’t have many places to spend it. Although he gave her something every week to help with expenses, he expected to be broke in a month. And then…? He didn’t know.

She couldn’t afford to support him.

“I’m going to get my hair done and pick up a few groceries,” said Judy, stopping the car in front of the barber shop. “You want anything?” She stared at him, as if hoping to ferret out his intentions.

“I could use some beer,” he said, glancing at her sideways.

“If you want beer, buy it yourself.”

“I’ve still got a few bucks left,” he said, fishing several bills from his pocket, handing them to her. “And get me some cigarettes too.”

At end of the street, the sun was breaking through a notch in the rippled, gray clouds, panning across the rooftop of an abandoned hardware store and the three dangling balls of a pawn shop. Fog was beginning to stir in the street, warming toward oblivion.

“Pick me up when you’re through,” he said. “I’ll be here somewhere.”

He lit a cigarette before he opened the door of the barber shop. The barber and several customers stopped talking and glanced up in unison. The barber nodded and said “Howdy”. The others stared at him.

By the time Roger stepped outside, sunlight had shredded the vestiges of fog. He lit his last cigarette and stood at the curb, breathing the warming air. He glanced up and down the street. An old Hudson cruised past, burning oil.

Moving slowly to keep the loose soles of his shoes from tripping him, he shuffled along the curb, inspecting the gutter for lost coins.

His leg was hurting, so he stopped at the pawn shop. In the window was a guitar, a set of wrenches splayed like a fan, an old eggbeater drill, somewhat rusted, and a stack of green army fatigue pants.

He entered. A bell tinkled above the door. The room smelled of oiled machinery. Along the back wall was a line of lawn mowers and large pieces of equipment Roger didn’t recognize. Farm gear of some kind, he guessed.

Behind the counter sat a man with a scruffy beard. His left sleeve hung empty. His right hand was large and meaty. He raised it in greeting. “Morning,” he said, smiling.

“Morning,” said Roger, glancing around.

Behind the man was a rack of shotguns and rifles. Under the glass counter were several rows of pistols and knives.

“Looking for anything in particular?” said the man.

Roger stopped at a bookcase, filled with old magazines. “Just looking,” he said, scanning the titles.

“Been back long?” asked the man.

Roger turned. “Back?”

“’Nam. You were there, right?”

“What?”

“You’re Judy White’s brother, aren’t you?”

“Yeah…”

The man laughed, waving his huge hand. “This is a small town. My cousin stocks shelves at Greene’s.” He reached across his body and flipped his empty sleeve. “You get any souvenirs? This is mine.”

“We’ve all got souvenirs,” said Roger, after hesitating.

The man nodded. “I guess that’s right.”

Then Roger grinned. “I got mine sitting on the shitter.”

The man’s laugh was spontaneous, deep and hearty. “You what?”

“Some idiot thought he heard something and fired through the wall. Hit me in the leg.”

Still laughing, the man said: “Well, I never heard that before.”

“I never told it before,” said Roger, moving to the counter so he could see under the glass.

“Next time, say you were surrounded by an NVA division.”

“No use. It’ll come out. Always does,” said Roger.

“Ain’t that the truth,” said the man, extending his hand. “My name’s Joe.”

Roger took the huge hand. In it, he was surprised at how small his own hand seemed. “Roger,” he said.

A door behind the counter scraped open and a Vietnamese woman appeared, carrying a Coke. She wore the dress of her country, an Ao Dai, with a red tunic and black, silk trousers. She had a narrow face, high cheekbones, and long black hair. Glancing at Roger, she looked away.

Roger blinked. Seeing someone from Vietnam was unexpected. But seeing her dressed like that gave him a start. For a moment he thought she had a white scar above her left eye.

But of course, she didn’t.

“This is Thuy,” said Joe, watching Roger carefully. “My wife.”

Roger nodded. She set the Coke on the counter.

“Cảm ơn bạn,” said Joe, smiling at her.

Her eyes lit up. “You well come,” she said slowly.

Roger shrugged and moved toward the door, trying not to limp. “Guess I need to be going,” he said. He didn’t know when Judy would return, but he was sure she wouldn’t find him here.

“Come again, if you need anything,” said Joe, raising his hand. “Or have something to trade or sell.”

Roger stopped and turned. Thuy was sitting on a stool, flipping through the pages of a movie magazine. Her small fingers moved with nimble grace.

“What do you buy?” asked Roger.

“Anything I can sell. If you have something, bring it in and let me look.”

That night Roger sorted through his belongings. The only thing he could find was the Montagnard knife he’d gotten in a trade for two packs of cigarettes and three cans of turkey loaf c-ration cans.

But looking at the knife brought back the image of the girl lying in that filthy Saigon alley, her throat slit and bloody, her head canted sideways, as if unzipped. Above her left eye a tiny, whitened scar. The scar he couldn’t forget.

Al had killed her. Tried to steal his wallet, he’d said. But Roger’s own silence, didn’t that make him complicit? Blemished with guilt?

At the time, Roger convinced himself that he couldn’t say anything. He denied his instincts, buried them deep. During his tour, he’d become cauterized to violence. Death was everywhere. Why shouldn’t it come to a bar girl in Saigon, too?

Still, she wasn’t a soldier. She was a young girl, her life ended before it took good root.

Later, he told himself that rules were different in a war zone, that even sins were different. He balked at judging others, particularly Al, who’d saved his life more than once.

Why did the girl’s memory send out so many ripples? Become so bothersome. Once they’d returned to their unit, Roger never discussed the murder. He covered for Al the way they always covered for each other. He was silent.

The next morning, Judy hollered him awake. Rising, he smelled bacon frying. She was ready for work.

“When are you getting home?” he asked. “I’ve got something to sell at the pawnshop. I should get a few bucks for it.”

“What is it?” she said, as she opened the front door.

“A Montagnard knife.”

“A what?” Outside, heavy rain pelted the porch. “Damn,” she said, distracted.

Later, after eating, Roger heard someone at the front door, knocking rapidly.

On the porch were two soldiers, one wearing dress greens, the other stiff-starched fatigues. The one wearing greens was a Captain with JAG insignia, the other an MP with boots spit-shined to a sparkle. He wore a .45 pistol strapped to his side.

“Goddamn,” was all Roger could think to say.

The rain had stopped, but their uniforms were still damp.

The captain was a small man with one green eye and one blue. He was a foot shorter than the MP. “Corporal White?” he said.

“I’m not in the Goddamn Army,” said Roger.

The captain’s eyes narrowed. “Are you Roger White, recently discharged?”

“What do you want?” asked Roger. He flashed back to Al’s words, before he was loaded into the medevac chopper. They can’t prove a Goddamn thing…

“Please answer my question,” said the captain.

“Yeah. So what?”

“Mind if we come in?” said the captain. The MP stood off to the side, looking large and solid. Beyond them, Roger could see the shadow of the emerging sun against the roof line.

“Yeah, I do mind.”

Pause. “I have some questions. You can make it easy and answer them, or…”

“Why don’t you just tell me what you want?” said Roger.

The MP shifted slightly, glancing along the porch, both ways.

“You served with Corporal Pfeiffer didn’t you?” said the Captain.

“Al? Yeah.”

“And you had passes to Saigon…”

“What’s wrong,” said Roger. “Didn’t we sign out?”

The captain leaned forward, squinted. The MP tensed. “Look, White. We can get the sheriff up here. Your choice.”

Roger felt the need for a cigarette. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack. He opened the screen door. “My sister doesn’t want me smoking inside,” he said, stepping out.

The captain moved to the right, the MP to the left. Roger went to the railing and turned to face them.

“Did you and Pfeiffer go to Saigon?” asked the captain.

“Is that illegal?”

“Did you…”

“Yeah, we went. You know that or you wouldn’t be here.”

The captain nodded. “Did you meet Phan Thi Binh?”

“Huh? Who the hell is that?”

The captain’s face tightened. “She was murdered while you and Corporal Pfeiffer were in Saigon.”

“You think it’s strange for somebody to be killed in Vietnam?”

The captain exchanged a quick look with the MP. “She was murdered. She wasn’t a soldier.”

“What was she then?”

“A civilian.”

Roger pushed himself away from the railing and glanced down the hill, where a breeze rushed through the trees like an invisible train. From somewhere came the odor of cooking food.

“You’ve come a long way to ask me about a… civilian.”

“I assume you’ve heard about Lieutenant Calley,” said the captain. “The Army is concerned about civilians in wartime. They aren’t combatants.”

Roger finished his cigarette while he tried to put his thoughts in order. “So why are you talking to me? Did you ask Al?”

The captain pursed his lips. “Corporal Pfeiffer is dead,” he said.

“Dead?”

The captain nodded.

“What happened?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. That’s not why I’m here.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To find out about Phan Thi Binh.”

“Well, I don’t know who that is,” said Roger, trying to keep his voice steady.

“Look,” said the captain. “I think you know something.”

“I don’t know a damn thing.”

“White, if we wanted to arrest you, we’d have done it already,” said the captain.

“Then what do you want?”

“Information.”

“Information? Well, here’s some information for you: go to Hell.”

For a moment they stared at each other, then the captain stepped back. “We’ll be at the Mountain Arms Motel tonight. Think about it.” He hesitated. “Otherwise, we’ll be back tomorrow. With the sheriff.”

Roger brushed past them and went inside, slamming the door. “Al? Dead?” he muttered, feeling light-headed. “Jesus H Christ.”

When Judy returned, Roger slipped the Montagnard knife into a paper bag.

“I need to borrow your car,” he said.

“Okay, but remember, supper’s at six. I’m fixing pork chops.”

On the ride into town, he drove through sunlight that flickered between the trees like a picket fence.

In the pawn shop, Thuy sat alone at the counter wearing a yellow, western style blouse.

Without thinking, he checked her left eye for the scar that wasn’t there. She smiled.

Joe entered through the rear door and raised his hand. “Good to see you,” he said.

“Ever see one of these?” asked Roger, pushing the bag across the counter.

“Sure,” said Joe, hoisting the knife. “What do you want for it?”

“What about trading for one of those pistols?”

Joe frowned. “Not much market for things like this around here. Nice, but… in Charlotte, maybe.” He edged the knife back toward Roger.

“It ought to be worth something,” said Roger.

“It is. Sure. But most of these pistols…”

“What about that one?” said Roger, pointing to a small derringer with a cracked handle held together by tape.

“That one?” Joe looked from the derringer to the knife, then back again.

“Does it fire?” said Roger.

“Sure. Already shot it. I picked it up in an estate sale. Couldn’t get that clock over there unless I took everything else.” He pointed at a grandfather clock that stood in the corner, tall and elegant, the wood recently polished.

“What about it?” said Roger.

Joe looked at the knife again. “For the derringer?”

Roger nodded.

Joe studied him. He reached under the counter. “Well, we’re vets. We’ve got to stick together, right?”

“Right.”

“Why do you want this one?”

“The derringer? Judy wants something small, to carry in her purse.”

“In her purse?”

Roger shrugged. “Women… you know. By the way, can you throw in a couple of bullets?”

“Sure.”

“There’s been a bear hanging around the house lately,” said Roger, laughing.

As he reached the door, Roger turned. “Say, you ever heard of Lieutenant Calley?”

“Isn’t he the one who massacred those civilians in Vietnam last year? Why?”

“Oh nothing. Somebody mentioned him, that’s all.”

“Well, come back when you get a chance. Thuy and I want to have you over for supper one night, you and Judy.”

It was almost sundown when Roger reached the lake. He’d driven there several times when he’d told Judy he was interviewing for jobs. He stopped the car and pushed back the seat. His leg hurt and he rubbed his thigh.

A cool cross-breeze wafted through the open car windows, carrying the menthol scent of pines needles and the tilting afternoon sunlight that trickled toward winter like inevitable grains in some universal hourglass. As a boy, he’d been calmed by pines like these, growing along the edge of the lake near his house in Florida.

He’d loved to lie on that bank, looking into the branches. Dreaming… of what he couldn’t recall.

Raising up, he peered outside, half expecting to see Judy crossing the field, carrying sandwiches they’d eat together in the autumn twilight, while she listened to his stories of adventure and the distance he’d someday run from home.

A distance he now wished away.

Al, he thought. You bastard. You fucking bastard…

But Roger didn’t know quite how to complete the thought. Had Al been killed on patrol? Was that how it happened? Perhaps, but Al was the savviest soldier in the platoon. Still, luck was always the high card. You didn’t spend a year in ‘Nam without coming to that truth. Or maybe the compound was shelled. That happened on a regular basis.

Another thought crossed his mind, but he put it away, almost in fear. Impossible, he thought. Things like that didn’t happen to Al Pfeiffer.

Not that it mattered anymore. Al’s death left Roger as the only witness to a murder he hadn’t witnessed. Was Roger being convicted by his own silence?

Truly, Al had been right. They were on his trail.

In the end, guilt was a tar baby, beyond the ken of law, of everything, and he didn’t know how to parse it into smaller pieces, ones he could manage.

In this case, a young girl was dead and he… what exactly did he do?

Nothing. But he also knew that nothing could be something. Together, he and Al were guilty. Together…

Looking back, he saw a patchwork of emotions, all pulled to the breaking point, each a failure.

He picked up the derringer and loaded a bullet. Getting out of the car, he went to the edge of the lake. A breeze blew a column of wavelets into the muddy shoreline, making a tiny, lapping sound.

Lifting the derringer, he took a deep breath. Sunlight struck the side of the small barrel, like a spark. His world narrowed to a pinpoint.

Then, on impulse, he heaved the derringer far into the lake where it splashed and disappeared into the dark water.

Damn, he thought. What have I done?

By the time he reached Judy’s house, a quarter moon was hanging over the trees, coloring the tight noose of clouds a faint gray.

“Roger?” she hollered.

“Sorry,” said Roger, coming inside. “I’m late.”

Judy came into the living room and stood arms akimbo.

“I said supper was at six,” she said, her voice strident with irritation. “I already ate, so yours…” She stopped and stared at the front door.

Behind Roger stood two soldiers, a captain in dress greens, and an MP wearing a holstered .45.

“Sorry,” said Roger again.

“What…?” she said.

“I have to leave for a day or two, so I brought back your car.” Saying this, he didn’t feel as bad as he thought he would, rehearsing the explanation all the way from town. Still, he felt queasy.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“A misunderstanding. It’s okay.”

“Who are…?”

“A girl was killed in Saigon while I was there. The man who killed her…” He hesitated. “He’s dead.”

Her eyes flicked to the soldiers and back to Roger. “Who’s dead? I don’t understand. Who are these men?”

“Ma’am, my name is Captain Tolbert. This is Sergeant Solis. Sorry to barge in like this.”

Judy stared as if they were foreclosing on the house, throwing her into the street.

“Your brother is helping with an investigation,” said the captain.

“An investigation?”

“He’s not under arrest,” said the captain.

“Why should he be under arrest?”

Roger turned toward the captain. “I told you everything I know.”

“I understand,” said the captain. “You’ll be back by Friday. We need to complete some paperwork.”

“Roger,” said Judy. “What’s this about?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing.”

“What did you do?” she asked.

“I fell in with somebody who… well, couldn’t control his temper.”

“Where are you going?” she asked.

Roger hesitated, looking at the captain. “Can’t we finish this here, tonight?”

When the captain spoke, his voice was barely audible. “The Army doesn’t want another front-page story, like Lieutenant Calley. Corporal Pfeiffer’s dead. We need your testimony, properly documented.”

“To cover your asses,” said Roger.

The captain stared at him, silent, stony.

“And if I do what you want?” said Roger.

“Then you’re done. You can get on with your life.”

“I’m done?” said Roger, snorting.

“Absolutely,” said the captain.

“What life is it you think I’m getting on with?”

The captain gave him a puzzled look.

“No, the Army will be done. This is only a job to you. I’ll never be done.”

Roger moved toward Judy and gave her a hug. “When I get back,” he said. “I’m going home.”

“Florida?” she asked, cocking her head. “That’s… wow… You’re ready?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I am.” He wondered which home he would find when he got there, the one he remembered, or someplace new, where he’d have to forge a fresh set of rules for himself,  just to survive.

Either way, he’d have to make room for the young girl he’d found in a Saigon alley.  That wouldn’t change.  He’d made that choice long ago.  She’d live with him forever.

Finally, though, he felt unhitched from Al, from the bond tethering them together.  Sure, he’d made his own mistakes, plenty of them.  And he’d live with them. But Al’s mistakes were not his. Not anymore. He didn’t have to justify them.

“When you get there,” said Judy, looking at him as if she wondered whether he was listening to her. “Remember to write. More than you did from Vietnam.”

They sent us home from school early because of the snow, just hard little flakes at first.

I didn’t look in the garage for Dave’s car because it was the time when he’d be at work. I went into the room he shares with my mother, took a five from the pile of change and bills on his dresser. When he said my name, I turned, smiled a dopey smile, took my hand out of my back pocket.

He watched as I put the five back. I told him I’d been looking for his miniature handcuffs tie tack.

Dave’s a detective, wears suits. The cuffs on his tie tack work. When I was little and got bored in restaurants, he’d let me play with them. I’d snap them shut and he’d look down, say, “I see Seth has apprehended a napkin.”

He unpinned it from his tie. “Here you go.”

I jumped when he reached his hand out, said I was sorry.

“How ‘bout that.” He sat on the edge of their bed looking at me. “Not the first time you did it.”

I wished it would turn out to be the way it usually does with Dave. Nothing.

I guess I’m not cut out to be a hardened criminal, I’d say.

Nope, Dave would agree. Amateur night.

“I won’t do it again.”

“I hope not.” He leaned back, as if intending to lie all the way down, take a little nap before dinner.

I took a step toward the door. “If that’s all…”

He sprawled back, looked bored. “I’m good.”

I stayed.

He pulled himself up. “Is there something I can do for you, Seth?”

“I’m sorry.”

“So you said.”

I couldn’t think what to say. “You’re an awesome stepdad.”

The way he looked at me then was scarier than when he caught me.

In my room I googled what you should do if your kid steals.

Talk to them about how they’ve lost your trust and what they’ll need to do to get it back, serve cheaper food to recoup the financial loss, take them to jail and have the police lock them in a cell so they know what it feels like, post a video of them wearing a sign that says Thief.

I didn’t go when my mother called me for dinner.

Dave knocked on my door the way I’d told him to.

“I’m not hungry.”

I got up when he opened the door because I didn’t want him to see me lying on my stomach, my butt in the air.

He waited for me so I had to walk in front of him.

We watched the snow from the dining room.

My mother said it made her cold, looking at it.

They’re predicting 12 to 14 inches, Dave said. The big dump, he called it.

A major transaction, I agreed.

My mother asked what was wrong.

Dave stood, said he was going to shovel. When he walked by me he reached over and tousled my hair. “Seth can fill you in.”

He was the one who was mad. Why couldn’t he tell her?

He was still in the hall, putting on his boots, when I said what I’d done.

“Why would you even do something like that?”

“I don’t know.” I thought of his hand on my head, my hair lifted from one place,

dropped to another.

“Oh, honey. You hurt his feelings.”

He gives you anything you want, was what I thought she’d say.

“Am I supposed to be grateful?”

“Yes,” she said. “Tell him you’re sorry.”

“I already did.”

“Mean it.”

Dave had taken my dog Bonnie with him, was showing her a good time, throwing one of her toys for her, still making quick work of the driveway.

He didn’t look like someone you could hurt.

I started on the sidewalk away from him. Where I cleared was messy, not clean the way Dave did it.

He doesn’t usually have me shovel, tells me to stay inside, keep warm, he needs the exercise.

“You’re putting too much pressure on your back,” he said. He’d finished the driveway, was working down the sidewalk toward me. “Bend your knees when you lift.”

After we went inside I stayed in the laundry room with Bonnie as long as I could, rubbing her down. She’s a beagle, short-haired, can’t shake the snow off the way a longhaired dog can. When I walked by the kitchen Dave told me to bring him the money I’d taken. “If you have it. If you don’t we’ll work something out.”

I had it. Also two hundred dollars of Christmas money and eighty dollars left from my report card money in November.

I scuttled to my room to get the money, thirty dollars.

He put it in his pocket without looking at it.

“I’m sorry.”

“Go to bed now.”

School had already been cancelled for tomorrow, Friday. I was hoping he’d want to watch a movie with me.

It was 8:30, an hour before my school night bedtime. I felt sorry for myself, lying alone in the dark. Dave’s mean, I told myself. My real father wouldn’t be this way.

My friend Carl would say I got off easy. When we talked about stealing, Carl said you won’t believe what you can get away with. I’d said if Dave catches me it’s the end of the world as we know it.

Bonnie stayed downstairs because Dave was eating. I could hear the microwave ding, got up and opened my door a crack, heard Dave telling my mom I’d just been feeling my oats, whatever that meant. “Kids do stupid stuff sometimes. Don’t worry about it.”

When they came up Bonnie jumped into bed with me, settled on my chest.

I woke at the usual time the next morning, couldn’t get back to sleep.

Dave was at the stove, asked how I wanted my eggs, said he’d appreciate it if he could take me and Bonnie over to his folks today. Give his dad a hand with the shoveling, keep them company. He asked politely, like I had a choice.

I shoveled our snow after I ate. It was easier today.

“Looks good,” Dave said, when he and my mom came out.

He could have said sucking up to him didn’t change anything.

I don’t mind going to my grandparents, Dave’s parents. They’re nice and they stuff Bonnie and me like Strasbourg geese, Dave says. I shoveled with my grandpa in the morning, was in the kitchen doing homework, drinking Coke, and eating the muddy buddies my grandma makes for me, when she called me to come quick, my dad was on TV.

She meant Dave. My real father is in California, I think.

Dave and the chief of police, looking serious, were standing behind a woman named Mandy Schott. “Help me,” she cried. “Help me find my baby.”

They TV station showed a picture of the baby, Ciara, fourteen months old, in a fancy red dress, sitting on Santa’s lap.

“Precious,” my grandma said. “See how she’s looking around like she just doesn’t know what to think.”

Mandy said she’d taken Ciara to the mall, had finished shopping, was walking across the parking lot to her car, carrying Ciara because she was fussy. “It was past time for her nap.” She smiled sadly. She’d opened her car door, Mandy said, leaned in to put Ciara in her car seat, when a man, a big Black man, pulled her back, ripped a screaming Ciara from her arms and tossed her, Ciara, like a sack of potatoes, into his SUV, also black, and took off.

Mandy was wearing one of the orange T-shirts Trucktown passed out at the fair this year. I could have gotten one but they weren’t great and I didn’t want to stand in line.

She was large and the shirt was too small.

She cried. “Please help me.”

The chief said they’d welcome any information from the public.

Dave’s the head detective and the other detectives hang out in his office. “How big is that big Black man?” one of them would ask.

As big as Quinton Lamar Spain, someone would say, bigger, and they’d laugh.

“I’ll bet it was her,” I said. “Mandy.”

My grandma got mad. “How can you say that? Her own mother hurting that sweet little girl.”

My grandpa winked at me. “Seth, do you think we should tell your grandma what your dad does for a living?”

“Surely you don’t think she’s lying?”

“A Black man with a white baby would attract attention.”

“You’re terrible,” my grandma said. “Just terrible.”

“Yes, dear,” my grandfather said, fake meek. My grandma laughed when we did, said she was ashamed of herself.

Dave came to get me early.

My grandpa gave me a twenty for shoveling. I felt funny, because of what I’d done, tried to hand it back. Dave said I’d probably already eaten my pay in cookies, “but you can take it, Seth.”

That was nice of you, he said, when we were outside with Bonnie.

We walked home. Dave said he’d be sitting on a hard chair all night working on hemorrhoid development, needed a break. I imagined him talking to his parents about me stealing. “I hate it,” he’d say, “but we have to face facts. Let me know if anything goes missing.”

“Are you going to tell Grandma and Grandpa what I did?”

He looked surprised. “Of course not.”

I wondered if I’d hurt his feelings again. “I’m sorry.”

“That was my line.”

Bonnie stopped to take a whiz. I bent down to pet her.

“You get any closer she’ll splash your face. Give the little lady her privacy and stand up and listen to me.”

That’s why he’d come home early, he said, to talk. He hadn’t handled it right, should have put a stop to it as soon as he knew I was stealing. “I was wrong to trick you.”

I was embarrassed.

“Shouldn’t you be telling me it’s wrong to steal and it doesn’t matter if I’m sorry, all matters is if I steal again?”

He looked at me the way he did yesterday afternoon. I don’t know why I didn’t take what he was offering, let things go back to the way they were.

“I think you knew that all along, Seth.”

Bonnie finished, kicked a little snow over the yellow spot. Good girl, I told her, though it was snowing again, covering everything up.

“Yes sir.” Dave doesn’t like being called sir. I told him I was sorry again.

“I got that part.”

We went a block without saying anything.

When we were in our yard he stuck a foot in front of me, an old trick of his I never see coming, caught me when I lost my balance, lowered me to the ground, said I was a dirty bird but he’d take care of that, rubbed my face with snow. Cold, but the new snow was soft, didn’t hurt the way the dirt-crusted old snow would. I grabbed his arms, donkey kicked. He slid backwards, letting me get to my feet.

Bonnie barked, ran in circles around us. We were hiding behind trees, throwing snowballs, yelling ‘you’re going down,’ at each other, when my mother came home from work, told Dave, smiling, he was getting me too wound up, what she used to say when I was little.

“Not my fault, Honey Gal. I wanted to build a snowman.” Then he went back to work.

Because of the extra day off, maybe, the weekend seemed long. Dave came home late Saturday night after I was in bed, went to bed himself. I heard his phone ring as it was getting light.

Before he left he came into my room to take Bonnie out, told me to go back to sleep.

He came home Sunday smelling of dirt and pine. My mom and I were eating supper and he looked at the spaghetti on our plates, said it was too slippery for him, trying to joke. I’m too tired to swallow, he said, when my mom offered to make him whatever he wanted. She helped him to bed, but he was up before I was Monday morning, frying bacon.

“I made plenty,” he said, loading my plate.

During Biology, I turned on my phone, wanted to know if they’d found Ciara. Dave was on again, getting out of his car. Mandy Schott was in the passenger’s seat.

“You’re going to jail, Piggly Wiggly Woman,” Carl said, looking over my shoulder.

Dave spoke into the camera, before he walked around to open the door for her, said Ms. Schott was cooperating with the police investigation, needed a break.

They didn’t look like a couple on a date because Dave is too old, forty-seven.

My mother is thirty-six. I’d thought Mandy Schott was her age or a little older, but on TV they said she was nineteen.

I recognized the restaurant. Dave takes us there.

He’d put his hand on what was probably the small of Mandy’s back when they were walking across the parking lot but he’s that way with all women. Stands up when they come into a room, opens doors, helps them with their coats.

Mandy would like the way Dave looks at you when you talk, interested.

He’d have a salad because he likes the bleu cheese dressing there. But the soup is good too, he’d tell Mandy. The Firehouse chili, maybe. He wanted the Reuben with homemade potato chips but the Monte Cristo is also excellent.

They’d have the sugar cream pie, a second cup of coffee. Or, if Mandy wasn’t used to drinking coffee, Dave would tell her to have another Coke.

At the counter where you paid they had candy like Twin Bings and Malty Meltys, stuff you don’t see much, and he’d take his time helping her figure out what she wanted. After they left the restaurant, when they were in his car, he’d asked her to tell him, please, where Ciara was, and then he and Mandy Schott drove around the lake long enough for her to eat her Charleston Chews before he took her to the police station.

My mother asked him if he’d put the lunch in his expense report. He said no, he didn’t need to buy Mandy lunch for her to tell him what he needed to know. “I just felt sorry for her.”

My mother said Dave was the one she felt sorry for. All that work and nothing to show for it but a dead child.

“You’re not making sense,” I told him. A nice meal wouldn’t make up for prison.

“You’re right. I hope I didn’t make things worse for her.”

You couldn’t, my mother said. “Her life can’t get any worse.”

I’d looked at my phone again on the way home from school, saw the cadaver dog, Dagwood. I know him. His handler, Sergeant Mays, brings him to the Super Bowl Party we have at our house every year. The first time he came, when I was seven, I’d asked Dave if he could live with us after he retired from police work. “Did you see how much he liked me? He can sleep in my bed. I’ll take good care of him.”

“I know you would,” he’d said, “but he’s young, won’t retire for a long time. Anyway, Ken Mays, and his wife, and his kids, are crazy for him. They’ll want to keep him.”

He brought Bonnie home the next weekend. Eight weeks old and, like Dagwood, a beagle.

On TV Dagwood was excited, jumping high as he could on his short legs. When he sat down, which is how he signals he’s found something, the police moved around him to block the cameras so you couldn’t see what it was.

The next time I saw him, Sergeant Mays was kneeling in front of him, giving him a treat, smiling and making over him, so Daggie Dog would know he’d done something good. If Sergeant Mays were to cry Dagwood would think he’d disappointed him.

Dave said the cops could see the outline of Ciara’s body under the mud as soon as Dagwood headed there.

I thought Mandy hadn’t made the grave deep because she didn’t want to let Ciara go. I know it sounded stupid, but Dave said he thought so too. “She loves that little girl.”

“Is that what you talked about at lunch?”

“No. We talked about high school and all the fun she had getting high with her stoner friends, shitting on toilet seats in the girls’ room, banging the lids down on top to smear it, skipping class to go shoplifting at Dilliard’s, spray painting gym lockers with the N-word, harassing the Korean shop owners on Townes Street, trashing the teachers’ cars.”

“Really?”

“Best years of her life.”

My mom sighed. She felt sorry for Mandy too.

Dave said it was going to storm. “I’m glad we found Ciara when we did. Dag can work through snow but they’re expecting eight inches tonight and we might not have been able to find the landmarks Mandy gave us.”

I wondered how Mandy was doing. She’d be on suicide watch, I knew, because Dave had told me that’s what they do at the jail for at least the first 24 hours, if someone’s charged with a high profile crime. One of the jail officers would check on her every fifteen minutes, maybe sit in front of her cell talking to her, trying to keep her spirits up.

I asked Dave if blunt force trauma, which was listed on the arrest warrant as the probable cause of death, would hurt, or if Ciara would have passed out right away.

“Passed out,” he said. “At her age, the skull isn’t fully developed, so she couldn’t take much, but her injuries occurred over time and she’d have periods of consciousness when she hurt.” He stood, knelt by my chair, held my right foot, still in my shoe, prodded it. “Tight in the box.”

“They feel okay.”

“They won’t for long.” He said he’d take me to the Nike store Saturday.

“You just bought him those.”

“When his little tootsies are sore he can’t concentrate on his school work.”

Once my mother had said when she was in foster care it was a treat to go to Walmart for school clothes, instead of Goodwill.

“I hope you realize how lucky you are,” she said tonight.

“What’s for dessert?”

Dave laughed, my mother too. But nobody likes a smart aleck, she said.

“I like this one.” I didn’t hear anything sour in Dave’s voice. “I like him a lot.”

“You shouldn’t swear in front of him. If he copies you he’ll get in trouble at school.”

“Seth’s too smart for that.”

He’d said shit, I remembered. Maddy spread shit, wanting someone to sit in it.

It started snowing for real after dinner. Dave said we might as well wait till morning before we shoveled. “You want to watch Justice League?”

Dave fell asleep on the couch as soon as he’d finished his lemon drizzle cake, his head back, his mouth open.

“He’s tired, poor sweetie,” my mother said, spreading the afghan over him, though we were warm, before she sat down on Dave’s other side.

I slumped against him. Bonnie got in my lap and I scratched her head the way she likes. There’s a velvet pillow on the couch I used to pat when I was little. Bonnie’s coat is better. Soft, thick, sweet.

Dave snored a little, singsong.

I saw I was holding onto Dave’s hand, the way I did before I was allowed to cross the street by myself.

He woke, kissed the side of my mother’s face, looked down at my hand, smiled before he went back to sleep.

When visiting

a friend’s grandpa, the Boy learned that the grandpa liked watching football games on the weekends instead of the black and white western movies. His favorite football team was the Kansas City Chiefs. Their team colors were—red, white, and yellow. Some of the fans had feathers on their head and they chanted and made a chopping motion with one of their hands when the game started. Sometimes a man who was dressed up in a pretend costume would beat on a giant drum. The grandpa said it was tradition and traditions were good. The Boy asked the friends grandpa if he ever watched western movies, but he said those were all fake and weren’t worth the copper they were printed on. That’s why he liked watching football. Real men. Real blood. Real consequences.

None of that fake cowboy horseshit.

Sometimes, though, if it was late at night, the friend’s grandpa said he liked to watch military documentaries, but only if everyone was already asleep. The Boy didn’t ask why. The grandpa had an American flag that hung from the front porch of his house—red, white, and blue. The Boy’s own grandpa didn’t have one. Neither did the Boy’s father.

Were you in the War too?

No, my parents wanted me to go to college. The same college my daddy went too. In fact, we even played ball for the same team. That’s my old jersey there.

The friend’s grandpa pointed to the wall. Two framed black and white photos with wooden frames that bent and curved all fancy like hung next to each other. The Boy knew one photo was older because it had a football team where they all had leather helmets on, and the image was faded. There was also a framed football jersey on the wall with the same last name that his friend had with stitched together letters on the back of it. The team colors were—green, gold, and black.

I almost volunteered for the military. I wanted too—hell, they almost got me in the draft! Maybe I wish they would have. Just wasn’t in the playbook, I guess. Your grandfather was in the service? World War II?

Yes sir. Well—no, he fought in Korea. My dad too. Air force. He didn’t fight in any War, though.

That’s okay son, you should be damn proud. We all have our role to play. That’s what my old man used to say.

I’m going to join too—when I’m old enough, anyway.

The grandpa smiled and put a hand on the Boy’s shoulder.

That’s a good boy.

The grandpa reached over and grabbed an old football that sat on a wooden mantle with some sports memorabilia underneath the old photos and the jersey. He held it in front of the Boy’s face close enough for him to smell the aged pigskin leather, letting his eyes wander over the scars from the field of battle. When the Boy’s hands moved to touch the football, the grandpa reached back in an old-school football pose like the quarterback does and threw the ball across the room to his grandson who caught it above his head with both hands.

Nice one! Just like your old man!

He lost

his favorite coffee mug. The Old Man poured dark roast into a short glass mason jar mixing it with the golden liquid already left waiting at the bottom. It wasn’t meant for hot liquids and the Old Man reached for a red trimmed potholder with a green and yellow wildflower pattern to hold it with. He sat down into his favorite corduroy rocking chair, one hand against his lower back for support. He smiled with the jar between his legs letting the glass cool, the steam from the roasted beans rising to his nose. Smells of earth and sweet honey warmed the room. The sting of diesel was nearly absent.

Please, just one-story Grandpa. I promise I won’t ask for more. Please—

Well shit, you’re old enough by now. I promised your dad I wouldn’t, but hell in my day you could drive a tractor at ten, and you’re nearly that. It can be our little secret. What do you want to know?

About the War, about—Korea. Like, what kind of gun did you use?

A few, but mostly the ole Browning M1919. I bet you don’t even know what that is, do you?

The Boy shook his head no.

It’s a light machine gun. L.M.G. It took two of us to shoot and two more to carry everything. It was a real son-of-a-bitch to get around.

Did you have to shoot it a lot?

I never shot it once, to tell you the truth, not at anyone anyway. See, I just fed the ammo to keep it firing. Do you know what that means, to feed the ammo?

The Old Man didn’t wait for the Boy to answer.

I was what they called an assistant gunner. Corporal did all of the shooting and stuff for us. He liked that kind of thing.

The Old Man grabbed the hot mason jar from between his legs and took a long drag of his coffee. The rounded glass edge burned against the crease of his lips, but he drank it anyway. He remembered the Corporal well. They grew matching mustaches; they all did. The lieutenant dubbed them his “Mustache Maniacs,” which later got shortened to just “M&M’s.” It was a real hoot with the men. The Old Man shaved it shortly before returning home. He felt stupid with it by himself. It didn’t feel right without Corporal Lopez and the rest. He wouldn’t tell that story today, though.

They didn’t deserve it, the people. Not too different from us you know—some of the best God-damned people I’ve ever met, actually. They fought side by side with us. Those Koreans, real God-damn patriots. We suffered together; I remember how hungry they were. How hungry we were—and cold, for shit’s sake was it cold. Colder than a well digger’s ass, if you ask me. You have to understand, it’s a different kind of cold they have there in Korea. It’s all any of us thought about most of the time. We weren’t ready for any of it. It was a terrible War.

Why were you fighting then Grandpa? If they weren’t bad?

It wasn’t them we were fighting; it was those god-damned Reds! You see, retreat was never part of the plan, hell, War was never part of the plan—we just killed that other bastard five years earlier! You have to imagine, when they first came over them mountain tops, millions of ‘em, I swear to God, the God-damned ground disappeared. I don’t know if they shot back, or hell, if they even had guns. Corporal █████ just kept firing. There was so much smoke you couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of you. I loaded until my hands charred like wood. We could hear them breathing they was so close. A wave of glowing lead to the left. A wave of glowing lead to the right.

The Old Man’s arms followed waves of bullets from one side of his body to the other in a repeating pattern. The aged wood from underneath his corduroy rocking chair snapped with the weight of his story. Liquid from the mason jar in one of his hands splashed over the rim.

The Boy breathed hard, too afraid to look away.

We screamed for the runners to bring more ammo; I don’t remember when they stopped coming. The Reds didn’t. They never stopped. When they were right God-damned on top of us, Corporal █████ handed me his pistol, a Colt 1911. Just a small little thing. He picked up that son-of-a-bitch Browning with his bare hands and we fired until we both had nothing left. And then, we ran. We all ran. Everyone did. And we kept running. When the order finally came to stand fast; we already made it to the God-damned ocean.

The Old Man drank from his mason jar again, the amber glow of liquid not able to hide behind his lost porcelain coffee mug. He nearly spit it out when he started laughing from somewhere deep down in his belly. He had to use his free hand to cover the top of the jar to keep the liquid from spilling everywhere.

You know, when we finally did stop, there were these two supply crates, just sitting there waiting for us. One had ammo, one had food. We hadn’t had a single round of ammunition to fire in over a week and no one had eaten in at least double that amount of time, probably longer. But wouldn’t you God-damn believe it, I was the only shit-stick dumb enough to go for the ammo first. I was more scared of those god-damned Reds than I was of starving to death. Go for the ammo first, that’s what Corporal █████ would have done, so that’s what I did. He always knew what to do.

Invitation to a Gunfighter, staring Yul Brynner and George Segal, played at a low volume in the background on a black and white television screen. The film ends after the hero takes a shotgun blast to the chest and one bullet through the stomach. The hero manages to jump from his horse in a dramatic roll before single-handedly disarming the bad guys in one swift motion. An entire town watches from the side. The hero then spends the next two minutes and thirty-four seconds forcing the bad guys to apologize in front of all the town’s folk for their crimes against their own neighbors. Eventually, the hero succumbs to the injuries and the people carry him away on their shoulders. The Old Man and the Boy sat in silence until the credits finished and the screen turned to black.

The Boy wasn’t sure what was meant to be funny about the ending to his grandpa’s story. He waited for the rest of the story to finish, but it never came.

The Sheriff

first met the Boy when he was still just a boy. The Sheriff took the Old Man away but said he could come back home once he was feeling better. The Old Man said it was the bitch’s fault. The Sheriff also gave the Boy a pack of Colorado Rocky baseball trading cards and a golden sheriff’s sticker that he could put on the outside of his shirt. The Boy wore it to school the next Monday and everybody wanted to know where he got it from but he told them it was a secret.

Vietnam, 1969

The world appeared like a ripple in a puddle- a Jell-O jiggle spreading across dark green jungle water. The scene came together but would not hold still.

Caleb did not know where he was. His vision swirled, and his chest hurt, and his lungs seemed full of water. His hand searched for his chest. Found it. Wet. Found it. Empty. A finger sank into it. Wiggled a moment. Mud, he thought. Mud at the bottom of the puddle.

There was a wall behind him. He braced himself to move, clenching his teeth tightly, and then slid himself against it, propping himself up. He let out a growl, and a twinge of nausea passed through his stomach. He nearly threw up, but he held in the bile, thinking of a man he’d seen throw up at a state fair once- thinking about how embarrassing that must have been. A grown man vomiting. He could do better. He squinted into the horizon. The nausea faded, and solid shapes began to take form.

He was in a village. A rural village. A smoking village. The huts around him were on fire; their woven roofs blazing orange and deep red, like the flesh of the Gac fruit he’d seen a young boy devour at a rural market in the eastern part of the country. Across from him, a hand lay, palm up, fingers sprawled, totally still. Slender brown wrist and jagged nails. The hand was connected to an arm. The arm was connected to nothing. Its severed edge, too, resembled the wet red meat of the Gac fruit. Caleb couldn’t remember whose it was. He wished he hadn’t seen it.

The air was smoke and fresh-turned dirt, tinged with feces, urine, and metal. Whether the metal smell was blood or guns, he could not say.

Caleb coughed, and a spray of red shot from his chest. So I’ve been shot, he realized. I’ve been shot, and I’ve been left for dead.

A groan split the space in front of him. He rolled his head toward the sound. “Hello?” he gurgled. He coughed again. Stronger: “Hello?”

There was a young Vietnamese man sprawled at his feet. The man lifted his head.

Opened and shut his mouth three times, bubbling like a fish. “Do you speak English?” Caleb asked him.

The man stared at him with fish eyes.

Caleb rolled his eyes. “Of course not.” Damn Gook. He pointed at the hole in his chest. “Are you hurt?” he asked. He pointed at the man. Pointed back at his own chest.

The man rolled his body to the side, revealing a wet, red cavern in which bits of flesh hung free from bone, swinging like sheets on a clothesline. He sank back to the earth with a grunt.

Caleb nodded. “We’re both goners, you know?” The man blinked. Sputtered, “Xin Loi.” “Gibberish.” Jesus.

Caleb rubbed his fingers together. He wanted a cigarette. He grimaced. “I’d kill for a drag,” he told the man. He’d killed for less before, but what did it matter now.

The man bared his teeth in a rugged smile. “Xin Loi,” he said again. Caleb tilted his head towards the sky.

The wall he was leaning against was part of a crude hut. When he shifted his weight, it crackled. A twig wiggled loosely above his head. He snapped this twig off and put it to his lips. He softly sucked in, gritted his teeth, and blew out. He offered this twig to the Vietnamese man, who pretended to take his own hit and then passed it back.

“Nothing like a Pall Mall,” he sighed. He took another drag.

On his exhale, he pointed at himself and slowly pronounced, “Caleb Millard.” The man pressed his hands to his sternum and said, “Do Hien Minh.”

Caleb pretended to tap ash from his twig. “Where are you from, Do?” Do stared at him.

Caleb shifted his weight, winced at the movement, and then settled his shoulders lower against the wall. “I’m from Iowa.” A bird played lip harp in a distant tree. “America.” He eyed a big sow nosing through the turmoil beneath a burning hut. “Got a lot of pigs there, too.”

Drag from the twig. “My family kept a cow, but no pigs.” Do bobbed his head as if he understood.

“I had a dog for a bit,” he told Do, “but she died. Never had a pig.” Do patted the dirt at the base of Caleb’s boot.

“How old are you, Do? Can’t be more than twenty.” Caleb raised an eyebrow. “My brother is twenty. He went to college, so he didn’t get drafted.” Caleb felt a bead of sweat forming on his forehead. “I didn’t go to college, so I got drafted. Now I have a damn hole in my chest.”

Caleb met Do’s eyes again. “We’re both gonna die dumb, you know that? Dumb and uneducated. And young.” Caleb shook off a gnat. “And covered in bugs.”

“You ever ate a bug, Do?” Do’s face was covered in sweat. “I bet you people eat bugs all the time.”

Caleb rubbed his chest. “I can’t breathe so well. I never could breathe in this country. You must be dumb to stay in a country where you can’t breathe. What’s the point?”

Caleb squirmed against his inhale. “It’s like breathing under-damn-water. Are you a fish, Do?”

Do moved his hands together, intertwining his shaking thumbs and fluttering his fingers like butterfly wings. He flew his hands towards Caleb and grinned.

Caleb muttered, “This is serious.” Do settled his hands under his chin.

“You got a girl, Do?” Caleb asked. “I swear, if a bastard like you has got a girl, then God can take me now.”

Do’s pinky finger twitched under his chin.

Caleb pursed his lips and made a kissing noise. With one hand, he drew the outline of a woman with generous curves in the air. Pointed at Do. “A girl?”

A soft smile spread across Do’s face. “Cô gái xinh đẹp,” he said.

“I bet you’ve got an ugly little thing,” Caleb mused. “Beanstalk tall and scrawny, with crooked teeth. Or no teeth.” He licked his lips. “There was a girl named Nancy back in the States who I always wanted to go with.” Caleb shook his head. “I never even wrote her a letter.”

Caleb scratched at his chest. “But man, was she beautiful. All-American, with blonde hair and the pinkest lips I ever saw. Always wore a red dress to Sunday service. And man, she loved to sing. Especially sad songs. Sounded just like Doris Day.”

Do repeated, “Doris Day.” “That’s right, Do.”

Do began humming.

Caleb recognized the tune. “Que sera, sera,” he half-sang. “Whatever will be, will be.” He dropped his eyes to the dirt. “That’s real nice, Do.”

“Do you reckon that letters ever make it out of the jungle?” Caleb wished a cloud would cover the sun. It was too damn hot. “I don’t see how anything makes it out of the jungle.”

It was quiet for a moment, aside from the two men’s dueted breathing and the rumble of a burning hut collapsing. “When you die, your body will sit here and rot. That’s a given. But what happens to my body?” Caleb sucked on the twig. “Will they come looking for me? Will they find me? My parents may never know what happened to me. They’ll hold out hope, I know. But I’ll be gone. Rotting, with no name. No meaning.” Caleb looked at the severed arm. He threw the twig away. “It’s sick.”

Do followed his gaze to the arm. Then Do looked back at him. “Caleb,” Do said. “Not me,” Caleb said. “I didn’t do that.”

Do patted the dirt again.

“It’s so hot.” Caleb squinted. He tried to shake the sweat from his head. “Do you think that’s the sun we’re feeling, or the light at the end of the tunnel?”

Do shielded his eyes from the sky.

“That’s the spirit, Do. Don’t look at it. Don’t look at it either way.”

Caleb wanted a cup of cold water, or a root beer. The air was thick with humidity- practically liquid- but his thirst remained unquenched. He wished that he had drowned. At least then he wouldn’t be thirsty.

He sat back and watched smoke pour out of a hut. There was searing pain in his throat. “To die in a place like this… Well, it isn’t Christian. Do the souls of those whose bodies are eaten by stray dogs still make it to heaven?”

Do coughed up a sticky string of blood. It sank into the dirt at the base of Caleb’s boot. “Damn it,” Caleb said. “Damn it all.”

“What’s the point of this anyways? Why am I talking to you?” Caleb was dizzy. He thought again of the state fair. The vomit. “What’s the point of me prattling on and you not knowing what I’m saying? Do you know what I’m saying?” Caleb kicked at Do’s hand. “Can you feel what I’m saying?”

Do’s face was pale. “Doris Day,” he said.

“That’s right,” Caleb let out a low whistle. “Que fuckin’ sera, sera.” Do rolled in the dirt.

“I killed a man who looked like you, just east of Bo Tuc.” Do’s hands curled into claws.

“And another just north of here.”

Do’s mouth opened into a near-perfect circle. “And another, north of that.”

“When my dog got ill, my father shot her in the side,” Caleb’s chin began to tremble. “She rolled that same way, rolled until my father shot her a second time. Shot her in the head.” Caleb held a finger gun to his temple. Pulled the trigger.

Do jerked sharply, arching his back into the shape of a mountain, and then fell flat against the earth. He became still on impact, save for his fingers, which twitched and twitched like the wings of a gnat. His eyes locked on Caleb.

“Thing is, I think I’m sorry for what I did. But this is war. I don’t know how to feel sorry. They tell me not to feel sorry. I’m not sure that ‘sorry’ cuts it anyways.”

“Do I pray for you?” he whispered. “Does it make a difference?” Caleb swallowed. “What can one do?”

Do’s earthquaking hand extended back towards Caleb’s shoe, traversing the dirt like a snake stalking prey. The hand met the boot and encircled it. Squeezed once. Then his eyes glazed over.

Eyelids half shut, mouth agape. A gnat landed on his thin lip. He was gone.

Caleb felt tears well up in his eyes. He resigned, “What can one do?”

He struggled for breath. He touched his chest again and found that the wet had expanded. His vision was a tunnel. He saw Do at his feet. Saw only Do. The gnat on his lip. The look of sleep on his face.

Caleb trembled. He knew what would happen next. He’d be a casualty of war with no story. No one- not his commanding officers, his parents, his brother, Nancy, no one- would know what had happened to him. The fire from the huts would spread, his flesh would fall to ash, and he’d be gone. There’d be no story, no burial, no resolution. Nothing. Forever, nothing. Alone in the jungle for the rest of time. For what? Nothing, nothing, nothing. What can one do?

Alone, but not alone. Do’s hand on his boot was a message. “It’s alright,” the hand said, “we’re in this together. We’re going to die, but we’re not alone. It might be for nothing, but we’re not alone.”

He saw it now. Xin Loi. I’m sorry. At least we’re together.

That gave Caleb as much peace as he could hope to get. That evening, the sun went down as it always did, but for Caleb, it burnt out. The jungle dirt lapped up his blood the same as it did anyone else’s. After all, all blood tastes the same. All blood nourishes the same. Caleb was still in the jungle night, with Do’s hand on his foot and a gnat crawling on his lip.