Five days ago at morning PT, Nate wasn’t in formation. Everyone assumed he was at sick call, and we did our workout without him. But when he didn’t show up for first formation after breakfast, tensions rose. He hadn’t checked in at sick call, he wasn’t assigned to any special details, and his roommate Specialist DiNofrio said he didn’t remember seeing him after the previous afternoon.

“Check his room,” Sergeant Martinez told us.

Dino and I followed Specialist Remington across the quad from the company building to the barracks. Remy was on CQ, so he was responsible for the large ring of key dupes. At five-one, he looked like a kid playing soldier. With the four-inch key ring jingling at his belt, he looked like a soldier playing janitor. I smiled briefly at the thought, but then we were in the barracks, up the steps, and at Nate and Dino’s room. Dino opened the outer door with his key, and after a full minute of searching the ring, Remy found the right dupe and unlocked the inner door to Nate’s room.

The room was clean and organized, and at first nothing seemed amiss. His bed was made, the floor was free of clutter, and his TA-50 gear was stacked neatly in the closet. He hadn’t packed his duffels yet, but we weren’t leaving for a few weeks. Plenty of time to get ready.

“Anything missing?” Remy asked.

Dino shrugged mechanically. He was always so stiff, like he was on guard duty every second he was awake. Being a good five inches taller than my six-one, it made him look a little like Frankenstein’s monster. “I don’t know,” he said, “I didn’t really come in all that much. He was closer to Winch than me.”

“How ’bout it, Winch?”

I felt around the room with my eyes, not sure what I should be looking for. All of his stuff appeared to be there; there were plenty of clothes in his drawers and on the hangers in his closet. Even his cell phone was there, resting in the charging cradle on top of his dresser. I was about to say that nothing seemed wrong, but then I opened the drawer of the nightstand next to the bed.

“He’s gone,” I said. I pulled the key ring out of the drawer, with the keys to the room, his duffel padlocks, and the lock for his Humvee’s cargo compartment.

“What?” Dino said.

“Car key’s missing.” The car I sold him. The car he said he just wanted so he could get around when he was by himself. The ugly piece of shit sedan that I made even uglier with the orange spray paint that he took off my hands for fifty bucks just a week earlier like he was doing me a favor.

When we returned to the company area, Sergeant Martinez reacted poorly to my suspicions. “What the holy fuck, Alpha team?” His bellow reverberated from the walls of the squad room. The rest of second squad discreetly slipped out of the room, leaving me, Dino, and Remy to face his wrath alone. “We’re in the desert in three goddamn weeks, and you let him go AWOL?” He looked at us, his eyes moving from one face to the next hungrily, the eyes of a predator.

“Any ideas where he’d go?” His eyes settled on me, and he gave me a look like he wouldn’t be happy no matter what answer I gave him. I looked at Remy and Dino, but they were intent on staring at anything but me or our squad leader. Alone against the world, I could only shake my head in reply.

He drew in close and bent down eye to eye with me. “Find him,” he said. “You’re team leader, Sergeant, this is your job. Find your soldier and bring him back.” Then he pushed past me and out of the room.

Now, as I reach the set of three small concrete steps that lead up to the front door of Nate’s mom’s house, it opens, and she comes out and stands on the porch. She’s a short woman, but she’s almost as wide as she is tall, an imposing presence there on the stoop, blocking my way. She’s breathing heavily and her face is an angry pink, though I can’t tell if it’s due to anger or a lack of exercise for the last fifty years. She folds her arms over the massive shelf of her bosom and says, “What do you want, Winch?”

“Looking for Nate,” I say.

“He’s on post.”

“No, he’s gone a few days now.”

“Don’t know nothing ’bout that,” she says. “Last time I heard from him, y’all were getting ready to leave.”

I take a step toward her, relishing in the crunch of a particularly dry leaf under my left boot. “So he hasn’t called you?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer, just looks over my shoulder and says, “What the hell are they doing?”

I turn around and see Remy and Dino standing next to the car. They’re both smoking and Dino is doing his best to block Remy from hitting him in the nuts with the back of his hand, David annoying Goliath. Remy must get a shot past Dino’s defense, maybe taps the tip, because Dino suddenly turns and punches Remy above his right eye, knocking the cigarette out of his mouth and down his shirt. Remy laughs as he puts one hand to his head and pulls the shirt away from his body, billowing it to allow the butt to fall to the ground. Probably best to turn the conversation away from their stupidity. I turn back to Mrs. Browning and say, “I don’t allow smoking in my car.”

“Uh huh,” she says. “What do you want with Nate?”

An incoming call sets my phone vibrating in my pants pocket. The buzz is loud and annoying, but the phone is semi-new and I’m still not sure how to silence it without pulling it out. I do my best to ignore it and say, “We’re leaving in less than a month.”

“Think I don’t know that?”

“I know you do, I’m just saying he needs to come back before we leave.”

She pushes her arms away from her chest and flings them in my direction. Her face left pink and is rounding the bases toward a deep magenta. “Maybe he doesn’t want to go back anymore,” she says. “Maybe he did enough time and wants to stay home now.”

“It’s not up to him. He’s gonna be in even bigger trouble.”

“Yeah, well maybe that’s okay. If he’s in jail, he don’t have to go back.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head, “they’ll just send him over like nothing happened, and when he gets back, then they’ll send him to jail. And while he’s over there, they might decide to garnish his wages. I know he helps you out whenever he can.” We both look at the fading house, note its chipped paint and worn siding, the piece of cardboard duct taped over the broken basement window. Her eyes tremble a bit, and I know that I’ve reached the part of her that could help me. I hate doing this, hate laying guilt on her. If she were my mom, I’d be completely ashamed. But she’s not my mom, and this is the only thing I can do. It doesn’t last long, though, as she quickly closes me of.

She says, “He’s not here, I haven’t heard from him, and I want you to leave him alone.” Then she turns and begins to retreat back into the house.

Before she closes the door completely, I say, “If you do hear from him, could you tell him to call me?” As the lock clicks, I wonder if she heard me.

Back in the car, I pull my phone out of my pocket and see I missed a call from my mom. I delete the notification and toss the phone into the console next to my seat. Later. I can’t deal with her right now. I’ve got my own shit to worry about.

Dino says, “No luck?”

I just shake my head. “What’s with the grab-ass?”

“Just messing around,” Remy says, holding an unopened Sprite up to his new shiner.

Anything to keep the mind off what’s coming.

*

When I tell Sergeant Martinez that we haven’t found Nate yet, he says, “What the fuck, Winch,” and walks away, his fists clenching and releasing. Hopefully it’s not my throat he’s imagining crushing between his fingers.

The three of us sit against the wall at the back of the squad room. I feel like we’re marshaling our energy for another mission. What we’re doing isn’t difficult, but it’s exhausting, just trying to put ourselves into Nate’s shoes and think about how to find him. I wish that he’d call, say, “Hey, Winch, how’s it going?” like we just saw each other this morning.

Then I’d say “Been better, been worse,” and we’d all have a good laugh and he’d come back and we’d be able to continue getting ready to deploy. But my phone remains silent in my pocket, and we remain silent in our chairs.

Other members of third platoon walk past the door and look in on us, spectators viewing the massive blunder that has been my week. I hear my name, Nate’s name, other things. “Fucking second squad,” someone murmurs.

Lunch time rolls around and Remy and Dino want to go get something. I tell them I’m good and watch them leave. Food won’t help me right now. Sometimes lunch gets in the way. But then I remember how I met Nate at lunchtime in this very room, three years previous.

I was fresh out of Basic, didn’t know anyone. Sergeant Martinez showed me around the company area, led me from office to office, introduced me to anyone he could find. Faces and names blurred together and I got lost trying to keep up with what my new squad leader was telling me. I was sure it was important, but nothing was penetrating.

He left me in the squad room filling out forms and reading field manuals and SOPs. I said hello to people who came in, told them who I was, where I was from. Some were cordial, some were indifferent. I was the new guy, the fresh meat, the cherry. I hadn’t been anywhere with these guys, and they didn’t know me.

At lunch, three specialists came in and sat at one of the other tables. None of them looked at me, or acknowledged my presence. They were having a heated discussion about action movies and who their favorite actors were and for what reason. At one point, someone said something that I agreed with, and I tried joining into the conversation, attempted to make a friend or two, but they simply looked at me for a moment before continuing their discussion without me. I felt like a cricket in the corner, an annoyance that was easy to ignore.

Movement at the door caught my attention, and I saw another soldier motioning to me to come over. I got up and passed the three soldiers and their conversation and met the PFC with Browning on his name tape. “Yeah?” I said, not expecting much after my previous encounter.

He leaned in and said softly, “Fuck those bitches.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about, and I’m guessing my face said so.

He nodded to the three at the table and said, “Don’t worry about them, they’re assholes. If you don’t have a tab, you’re nothing to them.”

“What?”

“Look at their shoulders.”

I looked, and sure enough, all three had Ranger tabs at the tops of their left sleeves.

He pulled me out of the room and walked away down the hall, with me following close behind him. “I call them tab toadies,” he said. “They hate it, but I don’t give a shit. If they want to do something about it, they can fucking try it. I choked out Stephenson last year in combatives training, and I know I’m a better boxer than Mitchell.”

I hadn’t said anything yet. “You haven’t said anything yet,” he said.

“Thanks?” I managed to get out.

“No problem, that’s what I’m here for.” He reached his hand across his body as we walked. “Name’s Browning, Nate. One each.”

I shook his hand. “One each?”

“Yeah, like in an inventory, you know, ‘Cot, four each, rucksack, three each, Browning, one each.’” I must have still looked confused. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You doing okay?”

“It’s all a little much.”

“Been better, right?”

“Yeah.”

He nodded. “But it’s been worse, too, I bet.”

“I guess,” I said. We walked out of the building. “Where we going?”

“Lunch. You like sushi?”

“Um, yeah?”

“Too bad, we’re getting burgers.” He walked faster, and I did my best to keep up. And that was what we did for a while. He’d move fast and I’d try and keep up. I learned a lot from Nate about a lot of things, and it helped me to get better at my job, become a better soldier, a sergeant, a team leader. Eventually I was the one moving fast, staying in the lead, though he never tried to keep up. Nate’s pace was whatever he chose, not what was chosen for him.

We went to war together, bled together, lost friends together. Both of our fathers died within months of each other, and we each comforted the other’s mother. Nate got married before our first deployment and I was his best man. He got a divorce after we got back, and I was there with him in the bowling alley, throwing balls down the lane at stand-in ex-wives, ten at a time, all wearing white. Both of us had the other’s back. I knew I could count on him for anything, because I would do anything for him if he needed it.

Sergeant Martinez comes back into the room and towers over me. “Find your guy yet?”

“No, sergeant.”

“Sitting here’s probably not the best use of your time, then, is it?”

“No, sergeant.” I stand up and walk to the door, but he stops me.

“The CO wants the car brought in when you find Browning, for the report. Go.” He makes a shooing gesture with his hands, and I leave.

My phone buzzes in my pocket again. A text: “Come by for lunch, if you want. Luv u, mom.” I realize I can eat, so I leave the building and send a text to Remy and Dino saying I’ll meet them later to continue the search.

*

I yell hello as I enter my mom’s house, but she doesn’t answer. It’s noon and the washing machine and dryer are running downstairs. My mom has done laundry every Friday at noon since I’ve known her. The smell of fabric softener wends its way through the vents in the basement, filling the house with lavender. Every time I come here, I’m reminded of how nothing in the barracks smells this nice.

I’m rummaging in the fridge when Mom comes up the stairs, an overflowing basket of freshly washed towels balanced on her hip. “Here,” I say, and take the basket from her and set it on the kitchen counter.

“Thanks, sweetie.” She pulls a washcloth out of the basket and blots her forehead and the back of her neck. She’s going through menopause and recently she’s been breaking out into cold sweats at random moments. She’s just in her forties, too young for this, I think. I wonder if it’s because of me. I know it is.

She says, “So what’s new?” and smiles, but the strain around her eyes tell me that it’s forced, that she’s not happy. I don’t want to upset her, but I can’t lie to her. It’s not how I was raised. I tell her all about Nate disappearing and my search for him.

“Can’t say I’m surprised,” she says. “You’ve all been through so much, I can’t imagine going back would be something you’d all be willing to do.”

“Yeah, but if anyone were going to quit out, I just wouldn’t have pegged it to be Nate.”

“Why, because he’s so masculine and strong?”

“No, it’s not that, it’s just—” I break off. What was my reasoning? Just because he said he was ready to go back, and he was jumping up and down when we got our orders? Did I actually expect him to be completely truthful about his feelings? I have nothing, so I say nothing.

“You could do it, too, you know,” she says quietly.

I must have been zoning out, because I’m not sure what she means, and I tell her so.

She doesn’t look at me when she says, “You could leave, like Nate. Find somewhere to hole up ’til the deployment’s over.”

“No, I can’t.”

Her face goes stern, like it did when I got in trouble as a child. “Why not?” she says, hands on her hips.

I don’t know what to say. Emotions and reasons and excuses jumble around in my head, like a load of clothes in the dryer, round and round. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

“Fair to who?”

“To everyone.”

“It’d be fair to me.”

“I mean everyone else,” I say. “All the other guys.”

“What do they have to do with it?” Her voice is starting to take on a plaintive pitch.

Crying isn’t too far off, but I can’t stop now.

“It wouldn’t be fair that I’ve been over there twice now, and nothing happened to me, and everyone else is coming back with scars and missing limbs and PTSD, and I’ve seen the same shit and I’m completely normal, and I don’t know why. Why don’t I get to be in pain like them? I don’t know how to help them because I can’t understand them. I need to understand!” I can’t keep it together and I start to sob. I think she is going to cry, but I beat her to it and collapse into her arms. She’s a foot shorter than I am, and a hundred pounds lighter, but she supports my weight easily. She was made to support my weight. It’s what she does.

My phone vibrates in my pocket, but I ignore it and let myself be held. I try to imagine the insistent buzzing as white noise, like what I might have heard in the womb. Something to calm me, to protect me against the noise of the outside world. Except this noise is the outside world, and I don’t have the option to ignore it any more. I pull the phone out and through the glossy blur of my tears I see Nate’s mom’s number on the screen. I take a deep, shuddery breath to try and rid myself of emotion, and press the answer button.

Her voice full of defeat and sorrow, Nate’s mom says, “Winch, I know where he is.”

*

When we arrive at the Browning family cabin fifteen miles into the country, the sun is sinking wearily below the horizon. The first thing I see is the car out front, that ugly piece of shit that I was glad to get rid of, not knowing what was going to happen. I’m still not sure why I bought it in the first place except that it was only three hundred bucks and I needed a car right away. I also don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to spray-paint the fenders and roof orange, causing it to resemble an Iraqi taxicab. I park in front of it and block it in. I don’t expect Nate to try and run, but I’m not taking any chances. The three of us get out of my car and slowly approach the cabin in a wedge. None of us are armed, and we’re in the middle of the US, but we can’t turn it off, that need to do what we were trained to do, to cover each other’s asses.

The front door to the cabin yawns open to greet us. I step up onto the decaying wood porch and the smell of gunpowder hits me immediately. It’s not a smell that you mistake for something else, especially in our line of work. I should hope for the best, that he was just out hunting, or he shot a wolf that wandered into the cabin, or he was spinning a gun on his finger like in the movies and it went off, harmlessly putting a round in the ceiling. But really, I know what I’m going to find. I pull my phone out of my pocket as I step through the doorway, because I know that in three seconds I’m going to be dialing 9-1-1. His mom thirty seconds later.

Except I don’t, because Nate isn’t dead. He’s sitting in an armchair that might once have been covered in some sort of floral print but now looks to be suffering from a combination of mange, fungal infestation, and dry-rot. Next to the chair is a cheap folding TV tray, which holds half a six-pack, a pair of sunglasses, and a Beretta 9mm. Nate’s fingers drum lazily along the pistol’s slide, as though he’s unaware of what it is, but I know that he can grab it in a heartbeat and do whatever he wants with it. I wave Remy and Dino off before they can enter the cabin, and they retreat back onto the porch and out into the gravel driveway. Now I’m alone with the guy with the gun. Smart move.

I look around the single room of the cabin. Not much in the way of furniture: an Army-issue cot on the opposite wall from Nate, a small rattan table, and the firewood rack. A handful of bullet holes trace a line in the floor in front of the fireplace and up the wall next to it. An empty beer can is in the fireplace with a matching hole through it. A second can is across the room, and though I can’t see a hole, I know it’s there. We don’t really miss that often.

Nate’s looked better. He’s wearing the pants to his uniform, but just a white tank top. He doesn’t look like he’s shaved or even bathed the whole time he’s been gone.

“How’s it goin’?” is the only thing I can think to say.

“Not bad, you?” he says.

“Been better, been worse,” I say. The third-platoon mantra sounds hollow in my ears, but I can’t not say it. I need something to be normal here. Every second that the sun withdraws from the sky, Nate’s face pulls a little bit more darkness from the air, like he’s a photo being reverse-processed back into a negative. I motion toward the fresh wounds in the floor and wall. “Target practice?”

He shrugs slightly, or else the fading light is playing tricks. “Just fucking around.”

I nod. “Yeah.”

“What do you want, Winch?”

“I’m here for you.”

“To bring me back.”

I shake my head. “I’m here for you,” I say again.

His fingers stop drumming on the pistol’s slide. He picks it up, but he doesn’t point it at me. “I’m not going back.”

“Don’t care. I’m here to make sure you don’t do anything stupid.”

He lifts the pistol to his head, scratches his temple with the tip of the barrel, almost lazily. “Can’t really see you stopping me.”

“Maybe not,” I say. I motion at the cot behind me. “Can I sit down?” He waggles an affirmative with the pistol, and I walk over to the cot and sit down. The canvas thrums as it stretches under my weight, the metal frame squeaks at the joints.

We just sit for a minute. There’s no need for words at this point. My eyes move from Nate’s face to the Beretta. He stares out the window next to the front door. I can hear Remy and Dino shuffling on the gravel outside. The smell of their cigarettes floats into the cabin with the darkness.

“Goddamn, I need a smoke,” Nate says.

“Remy or Dino’ll probably spot you.”

“Tell ’em to bring me one.”

I just shake my head.

I see pain in his eyes, sadness. He holds out his gun hand, palm up. “You think this is for you guys?” He sounds hurt, like I’ve betrayed him.

I say, “No,” and I mean it. It’s clear that he isn’t planning to shoot me or Remy or Dino, that there is only one possible target in this room. “Give me the gun, Nate.”

He shakes his head and pulls the gun back to himself. He cradles it against his chest. “Just leave me alone.”

I stand up and take a step toward him. “Not gonna happen.” I take another step. “Give me the gun.”

He points it at my chest, the first direct threat he’s offered since I came in, but we both know that it’s a bluff. I take another step. “You won’t shoot me.” Just a few more.

He puts the gun to his head and pulls back the hammer. “I don’t have to shoot you to stop you,” he says. Now I do stop walking. I can’t be sure this is a bluff. Nate’s always been unpredictable. “Get out,” he says.

“Why?”

“You don’t want to see this.”

I say, “There won’t be anything to see. Give me the gun.”

“Fuck off.”

“Give me the gun.” I take a hesitant step forward.

He yells, “Go away!”

“You know I can’t.” I cock my head and shout, “Remy, Dino, get in here.” When the mismatch twins walk through the door, I say to Nate, “Now we’re all here. You got something to show us, or are you going to give me the gun?”

His arm trembles, but he doesn’t lower the gun. I take a more confident step toward him and put out my hand. “Nate,” I say in a soft voice. “It’s okay.”

I’m not arguing now, I’m soothing, providing white noise against the world.

Another step. “We’re here to help.”

I’m three feet from him. I reach out and put my hand on his, on the gun. I don’t pull at it, because neither the gun nor the decision to let go are mine to take. “We’re here beside you.” Remy puts a hand on Nate’s left shoulder, Dino a hand on his right.

“You’re here with us.”

His arm drops. I slip the gun out of his hand and into my waistband as we all put our arms around him, and he around us. Four against the world.

*

Outside we stand in a circle, all of us smoking. I hate cigarettes, but right now it doesn’t matter. The other guys laugh at my hacking coughs, pat me on the back like I’m choking. It feels like I’m choking. I drop the cigarette and crush it against the gravel, my part done. Nate takes a long drag from his, and his face lights up red from the fiery ember before he flicks the butt toward the cabin and turns away. His gear is packed up in the trunk of the ugly-mobile, and we’re ready to head back to post.

“Who’s taking which car?” Nate asks.

“Yeah,” Dino says, “I’m not riding in the dumpster cab.”

Remy nods in assent.

“Can’t we just leave it here?” Nate asks.

I shake my head. “CO wants it for the report.”

“You gonna get in trouble for giving it to me?”

I shrug and say, “Fuck ’em.” We both smile. “You and me in the shitbox,” I say, “Remy and Dino, you’re in my car, right behind us.” They look overjoyed at this and I throw Dino the keys. As they get in the car, I say, “But no fucking smoking.” They smile and close their doors. The stereo blares past the closed windows. They better not blow out my speakers.

“This really is an ugly fucking car,” Nate says from the passenger seat once we’re in and ready to go.

I put the car in drive. “Sure is.”

We drive away from the cabin, a two-car convoy. The road winds around and through the small hills and ravines. It’s slower going in the dark. I intermittently lose Dino and Remy in the mirror behind me as we curve along, hugging the guardrail that sits between us and a twenty foot drop. Then they’re back for a minute or two until another curve separates them from my vision again.

“So what’s gonna happen when we get back?” Nate says.

“Don’t know. You weren’t gone that long, they’ll probably just dock your pay.”

He doesn’t say anything, just looks out the window.

“And Sergeant Martinez will want me to smoke the shit out of you.”

He turns back to me and smiles. “If that’s the worst that happens to me, I’ll be happy.” I smile, too, but I don’t say anything. We both know the worst for Nate will be going back. I hope he understands that he won’t be alone, that he’ll have all of us with him. That slogan from a few years back is bullshit. Each of us isn’t an army of one. We’re all an army of brothers.

“So, seriously, what were you thinking with the paint job?”

I’m about to answer, when I notice something in the rear-view. I can’t be sure what it is yet, so I slow down.

“The orange is all streaky. You could have at least used more than one coat.”

There it is again. A glow in the mirror, Remy’s face lit up red. “They’re fucking smoking.”

“What?” Nate turns to look out the back window, so he doesn’t warn me about the whitetail buck that pops out from the trees in front of us on our left. I see it in my peripheral vision first, so I over-correct in surprise. I yank the wheel to the left, which sends the rear of the car fishtailing to the right. I spin the wheel the other way to compensate, but it’s not enough and we simply drift along the asphalt, missing the buck by inches and hitting the curving guardrail broadside at thirty miles an hour.

The guardrail holds, but it can’t stop the momentum of the car. We spin over the rail and roll down the hill. We’re both wearing our seatbelts, so we just dangle in the artificial antigravity as the world turns around us. I hear the car’s repeated impacts with the ground, but it’s muffled, drowned out by the heartbeat in my ears and the screaming. It sounds like I’m screaming with Nate’s voice, or maybe he’s using mine. Maybe the car is screaming, in anger or pain. It doesn’t matter. I try and count how many revolutions the car makes, but I lose count at a million.

With a sickening crunch, we stop suddenly at the bottom of the ravine, right-side up. Nate and I just sit still, looking out the windshield. I can hear yelling above us. Remy and Dino. Are we all right? Eventually Nate and I look at each other, but neither of us knows what to say. Finally, he shrugs his shoulders and says, “Huh,” and gives a small snort of laughter.

He’s in shock. I watch as he opens his car door and hops out, apparently undamaged by our descent. He has to be in shock, massive blood loss is blocking the pain receptors. He doesn’t know he’s only got a few more seconds of consciousness. But he doesn’t fall down. I don’t see any blood. Maybe he’s not the one in shock. I try to open my door, but it doesn’t budge. It’s me, I’m the one hurt. I’m paralyzed on my left side, and I can’t do anything.

No. I can move my arms and legs, I can feel them. The door isn’t opening because it’s blocked by the large oak tree that we came to rest against. I unclick my seatbelt, slide across the seat, and fall out of Nate’s open door onto the ground. Jagged rocks cut my hands as I land. I make it my feet, my legs wobbly, and lean against the car. Looking down at my body, and patting myself with my hands, I find no injuries. I’m okay. Nate’s okay. Everything’s okay.

Nate runs over and hugs me, laughing.

“Why are we okay?” I ask when I get my voice back.

“Who knows?” Nate looks up and I follow his gaze to see Remy and Dino picking their way down the hill. The road is twenty feet above us. We probably only turned over twice during the fall. Nate releases me and walks around the car, inspecting it like he’s a claims adjuster. He kicks the tires and checks the glass in the side-view mirrors, both of which, somehow, survived the roll.

Remy and Dino make it into the ravine and come rushing over. “Are you okay?” Remy asks, his eyes saucers in the moonlight.

I punch him in the face, probably pretty close to where Dino hit him earlier. “Been better, been worse,” I say.

He looks angry at first, but his face softens and I think he understands why I hit him. Dino points at Remy and laughs. Then Nate comes up, smiling, and knees Dino in the nuts. “Been better, been worse,” Nate says. Dino groans at his feet, but the rest of us smile. None of this matters.

Nate picks up a softball-sized piece of granite and throws it through the rear passenger window of the shit-mobile. He finds a larger rock and smashes it down on the windshield once, twice, three times. With the third hit, he starts to laugh uncontrollably. He leaves the rock on the hood and searches for one even larger, laughing the whole time.

Remy, Dino, and I just look at each other, two of us in pain. Remy shrugs and picks up a rock of his own and chucks it at the passenger mirror. The mirror casing explodes. Dino pulls a knife out of his pocket and begins deflating the tires. Remy and Dino also begin laughing, echoing Nate’s loud mirth at this wanton demolition.

I watch them destroy the car, smash the glass, dent the body panels, tear the upholstery. I close my eyes and listen to the crunch of rock against metal and feel myself relax. Laughter and destruction fill my body and wall me off from the rest of the world. Right now, there is nothing but us and the car, a group of men wrecking something that used to have meaning. I don’t know how long this will last.

Sergeant Reiss insisted on giving a full patrol order every time we left the wire. I thought it was overkill, but I didn’t mind as much as some of the other guys. Haggerty especially was always going on about how it was a waste of time. It’s not like there was anything else to do, but he was obsessed with efficiency. Back in Twentynine Palms, he had a million little projects he would work on in our barracks room during the endless hours we spent waiting to be told what the plan for the day was, waiting to be released in the afternoon, waiting to deploy. While I’d sit and play video games like a normal person, he’d try (and fail) to learn foreign languages, do hundreds of pushups, and pace like a maniac. Haggerty just couldn’t accept that some time wasn’t his to spend.

On deployment, he had the bunk above mine in our squad’s platform tent. Inside, there were six other racks and a beat-up TV that the guys we relieved had left for us. Outside sat a generator that sometimes coughed exhaust into the tent. Our stained sagging mattresses had been around since the war started, and I could feel the bedframe’s springs under my ass as Haggerty and I sat side by side on my rack, taking notes while Sergeant Reiss briefed.

“Fuckin’ simple shit tonight, gents,” he began. “We’re going to depart the east ECP, swing by the ANA checkpoint on Highway 1, and return via the airfield. Orientation remains the same. We’ve still got Little to our east, the highway to our north, Big just past that, and fuckin’ nothing to our west and south. Weather tonight will be clear, with 6% illumination…”

I copied down all of the meteorological data, along with the same enemy situation and the same friendly situation that had held true for the previous three months of deployment. I wrote word for word “the Taliban are active throughout Washir. I expect them to mass to fireteam size in order to carry out hasty ambushes if they are alerted to our presence” and “the ANA maintain checkpoints along Highway 1. At night they are often high or asleep, so we can’t count on them for help. 3^rd squad will be on QRF and they’ll be able to reach us within 30 minutes.” I glanced over at Haggerty’s field notebook. All he’d written down was “ANA checkpoint, Highway 1.” In his defense, that was all any of us really needed. We’d already done this exact same patrol at least ten times.

Sergeant Reiss read off our mission statement (“On order, 2^nd squad interdicts the Taliban in the vicinity of Highway 1 in order to deter enemy activity and strengthen our partnership with the Afghan National Army”) and walked us through the patrol route, using empty cans of dip to signify our vehicles on a mockup of the surrounding grid squares he kept in the middle of our tent. He finished by listing all the frequencies to program into the vehicle’s radios (the same frequencies we’d been using the whole deployment) and telling us the succession of command, in case he went down. Sergeant Reiss asked for questions. There weren’t any.

“Alright. Check your shit, then get some sleep. We’re pushing out at 0200 so I want everyone at the vehicles by 0130.”

The brief over, we turned to personal preparation. My pre-patrol routine was automatic: I kept my kit staged in the same spot, with my rifle hung from the same bedpost and my boots pointing the same way with one sugar-free RipIt (the caffeine equivalent of two cups of coffee) stashed in each of them. Everyone had their own way of getting ready, from the rosary Schumacher prayed to Doc Warrington’s habit of jerking off before bed. Whatever it was, we’d all had plenty of practice, and 30 minutes after Sergeant Reiss’ order ended, the squad racked out with our alarms set for 0100.

*

Everyone killed their alarms on the second or third ring. We got dressed and kitted up in silence, each set of bunkmates in an island of light from the bare bulbs that hung from the canvas above our racks. I chugged one of my RipIts and pocketed the other, in case I started nodding off later. The center of the tent was still dark.

February nights in Helmand are cold as fuck, and we shivered underneath our flaks and kevlars during the five minute walk to the motor pool where our up-armored MaxxPros sat waiting. Haggerty and I took our seats in the back of vic one, with Sergeant Reiss in the passenger seat as vehicle commander, Donahue driving, and McClellan in the turret.

Our interpreter Aziz was already in the vehicle. He rolled with our fireteam, but he never came to Sergeant Reiss’ briefings. He’d already been working out of our FOB for nearly two years. His job was to sit inside the vehicle, get out when Sergeant Reiss told him to, repeat whatever shit Sergeant Reiss and the Afghans were trying to say to one another, and then get back in. He was older, with bifocals and flecks of gray in his well-trimmed beard, and he wore a knit sweater under his castoff flak. He looked like a college professor.

Like Aziz, Haggerty and I didn’t have anything to do until we got to the checkpoint. There, our job was to get out with Sergeant Reiss and Aziz and make sure none of the ANA shot them in the back of the head. An implied task was to not get ourselves shot either.

While Sergeant Reiss got comm checks with the operations center and requested permission to depart friendly lines, Haggerty bent towards my jump seat and motioned for me to lean in.

“I think Gabby’s cheating on me.”

“Are you serious?”

“I mean, I’m not 100% sure. It’s just little things. Like I saw on her Instagram story that she was at a party on Saturday night. When we talked on Monday and I asked her what she’d done over the weekend, she said ‘nothing.’ And the other day some dude commented on one of her photos. I asked her who he was, and she said it was one of her cousins. But I remember her telling me like six months ago that all of her cousins are girls. My point is, why lie if there’s nothing going on?”

“Fuck, dude. Do you know anyone she’s going to school with who could keep an eye on things for you?”

“The only people I know there are her friends, there’s no point asking them.”

“Fuck. I don’t know what to say.”

I really didn’t. But I did know that Gabby was a junior at UC Riverside. She had two older brothers that she got along with well, her parents lived in Palm Springs, she was majoring in biology, she wanted to be a doctor someday, and she played on the club volleyball team. She was tall for a girl, she almost always kept her hair tied back in a ponytail, and she wore the same floral perfume as my sister. Gabby chewed gum constantly, which made kissing her taste like spearmint.

Haggerty knew all of this too, except for the fact that I knew any of it. He turned to our terp.

“Aziz, you’re old. You got any girl advice for me?”

Aziz laughed. “I am maybe not the best to ask. My wife, I have not seen her in more than one year. The Taliban came to my house and said they would kill me next time I come home. So she tell them I’m already dead. Now, she pretends to be a widow until I make my three years and get our visa. Then, both of us go to America.” He wiped his glasses on the sleeve of his sweater. “I still send money home and we talk on the phone. So that is maybe my advice to you. Call on the phone and send money.”

“Goddamn Aziz, you always keep it heavy.”

He shrugged. “You ask me, this is what I tell you.”

We fell silent, listening to the low throb of the MaxxPro’s engine as we left the FOB. Our route took us through what used to be the largest American base in Helmand. We’d turned over most of it to the Afghans, and our perimeter was now a square postage stamp in the corner of their envelope. The Afghans manned the outer fence, sort of. In between our walls and theirs was a wasteland of materiel: Old canvas tents, rusted out vehicles, coils of barbed wire protecting nothing, long-empty concrete bunkers. The Afghans had taken anything worth the effort years earlier, when the American tide had first receded. All that was left now were the equivalent of tidal flats, wide expanses of dust reeking of dried piss and rotted wood.

We crossed this nothingness and reached a small guard post with a metal arm blocking the road, the main entry control point for the Afghan base. Beyond was Afghanistan. The real Afghanistan, not the FOBs on which most Americans spent most of their time. To be fair, in our armored vehicles and flaks we were basically tortoises who took the FOB with us like a shell. Still, beyond the ECP was something closer to reality. A small Afghan in tattered camouflage trousers and a yellow t-shirt that glowed under the shack’s lights jumped up from a plastic chair and lifted the arm for us.

“MANANA!” McClellan yelled from the turret. Sergeant Reiss was big on making us say “thank you” to the Afghans. He was kind of a boner about counter-insurgency stuff. The way I saw it, if saying “please” and “thank you” was all it took to win this war, we would’ve been out of here fifteen years earlier. But it couldn’t hurt, I guess.

No matter how many times I’d done it, I still got a bit of a rush from leaving the wire. Even though there was no real difference between the desert we’d just crossed and the desert we now entered, there was something unmistakably different on the north side of that guard post. An undercurrent of electricity ran through the air. We were out and about in Helmand Province, Afghanistan; anything could happen. It could be the last ten minutes of our lives and we might not even know it. I straightened in my seat and craned my neck to see out the MaxxPro’s portholes. I could just discern the outline of a cluster of mud huts some 800m distant, the hamlet we called “Little” (to distinguish it from “Big” on the other side of the highway).

Even outside the wire, Haggerty couldn’t keep Gabby off his mind. He whispered now, having gotten bitched out by Sergeant Reiss plenty of times for talking about bullshit on patrol. Haggerty was saying something about how he didn’t want to waste his time, and if they were going to break up, they might as well do it sooner rather than later. I pretended to listen, muttering that if that was the case he shouldn’t date anyone he wasn’t going to marry. But the truth was I couldn’t keep Gabby off my mind, either.

I remembered sitting across from her at a table in the back corner of a bar, comparing the fake IDs we’d used to get in. Hers was from New Jersey; it was a joke between her and her cousins (yes, they were all girls) that they’d used the same uptight single aunt’s address in Cherry Hill for their fakes. Mine was from Minnesota, a hand-me-down from one of the older mortarmen. It’d cost me $100. Gabby’s had run her five times that, and it was laughably bad. But a perk of being a girl that looks the way she does is that bouncers could give less of a fuck whether her ID is any good. So we’d both gotten into this bar, a fifteen minute walk from her dorm and a two hour drive from my barracks. I’d insisted on making the trek, partially to be a gentlemen and partially on the off-chance she’d invite me back to her place. After a round of drinks, she was laughing at my jokes and leaning towards me while she compared our IDs side by side.

“This doesn’t even look like you,” she laughed.

“At least it looks like an ID. Yours looks like one of those fake permission slips kids try to make where they sign their mom’s name in crayon, saying they were late to school because their dog escaped or whatever.”

“Oh come on, it’s not that bad. It worked, didn’t it?”

We mostly just joked back and forth like that. It wasn’t one of those epic first dates you read about where the couple talks until dawn and gets married as soon as the courthouse opens the next morning. But we didn’t hate being around one another and she was seriously cute, both of which are big wins whenever you meet someone off a dating app. Still, we only had two beers, because I was driving, and there can’t have been more than an hour between our awkward “nice to meet you” hug and when I settled the tab.

The part I think about the most is the last twenty minutes or so, beginning with when I asked to walk her back to her dorm. It was the sort of thing I thought grown men were supposed to do. The entirety of my experience with women up to that point consisted of a long-term high school girlfriend and a handful of one night stands in San Diego; I didn’t know how to handle a real, no-shit date. But walking Gabby back to her place felt right, and she agreed at least enough to have me along.

I still had some vague idea of fucking her, but as we traced the leafy edge of her campus, it became more like a fantasy than something I could be doing within the next hour. I felt like I was carrying a priceless Ming vase in my hands, and the only thing on my mind was not messing it up. Not tripping on a crack in the asphalt and splitting my face open, not saying the wrong thing, not pushing too hard too fast.

When we reached the stone steps of her dorm, Gabby paused, looking down at her feet. My heart pounded in my ears and I found myself breathing hard, like I’d just run the half-mile from the bar to her place.

“Well, thanks for the drinks. I had a nice time.”

I don’t think I said anything back; I just kissed her.

Normally, driving up the hill to Twenty-nine Palms is the most depressing shit in the world. First the road weaves between these angry-looking mountains, and then for the last half-hour civilization slowly fades away until you find yourself in Two-Nine, a town with a “Hundred Miles to Next Service” sign on its far edge. But for once I didn’t mind the desert. I was blissed out, my truck’s engine wailing to maintain 85 MPH going uphill. I thought I’d found an oasis with Gabby, I really did.

In a different desert, far from the smooth asphalt of Highway 62, we turned off the gravel access road leading in and out of base. Our command didn’t want us driving on the Ring Road itself. The shoddily constructed highway could barely handle the weight of our vehicles, and the few long haul truckers who kept Afghanistan’s economy running hated having to slow down for our convoys. At Sergeant Reiss’ direction, Donahue eased our MaxxPro onto a washed-out dirt path that led to the Afghan checkpoint we were visiting. As we bounced along, I could hear the occasional truck fly by on the highway 200m to our north.

The checkpoint consisted of two buildings, a new guard shack made of corrugated metal reinforced with sandbags and an old, abandoned mud hut that the Afghan soldiers had claimed as their hooch. Our squad seamlessly brought the three vehicles into a tight 360 degree security perimeter between them, forming a peace sign if viewed from overhead. Donahue lowered the back stairs, and Haggerty, Aziz, and I walked out to link up with Sergeant Reiss and head inside.

I dropped my night vision goggles down for the short walk. Our NVGs worked by magnifying ambient light, but it was a new moon, and with no light to magnify, I could barely make out where the buildings ended and the sky began. Looking up, though, I could see all of the stars that were normally too dull to be visible. I thought of an old Incubus song I’d liked in high school: The sky resembles a backlit canopy, with holes punched in it… I wish you were here.

I pulled my NVGs up and off my face when we arrived at the guard shack. The four of us stepped inside and were greeted with the overwhelming smell of hashish. An Afghan soldier sat on the floor, reclining against the sandbags that lined the wall. His back was to the highway.

“Salaam aleikum,” Sergeant Reiss said, placing his hand over his heart in the traditional Afghani greeting. The Afghan nodded and smiled. He didn’t stand or gesture for us to sit. Sergeant Reiss told Haggerty to post up just outside the door. He’d brought both of us because there were supposed to be two ANA soldiers inside.

With his own knowledge of Dari exhausted, Sergeant Reiss turned to Aziz to translate. They made small talk with the Afghan, discussing how cold it was outside and how much traffic had been coming by on the highway. The purpose of the checkpoint was to deter the Taliban from moving around freely on Highway 1, but short of stopping every vehicle and ripping it apart to search for weapons, there was no real way to do this. The actual value added of this particular spot was to serve as a bullet sponge, drawing attackers away from the larger base half a mile to the south. This guard shack was a reincarnation of one that had been leveled by a vehicle-borne IED a year and a half earlier. The Afghan seemed to accept this, replying to Sergeant Reiss’ questions with the tired air of a man who knows his answers don’t matter. Or maybe he was just stoned.

Sergeant Reiss eventually cut the shit. “Aziz, ask him why there aren’t two guys in here. Tell him we know they’re supposed to have two guys in here.”

Aziz and the Afghan went back and forth in fast, lyrical Dari. The Afghan punctuated his sentences with a series of shrugs and flicks of his hand.

“He says it is because two of their men are home on leave,” Aziz explained. “They were told to be back two days ago but they could not travel because of violence. At the checkpoint, they do not get a replacement and now only four are here. If they have two awake all night then there is no time to sleep.”

“Alright, whatever.” Sergeant Reiss shifted his shoulders under the weight of his flak. “Ask him all the oversight questions. You know, last time he was paid, last time he got leave, last time one of his NCOs came out here to check on him, all that shit.”

While Aziz and the Afghan talked, I continued to scan the room. Besides a ceramic bong, the only other furniture was a chamber pot. Thankfully, it was empty. The walls were lined with sandbags stacked up to waist height. A light machinegun stood on a fixed post, pointed out along the short strip of dirt road that led from the checkpoint to the highway itself. It wasn’t loaded. Belts of ammunition sat coiled in a rusted can on the floor.

Aziz finished with the Afghan and turned to Sergeant Reiss. “He says they were paid last week but not enough. I do not know if this is true or if he just wants more money. They have not seen any of their leadership in two weeks. He says it is because they are with the operation in Marjah right now. And he has not been home in six months. He is from the north, near Mazar-e-Sharif he says, and he wants you to know that there, the people are very good, but here, in Helmand, they are very bad.”

Sergeant Reiss nodded. “Alright. Tell him we say thanks for his time or whatever. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

We said our goodbyes and filed out the door. I went last. The Afghan stared up at me from the floor, and before I turned to leave, he flashed a toothless smile. I waved back awkwardly and closed the door behind me.

Haggerty was waiting for us outside. “Sergeant, are we going to go over to the other compound?”

“Nah, they’re just sleeping in there. No point in waking them up.”

“Good to go, Sergeant.”

Donahue saw us coming and dropped the stairs. We took our seats and began the drive back to our FOB. While the vehicle turned, I looked out the porthole and caught a glimpse of the Afghan highlighted through the checkpoint’s window. He was standing up now, but instead of watching the highway, he was watching us drive away. I thought to wave again, but he had no way of seeing me in the dark.

“Anything happen in there?” Haggerty asked.

“Nah. You see anything?”

“One of the guys from the hut got up and took a shit, like, right outside. That was it.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah. I got some good thinking done, though.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m not gonna break up with Gabby.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I mean, what’s the point? I’m over here. There’s nothing I can do about it. I guess it’s nice having someone to talk to. I’ll see what the deal is when we get home.”

“I feel that.”

“It’s not like I have any other options, you know?”

I told him I did. I hadn’t chosen to end things with Gabby, either. We’d actually made plans to hang out again the weekend after our first date. She was going to take me to a house party off-campus. I wondered what she would introduce me as. Friend? Acquaintance? Something else? We’d be drinking, obviously, so she probably didn’t expect me to drive back to Twenty-nine Palms that night. I hadn’t told any of the guys, not even Haggerty, because I didn’t want to jinx anything.

But then one of my seniors decided he wanted to go to LA that weekend, and he voluntold me to stand duty for him on Saturday. Gabby was busy Friday night, and I would be in the field the following weekend. So we had to slow our roll for two weeks.

And then two weeks turned into forever. It was day three of the field op we went on the week after I had to stand duty. Our platoon had some downtime between shooting all day and shooting all night, and a bunch of us were hanging around on our packs. Haggerty was bragging about this girl he’d been talking to on Tinder, an absolute dime he said, and he passed his phone around so we could all admire her profile.

It was Gabby. I didn’t blame her for that; I still don’t. We’d only hung out once, it wasn’t like we were exclusive. And I know that’s how the game works, that you have to keep your options open until you really commit to someone. I just felt weird about the whole thing. Which is why I tried to change the topic every time Haggerty brought her up after that, why I made a point of being at the gym while he got ready for their first date, why I avoided hanging out with them on the weekends once they started seeing one another, and why as far as Haggerty knows Gabby and I have only met each other once.

The one time he knows about was impossible to avoid. She came to our farewell before we deployed, and I obviously had to be there, too. The parking lot cordoned off for our goodbyes was pure chaos. Some of the wives were bawling, a bunch of over-tired toddlers were running around, and guys were trying to chug final beers without their leadership seeing.

Haggerty, of course, insisted I meet Gabby. I followed him to where his truck was parked. I realized that, for the moment, I was more nervous about seeing her than deploying. She seemed at ease, though, sitting on the tailgate, chewing a stick of gum and kicking her feet in the air.

“Gabs, this is my roommate Joey that I told you about.”

A flash of recognition crossed her face. Having had more time to prepare for our reunion than she had, I covered for her by introducing myself and saying I’d heard so much about her. The three of us made small talk, trying to focus on anything other than the fact that Haggerty and I were potentially heading off to our deaths and that the last time I’d seen Gabby she’d been running her hand through my hair while we made out.

Our platoon sergeant saved us from any further conversation, shouting with his gravely former drill instructor’s voice that we had two minutes to get on the fucking busses.

“Well, you two keep each other safe over there, ok?” she said, voice quivering.

We both nodded. I took the hint and boarded the white prison-style bus to allow Gabby and Haggerty a private goodbye. Somehow, I managed to resist the urge to spy on them through the window of the seat I’d claimed. Haggerty seemed shaken when he sat down next to me.

“You good?” I asked.

“Yeah, man.”

And then the bus lurched forward and we were gone. Gabby stood in the middle of the crowd of crying women, waving goodbye until they melted together and vanished behind us into the desert. I thought to myself that I’d see her again at our homecoming.

*

The same Afghan with the yellow shirt let us back into base, but this time we took a hard left along the fence line. Sergeant Reiss refused to take the same route out and back, so even though we were inside the Afghan wire, we had to take a dog leg by the airfield. Our FOB was too small for anything bigger than an Osprey to land, so we still relied on the Afghan flight line for most of our troop movements. They were supposed to have a guard posted 24/7, but as we drove by, the tarmac was empty. A random assortment of runway lights blinked on and off. The control tower was chained shut.

“You see anyone, McClellan?” Sergeant Reiss asked.

“No, Sergeant.”

“Fuck it, let’s just head back to the FOB.”

Donahue reversed our MaxxPro onto the muddy road that skirted the perimeter of the airfield and turned towards home. I caught myself starting to drift off, but I didn’t want to drink my second Rip-It this close to the end. Instead, I smacked myself in the face twice, hard enough to make my eyes water, an old stay-awake trick I’d learned in boot camp.

“Are you alright?” Aziz asked me.

“Yeah, just trying not to fall asleep.”

He laughed. “Yes, I know you do not want to miss a second of this.” Aziz spread his arms wide to encompass the MaxxPro, the checkpoint, all of Helmand Province, the whole country, the whole war.

*

It was almost dawn when we got to the tent and dropped our flaks with a collective groan of relief. Sergeant Reiss told us to hang out for a minute while he went over to our platoon commander’s hooch to debrief the patrol and get some word on what was next for us. While he was gone, I brushed my teeth with a water bottle and got into my sleeping bag, ready to pass out the moment we were allowed to. By the time Sergeant Reiss returned ten minutes later, I was struggling to keep my eyes open. He said we were going to the same checkpoint on our next patrol, departing at 2200 that night. I rolled over and went to sleep.

It’s zero-three hundred and I’m yanked out of a sleep so deep I wake thrashing and fighting like a marlin at the end of a hook. It takes me a minute to figure out why. Then the sounds of raw, unrestrained sex slap me further awake.

The anger flashes immediately but I try to reign it in, to give it a minute to dissipate. I’m in such shocked disbelief at what I’m hearing, the offending noise so wrong, I’m hoping someone will come to their senses and the problem will correct itself.

When that doesn’t happen I toss and turn. The volume is disastrously high. It bounces around the tents, reverberating throughout this end of the camp. I begin to think they’re doing it on purpose.

I lay there, my fury building. Should I?

“Oh my god,” a woman a couple of cots down from me mumbles, turns over, slamming a pillow over her head.

That’s it. I have no choice. I’m the senior non-commissioned officer in my tent. It’s my duty.

I shove my bare feet into my boots, throw on my grey hoodie with the four big letters spelling Army on the front. I stomp over to the tent next door and pound on the flimsy excuse for a door before storming in uninvited, strafing them with my senior-leader glare.

“Turn that shit down. NOW!”

They turn to face me. They are shirtless, in shorts, sweatpants, t-shirts and flip flops. All of them wear the shock of interruption. One dives and fumbles for the remote.

Oh yeah. Oh baby. Harder, harder, and the rhythmic slap of naked skin on skin weakens. The seams of the sharp night air, ripped open by the echoes of the graphic sounds, slip back together across the camp.

They are Scouts, just returned from patrol. Defiant, young boy-men who glower through ancient eyes. They hate me right now, but too bad. They are soldiers. They respond to my authority even though I’m not wearing any rank and my bed hair probably looks horrific.

I take a second to look at each of them, memorizing their faces. Three are huddled over a poncho spread out on the floor, a disassembled SAW laid out where they were cleaning the complicated weapon, piece by piece. Two others are leaning over a bucket, scrub brushes in one hand, their other arms shoved almost elbow deep into mud covered boots. Another one is standing in front of a small mirror hanging from a nail on a post, his bald head covered in shaving cream, a plastic razor in his hand.

Not one of them is sitting in front of the small TV in the corner with the built in VCR.

They follow the lead of the man I assume is their sergeant. Those that aren’t already, stand slowly, arms folding behind their backs, going to parade rest, further proof of their submission to my will.

I’m working to keep the anger in my voice now. Exhaustion, physical and emotional, feels like a cartoon anvil on a rope hanging above us, the rope fraying, all of us in danger of being crushed by it. I have no idea what they have done, what they have seen this day.

“I live next door. There are ten women in that tent,” I say. The gruff rebuke sounds genuine to my ears, if a bit forced.

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Keep it down now.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

I turn my back on them and walk out. My boots feel like bricks as I kick them off and climb back into my rack, deflated. The mumbled ‘thank yous’ that drift to me through the anonymous dark don’t lesson the buzzing in my head.

The clock glows zero three twenty. Behind my heavy lids I see them staring at me. Young men flattened by fatigue, with eyes as rusted as the spent casings they’ve left behind in their work.

A guilt dagger in my gut makes me want to curl into a ball, but the metal sides of my cot won’t allow it. I throb with unleashed emotion. Grief? Regret? I don’t know. Whatever it is, it tastes sour.

The hermit lived in the water tower with an alligator, both of them long-gone paler than moon. Their eyes gemmed the same pink in front of a flashlight. The hermit’s skin was scaly with scabs. His gums were too big for his lips to close over them. Some speculated that these traits were adaptive, or contracted; others insisted that the hermit had been born this way. He prompted various fictions of origin. The gator was a carnival prize won with marksmanship or a mallet-strike, some squinting feat of darts and balloons. The hermit had cast-netted it out of the sound. He’d chipped a golfball into its mother’s throat at a fatal angle and salvaged her sudden orphan from the water trap where it marinated. The hermit himself was a fugitive or dead celebrity. His retreat to the water tower was an act of grief, shame, or self-restraint. Lusting after a wrong object, he’d cloistered himself in that tank to confine perverse cravings. Regardless, he was up there: adrift on an inflatable dinghy, pale and long-mouthed and drained. The town coped with their bafflement by containing it in a holiday. The last week of every August the tank’s door was unbolted and the mayor laddered up the tower with a mic to conduct an honorary interview. The bank closed at lunch for this. The school declared a half-day. Everyone pooled at the base of the tower to catch the hermit’s proclamations crackling over the Shriners’ borrowed P.A.

He began with a purpose statement. He called the dark silk, claiming the tank was his cocoon. He explained the discipline of stillness, how he strove toward a torpid and unmuscled state. He enjoyed practicing shadow puppets with the flashlight on breaks. He’d never grown wisdom teeth. His waist size was twenty-eight. He had loved precisely once, like a flood: a drowning, destructive, lung-hogging sensation. He’d cocooned himself in the tank to escape. The love ebbed, but his insides still bore its watermark, a scourged and porous stain of a shade. The hermit siphoned off the haunt of it with his own hand when he had to. He burst blindly into the damp heat of the tank.

Spectacular, said the mayor.

After the hermit’s speech the floor was opened for questions. Most of these were procedural. The children wanted to know what the hermit ate. The parents wanted to know how he prayed. Their parents wanted to know if the hermit was coming down anytime soon so they could decide whether or not to keep putting up with no-starch diets, with catheters and radiation and nostrils chapped from tubed oxygen. They wanted to know what the hermit coming down would signify. Didn’t a cocoon imply a transformative exit? Wasn’t it an interstitial state? But no one asked why the hermit had gone up there. They kept their questions confined to the ways that he stayed.

One year a bone-old man came around. He’d lurked unnoticed until the Q and A, at which point he raised his cane and—before being called on—began making autobiographical claims. He explained he’d been born here too far back for anyone but the hermit to remember. He’d been drowned and un-drowned in that very water tower. He’d basked in the breaths of the man who’d breathed air back into him. He’d inhaled that man’s exhale, a gust that silked down his throat and spun a cocoon through his lungs. The man’s mouth had crawled into his. He’d wanted to cocoon the man, stow the man, hold him within until his own ribs bulged and broke with jerky ecloses. But he’d been too young. A boy only. He’d left town, but was back now, here to release the long-fluttering thing in his lungs. The bone-old man asked to be taken to the water tower. He claimed there was a kind of mistake that transformed as it aged.

Folks browed their hands over eyes, squinting. Frayed panting came through the P.A. The hermit limbed out to daylight, then, not bone-old but skin-old, his skin too small for his skeleton and sunburning at a visible rate.

“You came,” he said. “You came. You came. You came.”

The fire chief helped the bone-old man into the bucket of the tiller truck and lifted him up to the tank. The hermit kissed the bone-old man on his scalp, and the bone-old man kissed the hermit’s eyes, which now looked less like gems than mussels shelled in his face. The hermit’s gums looked like a swallowed animal striving out of his mouth.

“Well,” said the mayor, and climbed down the ladder. The fire chief backed the truck away. The tellers went back to the bank; the children went back to the classrooms, and the principal redacted the half-day. And the hermit helped the bone-old man down the ladder of the tank. They descended without palm fronds, walking off hand-in-hand-upon-cane.

The couple became the barnacle kind of locals. They sat side-by-side in porch rockers and corner booths, sessile, so still and plain-sight that folks went blind to them. Folks got the vague sense of a seal broken when passing them, the exposure of a thing stale from being too-long stashed away. There was the vague sense that holiness had a half-life; that a sacred thing left alone long enough would decay to the profane.

After a time it was posited that the water tower did no favors for the skyline. It was toppled that August, to applause, dissected by a Shriner-operated crane. A desalination plant was constructed in its place. It reverse-osmosed water from the Atlantic, straining off salt through membranes and boweling its product into flexuous tanks. There were those who claimed the tap still tasted salty. No one ever asked what the alligator ate.

This is the memory that stays with him as his blood abandons the body and life fades—this, the one comfort that will carry him into the next life. Dawran had waited beneath a mulberry tree in May of last year. He’d come to love mulberries in a small way—they’d always kept him company through the boredom of waiting. It was still cool in the mornings and evenings, the breeze shaking the branches, dropping the still tart clustered berries. So strange that trees bearing fruit must sacrifice their children to live. How an animal carries that seed away—the length of a kilometer, a province, a nation, to plant and bloom again. In this way, the child’s sacrifice meant something. He’d liked that.

He remembers Zafar’s simple house. Not more than a small compound with a low wall and one building, one shed. The gate opened, Zafar standing there in the vestibule with his daughter propped on his hip; the dim outline of a woman behind them. A handsome woman and child. Zafar put the girl down, kissed her once on each cheek, on the forehead, and on both cheeks again. He turned to his wife, and the woman smiled. The sight of Zafar’s family brought Dawran thoughts of the future, of blooming. At least, that’s how he likes to remember it—a smiling wife, a doted-upon child. Things he’d hoped to have one day, but never would.

Zafar took him up to the mountainside, where they could see the whole valley. They took a small bag. Some naan. Dried nuts and fruit. Rice. They had some work to do. Checking vantage points, watching the Americans and the government troops and police, drawing up maps of the improvements the Americans made to their little outpost. These soldiers were tired or lazy or scared, so they rarely ventured out, and the summer that followed was as quiet and peaceful as anyone could hope. Before they began their descent down the mountain, a pair of shepherds came across their path, offered them a little food and tea. They sat in a little basin in the foothills, where soil had accumulated over the years from all the sediment washed down from snow melts. While the flock grazed or huddled together or slept, the men sat around the fire, telling tall tales, reciting couplets of poetry, and resuscitating dead memories. They ate, drank tea, watched the half-disc moon crawl up the sky, trading places with the sun. The insects in the green valley below sang their song. Torch flies lit the marshy canal beds and mountain streams. A stray dog howled, and Dawran felt himself fortunate for his belly, now full with warm meat and gravy.

He remembers being thankful for Zafar, who’d had always been a patient eater. Methodical. Careful. And Dawran loved watching his mouth take some things whole, tear other things off in small bites, and seeing the thin film of grease form, his lips reflecting a little of all that moonlight. In the dark, his commander’s skin seemed more like polished stone than flesh. More than that, he loved listening to Zafar speak. He told a story about a book his father had brought back from Russia, about a giant fish and the mad fisherman who’d pursued it. We do such insane things for love, he’d said, tracing the outlines of the mad seaman’s obsession. He’d said it was love that’d driven him to madness, that he’d loved hunting the enormous fish, for it was the fish that gave him life, it was the fish that’d given him purpose.

Dawran remembers all the questions he’d had of the strange tale, questions that, when he gazed at Zafar, he knew he already the answers to. He had thought on that while the meal warmed his belly, and the fire drying the sweat from his clothes. Love deriving from purpose comforted him. It meant he could say he loved Zafar, this man who’d given him purpose, given his life meaning. And he’d learn how far that insane love would take him, but he’d stay loyal. He would slaughter a fat landlord with a knife, bomb his countrymen, and in his last living moments, watch his beloved commander flee from the field. He remains, above all things, loyal.

Even with the moon, they’d climbed high enough to not want to risk broken bones on their descent. So they spent the night there, camped with the shepherds around their little fire. They had only one blanket—Zafar’s—and Dawran was happy to let him have it, despite the night’s still chilly air. But the man told him not to be foolish, it was common practice for fighters—indeed a common practice among soldiers everywhere—to make spoons of their bodies and nestle close to share heat. He’d assented, curled himself in his commander’s embrace, his body like that of an infant in the womb, and listened to Zafar’s strong, steady breath, took in his musk—smelling of damp soil and leather and burnt powder—and fell drowsy to the steady metronome of Zafar’s heart against his ribs. They slept the whole night through, neither man moving a centimeter from the other. Through every challenge, every moment of doubt, every difficult choice, Dawran remembers this night above all nights. When the rooster woke the morning, Zafar shook Dawran awake. Soon, they heard the muezzin in the valley below singing the call to prayer. The two stood side by side, knelt in unison, their bodies bending as one, and on their lips, the name of God.

If you’ve never seen a desert, I mean, a real desert, you’d think the sand looks like murky brown water rippling in the wind. Sometimes I would tell myself that, as I traversed the barren land of sand and dunes. I wandered the desert for so long, my face was wrinkled around the eyes from squinting through the sun. My eyebrows were always raised; my forehead had ripples too. Did I see Someone?

On the days a light breeze brushed the sand, I imagined the dust rising like ocean spray after a wave. But then my tired feet would burn with the heat, and I’d have to keep trudging. Occasionally there would be people: tourists, scientists, gypsies. They’d pass me water. I’d take it without a smile. I always left them with my lips as dry and cracked as they were before. I never got hopeful when I crossed these types. They weren’t you.

My lips were waiting for you. My lips were waiting for your cool, sweet dew. When my heart began to tell me you were near, I would go whole hours sitting in the sand, just daydreaming of you. I twirled my long, knotted hair around my fingers. I cradled piles of sand in the form of you. Those days, it was even harder to set out across the barren land than during the hottest sun-drenched days.

My heart told me you were coming. And my heart found me the oasis. It told me where the palms were. It told me where the underground spring was bubbling up. When I found the tall green palms and the low green shrubs, my hunchback straightened. I no longer needed to bow against the wind. I stood tall; my eyes widened.

Tangled among the shrubs were myriad silks, pillows, jewels. I untangled the silks, polished the jewels, scrubbed the pillows until they shone as bright as my eyes. I worked day and night, drinking from the natural spring, energized, building for you. I grew dates and pomegranates and juicy melons. No longer skin and bones, I had hips for you to grab from behind and caress.

I saw you coming from many dunes away. I knew your heart was leading you to the oasis, to me. It was a windless day. The air was clear. I saw your strong shoulders first, then your long legs, then your touseled hair. Details came slowly. I bathed in them all.

Soon, you weren’t just a shadow. You were a man. A man with scruff. Thirsty, like I once was. But, unlike me, you were confident. Lost, but not lost.

As you approached, your thin sandals kicked up the sand behind you. I stood at the entrance of the palms, with lavender silks, gold cushions, white melons surrounding my beautiful silhouette. With my elbows at my sides and my palms up, I opened myself to you with a smile.

You squinted in my direction. You coughed, dry, short. My smile faltered slightly. You wiped your forehead with the crook of a glistening arm. My heart fluttered. I ran for the fresh spring water. I ran toward you with the water. Like gold, I offered it.

But, like the heat, I must have wavered in your eyes. A fiction.

You blinked me away. Just a dune.

Your form grew smaller and smaller to my eyes. They bleared until you disappeared. Invisible, I cowered like Romeo, slowly dying at the feet of your not-coffin.

After four months of not getting shot, not stepping on a mine, not taking a fragment to the neck or through the eye, Pat Dolan didn’t think about his remaining time in country. At the firebase, men talked about it constantly, as if would improve their odds. He never bothered. He had arrived on a day in July, 1971. On another in July, 1972, he would leave. Until then, every moment he survived was the only one that mattered.

Then, miraculously, the Army dusted off his change of MOS request and kicked him down to Saigon. As shake-ups went, it was a good one. It got better on realizing he had a remarkably fair boss. For a chief warrant officer on his second war, Pulaski was a hard-ass editor only when necessary. Otherwise, he assigned work to his men, then stepped aside and let them do it.

Four weeks slipped away as Dolan learned his role as the Army’s newest journalist. Learning the maps. Learning the cities and provinces. Learning the names, places and policies that defined the war – and, hardest of all, the language.

His crash course in Vietnamese was paying off, though, thanks to one ARVN lieutenant born in San Francisco. Likewise for three civilian journalists who’d covered Southeast Asia for decades. In a massive notebook he added words, phrases and phonetics, along with musical notes to help say them properly in a language where tones were everything.

After a month of intrepid news reporting, his latest piece was three hundred gripping words about an American vitamin pill now in use by ARVN troops.  Easy to write, palatable for the taxpayers, boring as hell.

There would be harder work, of course, in harder places – eventually.  Already weary at the thought, Dolan crossed the newsroom and dropped his article in the box by Pulaski’s door.

“I’m leaving,” he announced.

“Tôi đang rời đi.”

No one looked up.  Half the men in the room, military and civilian, were on deadlines. Hammering away on typewriters, talking on phones, gathering around radios and televisions. To them he was invisible.

At the door he stopped.

“‘Stairs,’” he declared.

“’Cầu thang.’”

“‘I am going down the stairs.’”

”Tôi đang đi . . .”

He frowned.

”Tôi đang đi . . .”

The rest of it slipped away.

“Shit,” he concluded, then started down.

“Phân.”

*     *     *

On Tu Do street he stopped to buy Newsweek and The Saigon Register. At work he had access to all the news he wanted, but rarely followed it unless his assignments required it. The irony was rich.

The sun was low now, the air cooler.  Looking for a place to sit, he chose a tea shop with a raised terrace.  He went through a set of green French doors and up seven steps into a vibrant yellow room filled with shelves and tables. Every surface was covered with jars  of tea.

An older woman in a blue silk gown appeared, then gestured around the room and invited him to choose. Awed, Dolan could not.

“Is surprise, yes?” she laughed.  “Very good!  I will make bring to you – yes?”

“Cảm ơn dì,” Dolan replied, trying not to stammer.  “Bạn – Bạn tốt với tôi.”

Thank you, aunt.  You – You are kind to me.

 Her smile broadened.

“Cảm ơn cháu tra!  Không có chi!”

Thank you, nephew!  You are welcome!

Dolan nodded, feeling foolish yet pleased.

From behind him another woman arrived, younger than the hostess and dressed more formally.  With her pink blouse and tan skirt, she could have just come from a bank or a law office.  One of thousands of professional women, done for the day.

Dolan bowed.

“Xin chào, di.”

Hello, aunt.

To his surprise, the woman was delighted.

“Xin chào, cháu trai!”

Hello, nephew!

Encouraged, he continued.

“Quả là một – ”

He hesitated, then tried again.

“Quả là một ngày đẹp trời.”

It is a lovely day.

“Vâng, đúng vậy!” she replied.

Yes, it is!

As the women laughed, Dolan bowed again and went through the door to the terrace. Their voices followed him, cheerful indeed, as if from meeting again after a long time.

The terrace had a slapdash charm. The stonework was cracked, and the wrought iron fence was bent here and there, with rust showing through the peeling white paint. Above it all was a wooden canopy, thick with vines, providing shade so deep Dolan first thought he was entering a cave.

At a table overlooking the street, he had barely sat down when the hostess arrived with a wooden tray.  On it were a cup, saucer and teapot made of jade green porcelain. In bowls of cut crystal were milk and sugar. A folded green napkin and silver spoon completed the display.

“I choose for you!” she declared. “So – you try! You enjoy, yes?”

Then she poured for him, filling the cup with a liquid the brightest orange he had ever seen.

“Please! You try now! You like, yes?”

Carefully he raised the cup to his lips. Hot but not scalding, the tea was excellent, tasting of oranges and nutmeg.

“Is trà cam,” she said proudly.  “You have back home?”

“Tôi – sẽ gặp?” he replied. I – will see?

“Is yes!  You enjoy!  You want more, you ask!”

She left  to sit with her visitor inside the open door. Together they laughed again, as if for an excellent jest, then began to speak earnestly. The walls inside the shop reflected their voices. The women sounded as if they were just behind him.

He set his cup down and studied the Saigon paper. The huge Chữ Hán characters dominated the page, while the accompanying Roman alphabet text struggled to be seen.

“English in Vietnamese,” someone once told him, as if sharing wisdom hard earned.

Groaning, Dolan opened his notebook and set to work.

“Tại Paris hôm thứ Hai, ngoại trưởng Mỹ Henry Kissinger da dua ra mot tuyen đã đưa – “

In Paris on Monday, America’s foreign minister Henry Kissinger stated –

That much he understood. No longer secret now, the peace talks were continuing at a snail’s pace.  The stunning was becoming the ordinary.

Almost.

On the street the activity continued unabated. The talking, the yelling, the laughing. The vendors and shop owners smoking and haggling. The adults on their bicycles weaving between cars and trucks and grinning teens on Vespas.

Then he heard singing. Looking down, he saw a young nun in bright blue approaching, followed by a dozen girls. No older than ten, each wore a white blouse, blue skirt and scarf. On their feet, to Dolan’s amazement, were penny loafers. Standard-issue footwear for Catholic girls worldwide.

They were singing about a dancing puppy, or so he thought. As they marched past they looked up at him and waved. A grin spreading across his face, he waved back.

“Xin chào!” he called out. “Cảm ơn ban!”

Hello!  Thank you!

Their singing became greetings.

“Chào ngài! Chào ngài!” 

Hello, mister! Hello, mister!

Dolan didn’t need the book for this.

“Chúa phù hộ bạn!” he added. “Chúa phù hộ bạn!”

God bless you!  God bless you!

Merrily the nun and the girls blessed him back.

He turned to see if the women were watching, too, but as he did they quickly looked away.

Unsettled, Dolan watched the chorus until they vanished.

Behind him the conversation resumed.

In French.

“He must not hear,” the younger woman said.

“No,” the hostess agreed. “Perhaps he is smarter than he appears.”

“True. His accent is appalling, but that may be his purpose. To deceive.”

“Foolish boy. He has everything.”

“As do they all.”

“So typical. Expecting everything. Believing they are worthy of it all.”

Dolan caught every word. His high school French had been good. At sixteen he met a college girl from Montreal who made him better. Getting him up to speed as she tore off his clothes.

After a moment, the younger woman continued.

“The heart of the village was gone.”

“But not all?”

“No,” she said flatly. “But then they dropped their demonic fuel. Their fire like liquid.”

“Yes. Such an evil thing.”

“It crushes me to think of it.”

“And this was before the wedding of your niece?”

“Oh, thank the heavens, no. By then she and her husband had moved to Hoi An. They were expecting their first child.”

“A girl?”

“A boy. Recently we celebrated his birthday. Now he is three. A most happy boy, with the eyes of his mother. We are blessed.”

“Every child is a blessing.”

Then they were quiet again.

Slowly, Dolan opened the Newsweek.

President Nixon last week signed into law the Twenty-Sixth –  

The words were difficult to follow.  He shook his head then tried again.

“The cadre had fled by then,” she went on. “There were a dozen of them.  No more.”

“And you knew them?”

“Some, but not all. Two were little more than boys. The youngest was fourteen. They had often been with us. So sad. They missed their mothers terribly.”

“Yes,” said the older woman quietly. “It wounds the heart.”

“Another man was familiar. He would stay the night with our neighbor. Perhaps the others were comrades of those who visited in the past.”

“Perhaps.”

“Most were in black, as is the custom. Two were in green. The eldest of them was most senior, although this was not apparent at first. His accent suggested he had lived in China. Perhaps he was born there. He seemed a decent man. He was in authority, yet he was possessed of – of a gentleness, one might say. He was scholarly, yet deferential, as if he were a teacher, pleased with his students.”

“And, that day, they simply appeared among you?”

“Yes. I think they came from the west but who can say. It was if they sprang from the air. They demanded entrance to our homes. They said the Americans were coming, and it was their duty to protect us – and ours to help them.”

“Yes,” the hostess sighed.

“Protect. How absurd. I remember my mother laughed. Laughed! Others begged the men to flee. Saying they could do nothing for us now. That their presence would only enrage the imperialists. Instead, they shouted curses at us. They shook their fingers at us and called us weak. Faithless. Then they were in our homes, placing themselves at our windows and doors, looking to the west.”

The woman paused, reflecting as she stirred her tea, the spoon clinking against the rim.

Dolan winced at the sound.

This week marks a year since the completion of Egypt’s Aswan High Dam, an epic –  

“Then they began firing toward the fields. Most of the Americans were keeping themselves low, but not all. One of them fell. I remember another hurried to help him, then that one fell, too.”

Dolan shut his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“And then they were began shooting at us. I could hear their bullets striking our homes, passing through walls, shattering glass. Then the cadre fled, and as they ran they pledged to return.”

She stopped again, then took out a cigarette and lit it.

Controversy continues over the death of Jim Morrison in –  

“’Return,’” she snarled. “These who declared themselves men. Liberators. Some we had known for years.  Now they were abandoning us. Running away down the path to the east.”

Dolan kept going. He hated The Doors.

“By then the Americans were using heavier weapons. Machine guns greater than those the soldiers carried. More bullets were striking our homes. Our animal pens. Our pigs, our oxen. They screamed as they fell.”

Dolan swallowed hard, seeing it all.

“But you did not,” said the elder.

“No.  Often I wonder why this was so. I knew of such things, of course.”

“Yes.”

“Now they were happening to us.”

“Yes.”

“Then we ran, too. We simply lifted our children, and then we ran. In that moment I felt I was floating.  Bounding in huge leaps, as if flying. I had never known anything like it.”

In New York, United Nations Secretary-General U Thant announced –    

“Then we heard their planes. They were low. I remember that. Approaching with a roar that shook the earth.”

The silence deepened.

Dolan watched the pastel-clad people on the street. The ice cone vendor and the eager children waiting their turns. The optimistic grandfather shuffling along, leaning on his cane, balancing a television on his shoulder.

He flipped the magazine over. On the back was a gorgeous couple, leaning against a Mustang convertible, gazing into a Malibu sunset.

“Our shrine was so lovely. It was old when my grandmother was a child. Her own grandfather had fashioned it with folding panels. He painted them a shade of gold that glowed. On clear days it was as though the sun had entered our home. Between them were two shelves. On the first were the copper bowls for flowers, and between them were the candle holders.”

She paused again.

“And on the second?” prodded the other gently.

“Many boxes. Some were the size of a sewing basket. Others were small enough to fit in one’s palm. My grandmother had built them from mahogany. She was most skilled.”

“The women in our family have always had such talents.”

“I remember how bright they were,” the younger woman sighed. “With a brush she would apply a lacquer to make each surface a mirror. Together in the candlelight, they shone with wondrous harmony.”

“And what did you keep in them?”

“Our treasures.”

“Yes.”

“Our memories.”

“Yes.”

“In one were petals of a flower. My mother picked them when she was a girl. She cherished them so.  In another was a lock of my father’s hair, kept from the day of his birth.”

In the cooling shade, Dolan wiped sweat from his forehead.

“The lid of another was glass, with a photograph beneath. A portrait of my grand aunt and uncle for their wedding day. They had travelled to a studio in Phuy Tan to sit for it.”

“To sit, as one would for a painting?”

“Oh, yes. It was much the same. Cameras were quite different then. One had to sit quietly, patiently.  One could not move or the image would be unclear. My grand-aunt told me they sat still as statues.”

The woman laughed dryly.

“She smiled throughout, yet her husband appeared very serious. She would tease him about this, as he was truly lighthearted. Often it was she who was formal in manner. That each bore the look of the other greatly amused our family.”

Dolan felt lightheaded.

“So many memories.  So much life.”

The printed words were nothing.

“It grieves me so, to know that it is gone.”

The sun had set.

Mechanically, Dolan took a piastre from his wallet and dropped it on the table, then two more.

“They took everything,” she said, her voice nearly a whisper.

Dolan froze, feeling their gaze on his back.

“Look at him,” said the hostess coldly. “This man. This boy.”

The money was more than enough.

“So healthy,” the other said bitterly.

It was too much.

“So prosperous. I wonder – what does he have to lose? What could they take from him?”

Dolan stood up.

He meant to feign ignorance.

To fold his papers then return the tray to the hostess.

To thank her.

Cảm ơn dì. 

To wish them both good night.

Chúc ngủ ngon.

He climbed over the railing instead.

And then he jumped to the street.

And then he walked away.

It was the only way out.

Grant crouched on the sandstone and leaned on his fishing pole. The sun warmed his shoulders as he stared through the clear, green water of the Sand Fork River. Shadows of particles on the water’s surface glided across the submerged, algae-covered rocks. A dragonfly buzzed over the water. There were no fish in the pool. His boots gritted against the rock as he stood. He took a deep breath.

He looked down the narrow valley as the hot breeze buffeted him. The green walls of the gorge hemmed the river into a space barely a hundred yards wide. Hemlock and sycamore branches shaded the whitish-tan rocks that formed its jagged banks. The water meandered around the boulders for two hundred yards before it dropped below the horizon into a rapid he could only hear.

He liked the river best when he was alone. There was only what he brought with him – no bustle, no people and their motives. No one trying to show off. No one trying to scare anyone. There was just the river and its own cacophony.

He listened to all the layers of sound. The river’s whoosh echoed off the sides of the gorge. The water lapped in a steady rhythm against the rock on which he was standing. It gurgled and tinkled around an exposed log a few feet away. Further down it poured between two rocks in a sloshing sound heavier than the gurgle. Then there was a steady thundering down at the rapids that reminded him that the river could change.

***

“This next one’s a bit crazier than the last one, man, but you’re doing good so far. Just keep it up,” said Brandon.

Grant looked behind him. Brandon’s tall frame was perched on the back edge of the three-man raft, eyes intent on the rapids ahead. His freckles were conspicuous on his fair skin. The swollen, muddy river stretched along the valley behind him. Spring had so far brought only rain. The valley was dead except for the evergreens and the beginnings of red and green buds on the other trees. They glided down a calm stretch between two rapids.

“Yeah. Right,” said Grant. He wedged his left foot tighter between the floor of the raft and its side. The roar almost a hundred yards ahead of them grew as they drifted toward it. “Man, are you sure we shouldn’t just walk the raft around this one? There’s nobody else out here if we tip over.”

“Nah, man. We’ll be totally fine. This one’s intense but it’s fuckin’ epic. Trust me,” said Brandon. He sat down and jammed his foot under the side. He nodded at Grant with a faint smile, then locked his eyes downriver. Grant said nothing and turned around. He gritted his teeth and shivered, wishing the clouds would break. He cinched the chinstrap on his plastic helmet.

He wondered how the hell he’d gotten here.

He’d run into Brandon on the campus of the state university. They’d graduated high school together, and he was a familiar face even though they’d run in different circles then. It was the second day of classes, the second day as a new college student just a few days removed from four years in the Army infantry and a tour in Iraq. The second day of bewilderment in a sea change. They got together on weekends through the spring semester, and Brandon took him the most laid-back bars, showed him the best grocery stores and hiking spots. They talked and bonded.

When Grant spoke of Iraq and a little of combat, Brandon spoke of being a whitewater rafting guide. It was a lot like war, Brandon had said once. He’d read a lot about it, World War II mainly. You had to keep it together to survive. That took balls. This would, too. The river was like that. He’d invited him to take him rafting before the season opened, just them and the river. It’d be epic, Brandon had said.

It sounded like it could be fun. Brandon had showed him a lot so far that was. Maybe it would be like the cool parts of the Army, the air assaults and live-fire exercises. The adrenaline.

“You sure you’ve gone down this one when it was this high?” said Grant. The booming rapid had grown louder. “You’re not bullshitting me, are you?”

“We’ll be fine, man,” said Brandon. “If you get thrown out, just curl up in a ball. You won’t get stuck under a rock that way. The current will just push you downriver.”

The image flashed through Grant’s mind of being pinned against a rock by the force of the river and his mouth went dry. Brandon stood in the raft behind him. The rubber squeaked and the raft rocked. Grant turned around. Brandon was mumbling to himself and scanning the rapid ahead, eyes wide.

“Yeah,” said Grant and faced front again. He pushed out a breath. The look on Brandon’s face had tensed him up. It was always worse when the guy in charge was scared. His limbs felt warm despite the chilled water that hadn’t yet dried from the last rapid.

Brandon dropped to his seat and the water sloshed underneath. “Okay, man. Comin’ up! You ready?! We’re hitting it from the left.”

Grant rolled his shoulders and gripped the tee handle of the paddle. He jammed his foot further into the crevice until it pinched his toes.

“Got it,” he said, adding force to the words. He couldn’t see the course of the rapids, only a drop twenty-five yards ahead and a scattering of worn boulders. The whoosh had grown into a thundering. He crouched low. “Yeah I’m ready.”

His heart thumped in his chest. He heard Brandon behind him taking deep, deliberate breaths.

“You fuckin’ nervous, man?” said Grant. “Shit.”

“Huh-uh, nah. Remember, dig with that paddle. Push hard,” said Brandon. “Okay, let’s go two left!”

Grant put his paddle in the water on the left side, ensuring the entire paddle head was submerged, and pulled. They veered to the right, pointing at a narrow passage between two boulders. He dipped the paddle in the water and pulled once more.

“Okay, rest…Let’s do it, man!” shouted Brandon over the intensified roar in front of them Grant stared straight ahead. He heard Brandon’s paddle hit the water, then the current sucked them into the rapid.

“Left! Dig!” Brandon screamed over the din of the crashing water. “Now right!” Grant switched hands on the paddle and hunkered low as he dug the paddle into the water on the right of the raft.

They shot through the crevice. The front of the boat dropped and Grant felt weightless for an instant before it smacked the surface of the water. He stopped breathing when water came in the boat, dousing him, and then a gasp filled his lungs with air that smelled of mud. Boulders jutted out of the water and swirled all around them.

“Left, left!” said Brandon.

A wall of water to his left rose several feet above his head. His paddle was horizontal.

“Right! Right!” He flipped his hands around and leaned over the right side of the boat to get the paddle in the water. His left foot came loose. A wave underneath the boat bounced him out of the rubber seat. He scrambled to shove his foot back into the side and righted himself as the boat shot down the rapid. A wave threw the raft to the left and into a rock, stopping it and tilting them at an obscene angle.

This was it, thought Grant, and his heart fluttered.

“Back left, back left! Oh fuck back left!” said Brandon. Grant plunged the paddle in the water and pushed backward and his arms burned. The bottom of the boat hit rock then broke loose and bounced against another boulder. It sent them hurtling down the river to the left.

“Two right and two left!”

Grant caught a glimpse of calmer water further ahead as he paddled. A wave crashed against the left side of the boat and drenched him. He blinked the cold water out of his eyes.

“Two right, two left again,” said Brandon with a voice that had evened. He took a breath and paddled. The raft bobbed in the waves, and Grant heard the sucking sound underneath as it passed over them.

The raft slid down the remaining rapids, mere bumps, and reached the calm. Brandon whooped behind him.

“Holy shit, man!” he said. “We made it! Was that not awesome?!” Grant turned around in the boat. Brandon was taking off his helmet. Water streamed from his face and through his short, red hair.

Grant looked at the rapid behind him, growing quieter as they drifted, and traced the path they’d taken with his eyes. His stomach churned at the sight of the water pounding the sides of the boulder against which they’d bumped and the tremble began.

“Okay dude, you see that rock over to the right? Let’s take a little break there,” said Brandon, pointing to a long, flat rock that jutted into the water. Grant nodded and paddled.

The raft scraped against the rock as they approached it, then made an abrupt stop. Grant still felt the motion of the waves rocking him. He propped the paddle against the wall of the raft and unsnapped the chin strap. He lifted the light helmet off and ran a hand through his wet hair. Brandon got out splashed past Grant. He tossed his lifejacket onto the rock and put his hands on his hips, regarding the rapid behind them. His chest rose and fell with deep breaths.

When Grant climbed out of the boat his legs were wobbly. He sat back down on the edge of the raft and fished his water bottle out of the dry bag.

“That, my friend, is some fucking whitewater rafting,” said Brandon with a satisfied smile. “You okay man? Looking a little pale over there.”

“I’m fine,” said Grant. He tensed his jaw. He took the life vest off and his sodden shoes squished as he stood. “Man, fuck. Is that it?” He took short, shallow breaths.

“Yeah that’s the last big one. The rest of them are babies, nothing like that. Just an hour’s worth or so until the takeout.”

Grant nodded. “I almost came out of the goddamn raft,” he said.

The old fear had returned in earnest, the gut-churning sense of doom like passing a pile of trash on an Iraqi road and wondering if it would explode and kill you or nail your best friend’s Humvee behind you.

“Ha! Yeah. Glad you didn’t,” said Brandon. “We’d have been screwed.”

“Yeah, especially with no fucking medevac,” said Grant. He wanted to scream at him for subjecting him to some kind of cruel, pointless trick, a measuring contest he’d never entered into. “At least in the Army we were smart about shit.”

He stared at Brandon, whose smile ebbed.

“Well, I didn’t know it’d be this high, but still, rocks doesn’t it? Figured you could handle it.”

Grant shook his head, feeling the blood rushing to his face and his back stiffening. “I sure fucking can. What are you trying to prove, man?”

“What?” said Brandon. His eyebrows shot up. “Nothing, dude. This is just fun. We beat the river, you know?”

Grant glared at him. Brandon shook his head, and then walked over to the raft and dug in his bag for a Power Bar that he ate in silence.

Just fun, thought Grant. Exactly. The war wasn’t just fun. It had a point. He’d gone because people had flown planes into towers his senior year, and someone had to step up and do hard things. It wasn’t about fun at all. All that fear – on the roads of Iraq, the raids, the incoming – it was about serving something other than ego.

“You hear that?” said Brandon with his mouth full. He nodded towards the rapid they’d just come through. “Listen close. That real low rumbling.”

Grant cocked his ear toward the rapid. He homed in on the deep booming of the water. His eyes narrowed as he focused on the sound.

“I hear it.”

“Know what that is?”

“No,” mumbled Grant. It was unmistakable now, a low, rolling knock beneath the higher pitched sounds of the rapid.

“Those are rocks moving along the bottom. That’s how powerful that current is. I forget the numbers on the volume of water the Sand Fork pushes, but yeah, it’s that powerful.”

“Rocks? Really?”

“Yeah man. This river’s no joke,” said Brandon.

Grant listened to the deep booms under the surface.

***

That was almost the last time he’d seen Brandon. He’d taken up his invitation for a celebratory drunk at McNally’s pub the night after the trip. Grant thought it could smooth things over. Maybe he’d overreacted, misread things when his blood was up.

The Sam Adams had gone down nicely. Easy conversation flowed. And they’d noticed a couple of attractive, seemingly single girls. This could be epic, too, Brandon had said. They sidled up to them at the long wooden bar and offered them shots. They accepted, but that was all. At the first sign of their disinterest, Brandon had regaled them with tales of the river, at how they’d nearly been killed if not for his expertise and calm. Should have seen how scared Grant was, he’d said. They weren’t impressed. And neither was Grant.

He’d avoided him since. He needed no measuring contests. He needed peace.

Grant picked up his fishing pole. He listened for the rumbling of the rocks along the river bottom but did not hear them now. He unhooked the lure from the pole and flipped it into the water. The ripples dissipated as they were carried downstream.

There were sixteen of us before the storm hit: truants and runaways and young offenders, girls in insulated yellow snowsuits, left to the dark Montana cold. We marched like ants across the tree line. We were terrifying and tiny and gone. Above us, icicles swayed from conifers, threatening to crush us alongside the mountain passage’s unstable walls of rock and snow. Only the counselors had radios. We had no say in where we’d go. The state had sent us to Bitterroot Wilderness Reform after we’d called our mothers bitches and spray painted tits onto bridges and robbed Safeways with unloaded guns, said we could choose to hike and talk about our feelings or go to juvie. We chose the mouths and crags of mountains, chose six weeks of litter-clearing and cold. We signed a form that swore if we died, Montana wasn’t liable, that we weren’t the kinds of girls anyone would come looking for. When the line of turkeys cut in front of us and a few girls jostled to look at them, one of our counselors, Candy, got bumped and slipped on an ice patch. The sound her head made against the ground was like a melon smashed against a brick. Wen reeled back and raised her hands to assert her innocence while I shielded my face and shouted “Wait!,” but by the time we’d lowered our mittens, the fourteen girls in front of us were gone.

We could’ve run after them, but we had consciences. Maybe ulterior motives. We wouldn’t leave someone to die. Snow scraped our reddened faces as the line of birds scrambled toward the nearby cave for cover, and the two of us huddled together until Wen separated and bent down in front of Candy, her knees vanishing under the snow.

———

We’d been paired into twos when we first got here, asked to look out for and rely on another delinquent. For six weeks, we’d distribute supply weight between our shoulders, go to the bathroom when the other had to, match each other’s footfalls step for step. Through our closeness, our scents would intermingle and become a new scent. Ideally, we would become indistinguishable from each other. Our counselors had linked Wen and me together due to the order of our last names, merged us as if under one skin. It was easier for them to keep track of us if we were accounted for together as if we were numbers instead of people, but Candy was different. We felt she wanted to know us. We wanted to know her.

When we first met Candy, she told us her real name was Candice but to call her Candy instead. Candy like sugar. Candy like something sweet. She greeted us on the roadside after we piled out of the van, and we shied away from her ringed fingers, from every white woman who’d hurt us before. The thing about sweetness was it was good in moderation but in excess, it rotted your teeth. The thing about white women was the kindness they promised was always too good to be true. I thought about the news story about the mother who’d adopted four children from China and shot them all in her basement. The mother who’d driven her eight adopted kids over a cliff. How, inexplicably, a woman who promised to care for you could turn on you, and how I didn’t even care if I was murdered, so long as someone took me in, and, when the barrel was held to my forehead, promised this was a way I was loved.

———

Wen thought Candy could care about her because she didn’t scowl at her like she was a hairy caterpillar under a magnifying glass or something. One of those pipe-cleaner-haired creatures that conjured the same feeling as an uncle’s pesto-filled mustache on your family’s annual trip to Olive Garden: crusty and externally-organed but somehow alive. How amidst our wide berths and arctic glances, she, too, felt like a fuzzy thing under a magnifying glass, a too-large and duplicitous moth. She listened with the rest of us as our driver into the wilderness gave us our first lesson on nature and its relation to our humanity: a lecture on prey fowl and predatory birds.

“It’s in the eyes, see,” he said, a wad of jerky wedged between his teeth. “In the ratio of white to pupil. It’s in the way they look at you, keen—there’s a shine that non-raptors don’t have. Big birds, always predators. Small ones, you’ve gotta check their beaks and eyes. Predators have mouths like hooks. Mouths for tearing. Mouths for skin.” He paused as we passed an Avalanche Warning sign. Wen looked down at her hands, their breadth like loaves, knobbed and callused to garlic knots, and ran a finger over the cracks in her lips. Big birds, always predators. Big girls, hungry and dangerous too.

———

“Okay, stand back. I, uh, saw this in a movie,” Wen said. She cupped Candy’s chin like a baby rabbit’s, raised it carefully, then pressed gently with her arm against Candy’s chest. Two pushes. Three. Nothing happened.

“Can you check her pulse?” I asked.

Wen pressed the back of her glove against Candy’s neck, then shook her head. “I don’t feel anything.”

“Take your glove off.”

Wen peeled her glove back and concentrated, her mouth screwing up as if she’d eaten a slice of sour grapefruit.

“A flutter?”

Alive, alive.

———

We paced around Candy’s body for a while, unsure of what to do or where to go. All week, we’d had people to yell at us or shepherd us into motion or prod us back into our line. Back home there was always at least someone to tell us to move faster or we’d be left behind. We stood alone and motionless for the first time, watched the snowfall as if we were infants trying to comprehend the moons of our mother’s faces. We heard the turkeys cackle from the cave but we made no sound. On the ground, where our feet once swam in evergreen needles, a coat of white gathered and hid signs of life. If we were normal girls, we might’ve taken handfuls of the new snow or stuck our tongues out to taste it. We might have marveled at how it tasted blue as mountains, tasted of fir trees and clear glass sky. If we’d been born better or less afraid, we might even have packed it in our hands and hurled it at each other like tickets from hometown arcade machines, but the truth was we didn’t know how. So instead, we stood motionless for a few minutes, then moved on.

———

The wind picked up, sending fragments of rock and ice from the formations above us and scraping red lines against our cheeks. Candy once said frostbite was most dangerous when you didn’t notice it, after you’d been outside too long and became numb. She told us this on one of the first nights when I woke up from a terror about being trapped under the snow. One of the program’s worst rules was weren’t allowed physical contact with each other outside of necessity, but Candy rubbed my shoulder, gave me the mercy of a caring touch. One night, she gave Wen her mushroom soup after she spilled hers, all the kindness we’d never known except for now.

We thought of Candy’s warning as snow gathered inside the crevices of our snowsuits, gathering in small piles on our shoulders before blowing to the ground. The cold began to soak through our clothes and so we, like the turkeys, retreated to the little cave. We carried Candy with us to a dry spot and slid her drenched coat off her shoulders. We bundled her up in a sleeping bag. We kept her warm. We cleaned the gash on her forehead and pressed it with snow. We sat on a damp stone and counted the food we had between us: four sachets of Uncle Ben’s ready rice (Tex Mex flavor: tomato, garlic, and puke), six blocks of shattered Maruchan chicken ramen, a carton of cashew-heavy trail mix, two packets of off-brand, likely expired Walmart fruit snacks, and an instant cup of mashed potatoes with a swollen lid. We tried to think of what to make and what the components of an actual meal were supposed to be. Candy looked so tiny in the sleeping bag, all nestled and motionless like a just-bathed sparrow shrunk to one-fourth its size. We thought of the way she carried a bag of popsicle stick jokes to share with us and walked beside us while we straggled, of how she only ever had praise for us and how she promised she’d never leave us behind. We thought of how stupid and corny she was when she talked about the importance of trees, and how we knew nothing about her but wanted so badly for her love.

———

“If one of you chickenshits lost the mac and cheese, I’m going to literally have an aneurysm,” I remembered someone saying a couple of days ago. Wen had looked downward and I’d shaken my head. Under a tarp the night before, the two of us had caught each other staving our hunger on raw macaroni beneath the cover of night. Each of us had watched each other in the darkness, our tongues blue and eyes wide as searchlights. Our breaths circled each other. In the cave, we put our pot up above the fire and filled it with snow. The water came to a boil, and we poured in a packet of puke-tomato-rice. We listened for the sound of bubbles, waited for that warm, gas station smell. We thought of how quickly a figment of warmth could become a vessel for all our hungers, for heat our bodies didn’t have. We wondered: What would become of us in the morning? If we made it out of the wilderness? Where would we go? Under masks of shadow and firelight, we hid our pitiful thoughts from each other, wore the learned disguises of predatory birds. Or maybe we hadn’t adopted curved beaks and claws as survival mechanisms but were instead born defective, and maybe our glimmers of innocence were merely tricks of the light.

———

There were things you learned when you didn’t have anybody: how to float in a neighbor’s bathtub and pretend it was the wide, cold ocean. How to fend for yourself and your siblings or you alone. What type of footsteps meant “bad” and what type of footsteps meant “good” and how to prepare yourself for either. How on the right morning on the right day of November you could convince yourself you were actually worth something and still be so stupid you got arrested for shoplifting the same day. How to bandage and cradle yourself after scraping your own knees against asphalt. How it was your own monstrousness that got you here and nobody else’s. How if you used the right voice for the right story and fabricated exactly the right details, everyone would believe you. How if you broke yourself down into something perfect no one would know. How you could do everything, yes, everything, alone and be prepared for a heart attack or a tornado or a Montana blizzard, and how your aloneness made you immortal. How there was only one spot between the shelves of canned food in the Safeway the security cameras couldn’t catch, and how if you ran every day you’d become faster than anyone, how you’d run fast enough to find a spot under the sun where you could lick a stolen ice cream cone for a few minutes, and nobody would come to run over you or your prize.

———

We waited for Candy to wake up, to move or make a noise or do anything. Without her, we were afraid and so lonely. We imagined ribboning our elbows against cave walls and crying just to feel her hands on our shoulders, for her to run circles against our backs, smooth and even. We wanted to curl into ourselves and become infants again — back before we’d done anything wrong, when a womb was an ocean and we only had to be passengers. Back when our lungs didn’t work and we slept when our mothers slept and we fed ourselves through the gristled tripe of her stomach. Back when the sun didn’t exist unless she saw it. We wanted to ask what we’d done wrong and what we’d done to deserve this. We wanted to ask: why is the sun warm and why does it burn? We wanted to know why there was no “d” in “refrigerator” but there was in “fridge,” why there was salt in both the ocean and the blackheads lodged in our noses. We wanted to know where the world came from: its burnt archipelagos, snow and sky. We wanted to know why continents were ridged but not planets and what the deal was with white people and farmers’ markets. We wanted to know why our mothers didn’t love us and because they didn’t, if she could. “Tell us a story,” we wanted to ask, so we could curl into her voice like a pillow fort and stay there forever. So we could hold on forever and not let go.

———

Wen and I took our sleeping bags, zipped ourselves together, and crawled inside. We held each other like sea otters through the cold. After Wen fell asleep, I worried about how something precious could always be taken from us in an instant. If Candy died, she’d kill the girls we’d whittled so carefully from our own bodies for her, the girls she believed us to be, the girls she wanted to hold. If she woke up different or changed her mind about our goodness, I knew we’d morph into something monstrous, who we’d been and who we’d always be. In the silence, I crept towards Candy’s motionless body. I checked her pulse, alive, alive, alive. Wen made a frightened sound in her sleep and I crawled back under the sleeping bag, and we became us again, and we hoped she’d die or wouldn’t die there, and in the morning, we sifted for something to eat.

On a bright December morning, the lieutenant told me the news. An insurgent group in Latifiyah had executed about twenty Iraqi Shiites. Their unburied bodies were still rotting in the desert. We had to do something. We had to help. That’s what he said.

“What kind of fucked up bullshit do you have us doing now?” I said.

The lieutenant crossed his arms. “We’re helpin’ out, Doc. That’s why we’re here.”

“Sir, you can’t be serious. After six months, after everything we’ve been through, we’re gonna go risk our lives to clean up a bunch of dead Iraqis?”

“That’s right, we’re gonna go do our job.”

“Pfft.”

“Hey, Doc, you just do what you’re told.” The lieutenant loved that line.

“Roger that.” I turned and headed toward the tent looking for Logan. On my way I passed Talal, our Iraqi interpreter.

“Good morning, sir,” Talal said.

“Where’s Logan?”

“Inside, sir.” Talal pointed to the tent. “He is sleeping.”

I nodded, entered the tent, and walked straight to Logan’s cot. He was lying facedown underneath a poncho liner. I sat by his feet.

“Guess you heard,” he said, rolling over. I shook my head. Logan put his arms behind his head and grinned. “You don’t look excited. At least it’s something new.”

I closed my eyes and sighed. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t give a shit anymore.”

*

Three hours later we loaded up the Humvees, did radio checks, and headed toward the gate. As usual Logan and I sat in the back of the trail vehicle. He was smoking. I was staring at the casings lodged between the benches. Some of them were only a few days old. We stopped outside the medical facility on our way off the FOB where a young corpsman was waiting with a stack of body bags. He handed them to Logan then tossed me a box of latex gloves.

From there we drove at full speed toward our destination: a bombed-out munitions facility near Latifiyah. Right as the town came into view we veered off the asphalt and turned onto a dirt road. I kept my head down until Logan nudged my shoulder. “You gotta see this,” he said. I stood up and followed his gaze. He pointed to a gnarled mass of rebar and concrete the size of an SUV. It looked like a gigantic insect.

“Must’ve been a bunker,” I said, pointing to a few more in the distance. We passed piles of rubble, the wreckage of various structures, a palm tree, and two burned-out vehicles. Tire tracks cut across expanses of dirt and brush. Not a soul in sight. “Hey,” Logan said, “this would be a great place to dump some bodies, wouldn’t it?” I nodded and sat back down. Then the lieutenant’s voice came over the radio.

“The road’s about to fork. Gunny, take your element south. I’m gonna head north.” Without slowing the lieutenant’s element bore right. We made a left and patrolled for another fifteen minutes until Gunny stopped the trucks. “I think we got something,” he said over the radio.

Logan, still standing, pressed his push-to-talk. “What do you see?”

“Don’t see anything, can smell it.”

I leaned forward to look through the windshield. Gunny stepped out of the lead vehicle, walked a few steps off the road, and stood still for a moment. He looked around then walked back to the truck. We started moving again. I stood up and took a deep breath. A sour stench filled my mouth and lungs. I shuttered. Logan wiped his nose.

“Can’t be too far away,” he said.

They weren’t.

“All right, stop the vehicles,” Gunny said. “About fifty meters to the right. Doc, Logan, go see what we got.”

Movement gave them away. Two mangy dogs circling a dark heap. We climbed out of the truck and they trotted off.

“I’m gonna shoot those dirty fuckers if this is what I think it is,” Logan said.

“Bro, I think we both know what this is.” I was breathing through my mouth to avoid the stench, a trick my mother taught me.

“Check it out,” Logan said, pointing with his boot.

An ulna or radius bone. Casings. I looked at Logan. Then at the heap of clothes, shoes, and decomposing flesh. I could see hair, blackened hands, and a few heads. The faces had rotted away.

“I guess we got our bodies,” I said, swallowing hard.

Logan shook his head and spit. “Seriously, man, how do we get stuck doing this shit?” He raised his M-4 and shot one of the dogs. The other ran off.

I reached for my push-to-talk. “Lieutenant, this is Doc, over.”

“Send it, Doc.”

“We have about five to ten bodies here in an advanced stage of decay.”

“Roger, you said advanced stage of decay?”

“Yeah, advanced.”

“Mark the location and keep looking.”

Logan and I exchanged looks. “Keep looking, sir? We found bodies.”

“Doc, we’re looking for a group killed in the last few weeks. Shouldn’t be seeing that much decay.”

Logan laughed. “Apparently the lieutenant’s a fucking coroner now.”

“You should tell him that,” I said. Then I pressed my push-to-talk. “Roger, sir, we’ll keep looking. What about the bodies we found?”

“Just mark the location.”

“I got the location,” Gunny said, cutting in. “You guys head back to the trucks.”

Logan turned and left. I grabbed a handful of dirt and tossed it over the bodies. When I returned to the trail vehicle, Logan was lighting a cigarette. I sat down, still breathing through my mouth, feeling a little sick. The lieutenant’s voice came over the radio again.

“Gunny, need you to move to us, I think we got ‘em.”

I located the box of latex gloves. As we bounced down the road I shoved a handful into my drop pouch. About ten minutes later the other element came into view. They had stopped next to a circular brick building. Its roof had collapsed, the entrance lacked a door, and parts of the walls were crumbling.

The lieutenant was standing at the entrance, waving. Our truck stopped, and without a word, Logan and I made our way to the entrance. “They in there?” I said to the lieutenant. He nodded and we stepped inside.

Loose rubble covered the floor. A cloudless sky had replaced the roof. Against the bare walls leaned eighteen bodies, shoulder to shoulder. All men. Each shot in the head, some more than once. Powder burns speckled their swollen and disfigured faces. The casings said AK-47. All wore button-up shirts tucked neatly into dress pants. Their hands were unbound. One had a note lying near his feet.

We just stared until Logan said, “What do you think, sir, been dead a few weeks?”

“Yeah, Logan, I’d say so. Doc, would you agree?”

I leaned down and picked up the note.

“Doc, would you agree?”

“With what?”

“That they’ve been dead two weeks.”

“Sir, I’m a combat medic. I have no idea.” I held out the note. “Should we give this to Talal?”

“Why don’t you give it to him?”

“Be happy to.” I pressed my push-to-talk and walked toward the entrance. “Somebody send Talal into the building.” Talal came running. I handed him the note. He took it with both hands and started reading. “What’s it say?” I said.

Talal started nodding. “It say who did this.”

“Go show the lieutenant.”

“Ok, sir.”

I stepped out of the entrance, let Talal pass, and walked toward Gunny’s truck. He opened the door as I approached.

“We don’t have enough body bags,” I said.

“Don’t worry about that. We’re not cleaning this up.”

“You gonna tell the lieutenant that?”

Gunny stared at me for a moment. “Yeah, I’m gonna tell him that.”

I felt relieved. Then Logan and the lieutenant started shouting. We turned to see them sprint out of the building. They slowed to a trot, stopped, and looked back. Both eyed the building as they made their way to us.

“What the fuck was that all about?” Gunny said.

“Something started beeping,” Logan said between breaths. He pointed toward the building. Talal was leaning out of the entrance, motioning for us to join him. Logan shook his head. Talal motioned again.

I looked at Logan. “The place gonna blow?”

Logan smiled. “Maybe,” he said. “C’mon.”

We walked toward the building. Talal stepped out of the entrance, picking at his moustache. I faked a smile. “What happened, Talal?”

“Telephone, sir.”

“What?”

“Telephone.” Talal held a fist to his ear.

We stepped into the building. Talal took my arm and guided me to one of the bodies.

“Sir, this one. Here.” Talal pointed.

I leaned forward to look. Talal backed away. Sure enough, I saw a rectangular bulge in the dead man’s front pocket. I reached into my drop pouch and took out a pair of latex gloves.

“What are you doing?” Logan said from the entrance.

“What’s it look like?” I donned the first glove.

“Dude, seriously.”

I donned the other glove, stepped between the dead man’s legs, and tried to angle my hand into his pocket.

“Goddamnit,” I said.

“What’s the matter?”

I looked back at Logan. His face was wrinkled with disgust. “It’s not gonna work,” I said, “not with him sitting up.” I stood and surveyed the bodies. “Logan, you think these guys are boobytrapped?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. You need a pressure-release fuze to do that. Would’ve blown by now.”

“Okay.”

“Why?”

I leaned over, grabbed the dead man by his ankles, and pulled the body away from the wall. My efforts left a trail of gore and wormlike creatures writhing on the floor. Talal gasped. I held my breath and went right to work. Using my thumb and index finger, I wiggled my hand into the guy’s pocket, pulled out the phone, then turned away and exhaled.

I pressed zero on the pink Nokia and the screen lit up. The Arabic meant nothing to me but the battery icon was about a quarter full. I tried to hand Talal the phone but he backed away with his hands up, shaking his head.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “You want gloves?”

Talal looked at his hands. “Yes, gloves.”

“Let’s go then.” We walked back to the truck. The lieutenant, still holding the note, was talking to Gunny but stopped when he saw the phone in my hand. “Where did you get that?”

“Out of a dead guy’s pocket.”

“You’re serious?”

“What do you think was beeping?”

The lieutenant just stared at the phone. Gunny shifted in his seat and said, “You took it out of his pocket?”

I nodded and dug another pair of gloves out of my drop pouch. “Talal, here, put these on.” Talal didn’t move. “Hurry up,” I said. “Put ‘em on.” Talal took the gloves but started fumbling with them.

“I said hurry up!”

That got him moving. He donned the gloves, cupped his hands, and I handed him the phone.

“Hey, Doc,” the lieutenant said, looking at my face, “you okay?”

I tore the gloves off my hands and dropped them in the dirt.

The lieutenant took a step back and said, “Why don’t you go to the truck? We got it.”

“You wanna hear my suggestion first?” I said.

The lieutenant looked at the building. About five seconds passed. “Sure, what’s your suggestion?”

“Let Talal return that call. He can tell whoever it was where to find the bodies. We’ll leave the body bags and gloves. They can bury their own.”

“You know, Doc, before we left, you were ready to let these guys rot in the desert. I’m glad to see you still care.”

“I’m not sayin’ I care, I just wanna be done with this. Let Talal call that guy.”

“Let me handle this.”

I locked eyes with the lieutenant.

“You wanna handle it?”

“Yeah, let me handle it.”

My fists clenched. “All right, I’ll let you handle it.” I turned and almost walked away. Almost.

“You know what, sir?” I faced the lieutenant. “I’ll do better than that. I’ll let you take the body bags out of my truck and you do what you want with ’em.” I took a breath, ready to continue, but Gunny lunged between me and the lieutenant and gripped my arm. Hard. “Let’s go,” he said in a low voice.

We started walking. “I could kill him,” I said.

“You could, but what you’re gonna do is go sit down until we leave.”

Logan walked with me to the truck and we climbed into the back together. I sat down, leaned back, and shut my eyes. That stench filled my mouth and lungs.

“Logan?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Who do you think called that guy?”

Logan chuckled. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

I sat up and opened my eyes. “Who do you think it was?”

“No idea,” Logan said, shaking his head, “but somebody’s still looking for him. Kinda sad when you think about it.”

“I know, I’m trying not to.” I leaned back again. “Can I ask you something else?”

“What?”

“How many more you think are out here?”

Logan sat down next to me. “Bodies?” He took out his cigarettes. “Honestly, bro, nothing would surprise me. Could be hundreds. Thousands.” He looked at me and smiled. “Tell you one thing though. Long as mine ain’t one of ‘em, I’m not gonna worry about it too much.”

He had a point. “What do we got,” I said, “two weeks left over here?”

“Sixteen days.”

I nodded and shut my eyes. “I just hope Talal calls that guy.”

This isn’t the first time that man has visited this cemetery, and he supposes it isn’t going to be the last. As a child he was one of the pack of kids from the neighboring sprawl of houses who came here, against all warnings, to scare themselves silly with games of Ghost or Hide-and-Seek or Sardine. They gathered near the hedges where the black angel spreads her wings, looking down on anyone who dares look up. Her expression might be a face of horror or sorrow or rage, depending on the moon and how dark the night. Later, when he and his friends were older, they crept around in pairs and fell against each other, desperate to become one.

Now he stands alone here, a grimy shadow in his khaki pants and his brown shirt and his black shoes. His wife would have told him to change the shirt, at least. Put on something cheerful, such as the pale-pink one she bought him, but he didn’t care for it and only wore it that one time, to please her.

The grave is new. Dirt. Waiting for rain. Waiting for sod to cover it over green. A motor grumbles in the distance. He looks up. It’s the big, yellow backhoe trundling down the lane toward him. There was a time when a shovel was all you’d need. He lets fall the roses he’s brought and turns away.

*

This is a young woman over here, but you might not know that just by looking at her. Just by looking at her you’d have to make a guess because of how she has her hair cropped so close to her skull. That’s how the kids do now—just shave it off and forget about it. Also she’s hidden her body inside baggy jeans and an old sweatshirt—pitch black except where it’s faded and fraying at the cuffs—so you can’t tell by that either. Her face is youthful, though, exposed and shining in the morning light. Pretty little thing. She’s got her mask pulled down under her chin, so you can’t see the dancing skeletons on it, a wry design created by her younger sister, who is dark and depressed and, for the last few months, eager for the world to just come to its end already, the way the prophets have been promising her all her life it will. “Soon,” this sister whispers, gazing into her own eyes. She’s had enough, she says to anybody willing to listen. This girl here isn’t like that, though. She’s always been known by family and friends as the sunny one—no matter what else might be going on, she’s always able to find something to make her feel fine. Right now that’s a job to be done and a lollypop burrowed into one cheek while she does it. Banana Dumdum, her favorite flavor, though she didn’t choose it, just left it to chance and got lucky, and so it goes.

She’s moving along house by house—through a gate, up a walk, up the steps, and then back down to the street again—going door to door in this neighborhood that looks like it’s deserted, but how or why is none of her business to wonder. She’ll leave a census form and a Dumdum in a plastic bag inside the door or in the box or just there on the porch planks of every house she comes to on her assigned route. That’s the job, plain and simple.

Who is this girl? She’s not a kid and not a teenager either. You might guess her to be in her twenties. Early twenties, anyway. A college student, maybe? Had to drop out because of the plague, when classes shut down or went on-line and she had no computer of her own, or she had to drop out and move back home to live with her mother and that gloomy younger sister, who have the old house to themselves now since Dad died of alcoholism or jumped out a window or has been institutionalized somewhere. Whatever. It’s enough to know he’s not around anymore, so the sisters have gone from riches to rags. And the mom? She suffers from anxiety, depression, agoraphobia, OCD, she’s a hoarder who hasn’t left her house for years and now, with the plague going around, won’t ever leave it again, not even the backyard, such as it is. So this girl…this young woman, that is…she’s not a girl, she doesn’t like being called a girl…this young woman is doing the best she can under the circumstances.

She throws her head back and breathes deep, so now you can see the blot of a bruise on her neck, just there, below her chin, along the course of her jugular vein. A hickey is what it is. She was at a plague party last night is what, and the guy in whose arms she ended up was moaning as his mouth found her throat and branded it with his mark. She won’t tell her mother this or her sister either. She thinks she doesn’t care if she gets sick and dies, but she also doesn’t believe she’s going get sick, and she definitely doesn’t believe she’s going to die. Not anytime soon, anyway. She knows people who have been going around spreading the plague on purpose. Taking their chances with a single round, spin the cylinder, nuzzle the muzzle, pull the trigger, and…click?

The younger sister has a room in the basement of the mother’s house, and that’s where she makes the masks. If you put your ear to the grate, you can hear the clatter and whir of the old sewing machine at all hours of the night. But this girl took the attic because it’s least cluttered with her mother’s growing accumulation of all that she thinks she needs and must save. Because the mother can’t get up there is the only reason why. The folding stairs are stuck and have been stuck for years, so this girl, ever resourceful as well as cheerful, comes and goes through the small dormer window on the side where the old oak has grown up taller than the house. She can shinny a rope to the tree’s lower reaches, then climb on up the branches to the roof or vice versa on back down to the ground.

You might notice now that she’s also wearing gloves on her hands, the floppy rubber kind made for cleaning toilets and scrubbing floors. She found them in the kitchen of the abandoned house where she woke up in the dark only a few hours ago. Where she woke up and rolled away from the guy whose mark she bears. Where she crept downstairs to scrounge in the cupboards with a hope of finding something to eat. Or drink. But there wasn’t much there. Cans of soup and something floating in brine in the pantry. Sponges and disinfectants, bleach and scouring powder and the gloves under the sink. The others were all fast asleep by that time, but this girl has long been in the habit of rising with the sun. Or maybe it was just she’s the only one who has a job.

*

That man is at home now. He’s right over there, in the house on the corner. The yellow one with the white fence and all the flowers. He’s sitting at his desk, where he’s been writing a letter to the editor of the local paper. He has something to say about the situation. His situation. The world situation.

“There is a virus,” he writes, “and it’s going to kill us all.” But everybody knows that. This isn’t news. Whether you want to believe it or not, which his son does not. The boy called last night. Not a boy, another man, but he will always be a boy to his father. The boy had been drinking. Or something. He wasn’t in his right mind, whatever that means. He seems to have some ideas that he picked up somewhere. Crazy talk about a hoax, is that it? The Pandemic. The Plague. The Plan-demic. Here to control us. Here to keep us locked down and desperate. But he can’t stick it out. He doesn’t have enough food to last the months it’s going to take before we’re free again. “Do you, Dad? Do you?”

“Dear Editor,” that man writes. “Can you tell me what’s happening? Do you know what’s real and what isn’t? My son says this and my son says that, but it all sounds like something somebody made up to entertain us or to scare us or to cause us to…what? Do you know? Because I’m afraid I can’t say I know anything for sure anymore.”

But that’s a lie. He does know one thing for sure. He has firsthand knowledge, that’s what he has. And his wife is dead, that’s what he knows. She was in a home, her brain already scrambled. He never wanted that for her, but it just got so bad that he had no choice. The children insisted. The boy and his sister. He couldn’t care for her properly. That’s something else he knows.

He didn’t get to see her in the end but it doesn’t matter, she wouldn’t have recognized him anyway, and all she’d have to show him would be that quizzical look she’d get at the sight of his face, stabbing him with its emptiness. Her gnarled fingers at her lips, all twisted like twigs from some ancient tree, and her whisper nothing more than a whistle, “Who?”

He hadn’t bothered to answer the last time. Just raised a hand and waggled his own fingers, which made her smile, before he turned around again and walked away.

So you see, she was already gone before she got sick, before she died, so he’s not really in mourning for her now. More like he’s in mourning for himself. She was cremated and then buried over there in the cemetery, in one of the plots they bought for each other a long time ago, when they were young, knowing but not really believing that that would be where they ended up. In the long run. Or the short, depending. He assumed he’d be the one to go first. All of us did. But what do we know? Nothing.

So now he walks over there every morning, before it gets too hot and when no one else is up and about, while it’s still safe.

Yours truly? No.

Sincerely yours? No.

Always? No.

Ever? Almost.

As ever, then. Followed by the trembling scribble of his name.

He folds the letter once, twice, three times. His hands are clumsy. His fingertips are numb. He licks the envelope, seals it, then opens it again. Unfolds the paper, crumples it in his fist, smooths it on the desktop, folds it once more. His head throbs and his pulse stutters in his ears. He doesn’t want to lick the envelope, so he staples it shut, then hammers on the staples with his fist to flatten them, which causes the small frame at the edge of the desk to tip over and fall to the floor, leaving the glass shattered and her face in pieces behind it.

*

Over there, at the end of the block, this girl has paused. She might as well be the only person left alive on earth, one last girl standing there, sucking on a banana-flavored Dumdum with a satchel of official questionnaires slung over her shoulder, in these precious last moments we have left before the end.

Soon she’ll turn the corner onto another street, and then she’ll be out of sight, and after that there won’t be anything left to disturb the frightful stillness that’s settling in all around us now, acting for all the world like it might never go away.

While the flowers in the gardens nod their heavy heads, docile and dreamy, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but bloom and die and bloom again. Like that.

1. Heads

Years later, long after the bodies had been pieced back together, after they’d been bagged and buried, after the lawyers got involved and Code Pink rallied, after the stacks of cash and the nightmares that finally ended, he would still want that one simple thing. The same thing he’d been after that first night. Back when everyone was screaming and crying and looking to him for answers. Back when all he had was a single phone number, a string of digits read out by a voice on the phone. The number, like so much of what was to come, wasn’t really for him. It was a stranger’s dissent, a single act of absolution from an anonymous man. But he didn’t know that yet. All he knew was the number, and that night Faisal al-Lawjari dialed it again and again.

*

Salem had always been stubborn. Faisal knew that going in. Outsiders saw the preacher’s big-bellied ease and the gentle way he joked with the kids he mentored and thought him soft. But his family knew different. Salem didn’t bend. He just smiled and stood firm. And that’s why, after listening to his sermon, Salem’s father had asked for help.

Faisal was the obvious choice. He was Salem’s brother-in-law and one of his closest friends. People respected him and his quiet counsel. Part of it was the way he spoke, soft and slow like a story before bed. A 58-year-old electrical engineer with a pressed and polished taste in clothes and eyeglasses that never quite sat straight, Faisal would know what to say. Half a generation older than Salem, Faisal had a lot in common with his brother-in-law. Both of them had made it out of Baraqish, the dusty pinprick of a village in Yemen’s eastern desert, where everyone was related and nothing ever changed.

They knew what life was like on the outside. But they also understood the obligations of family and tribe. And that one simple truth of life in Yemen: no one ever truly escapes where they’re from. Home is always there, a fixed point, anchoring those who might stray too far and a buoy for everyone else. Faisal and Salem each sent money back to Baraqish, remitting salaries and returning themselves for holidays and special occasions. This time it was for Faisal’s eldest son, Majid, who was about to get married.

But first Faisal wanted to talk with his brother-in-law. Salem’s sermon three days earlier had been a mistake. Like most of the men in the village, Faisal had been in attendance, as Salem walked to the front and started to speak. He was going to preach on “killing outside the law,” he announced from the raised platform near the front of the mosque. Salem was characteristically calm throughout the thirty-minute sermon, patiently walking the congregation through each of his points. But soft words couldn’t disguise what he was doing. From where he was sitting on the mosque’s thick, red carpet, Faisal could see that Salem was crossing a line. His brother-in-law was attacking al-Qaeda, and he was doing it from the pulpit.

Looking out over the crowd of men, Salem asked a simple question: How can al-Qaeda carry out attacks in Yemen that kill Muslims and then claim that they are defending Islam? This is a group, he continued into the microphone, that likes to dress terrorism up as theology. “That’s not jihad,” he said. “That’s murder.”

This wasn’t a US-sponsored program or a government preacher arguing against a terrorist group, this was a single man – a 43-year-old, father of five – in the heart of one of al-Qaeda’s most fertile recruiting grounds standing up and saying what he believed: al-Qaeda operated outside the laws of God and man. The longer Salem talked, citing examples and quoting verses, the more uncomfortable the crowd became. Most of the men in attendance that morning were members of Salem’s clan, but there were always a few strangers around. And no one wanted any trouble. “I challenge al-Qaeda to show me one piece of evidence in Islam that says such killing is justified,” Salem said as he finished his sermon.

Three days later, in a parked car out in the desert, Faisal asked him about the challenge. Salem listened politely as the gentle man next to him voiced the family’s concerns, and worried over his safety.

“Will I die if I continue?” Salem asked as he stared out the window.

Faisal paused, considering the question. “Yes,” he said a moment later, nodding his head as he answered. “They will kill you. You know they will.”

“What if I don’t continue?” Salem asked. “How long will I live?”

Faisal looked over at his brother-in-law and friend. “Only God knows your appointed hour.”

Salem nodded. “Then while I am alive I will seek justice on this earth.”

There was nothing left to say. The two sat there a while longer, the air conditioner ticking in the morning heat, but Salem wasn’t going to change his mind and there were things to do before the wedding.

The next day, Salem danced for hours holding Majid’s right hand in his left as the circle of men moved back-and-forth across a teal tarp laid down on the sand. Faisal spent most of the day watching from the sidelines, but late in the evening two of his son’s friends tried to pull him onto the dance tarp. Slight and self-conscious, Faisal resisted for a moment, but his smile gave him away. Finding the center of the circle, he started to bounce and move, slowly at first and then a bit faster as he found the rhythm of the music, his white hair flashing under the floodlights.

****

Three men, a trio of strangers, trailing drones after them like an invisible tail. Who they were and why someone half-a-world away had marked them for death were mysteries, two more things Faisal would never know.

Shortly after evening prayers on March 13, as Salem walked back to his house, the strangers dispatched a village boy to ask the burly preacher if he had a few minutes to talk. Salem hesitated. It was already dark and he was tired from the wedding the night before. But his cousin, Waleed, one of the village’s two police officers, said he’d go with him to make sure nothing happened. “Don’t worry,” Waleed told him. “I’ll be with you.”

The men walked just outside the village, stopping under some palm trees near a sign that read: “Baraqish Welcomes You.” None of the villagers, who had followed them to watch, could hear what the men were saying. But everyone heard the explosion. A giant flash that tore up the ground and spewed body parts. Three more followed in quick succession. Four missiles, five bodies.

This is what the far side of a drone strike looks like: scorched sand, twisted metal, and fragments of flesh. Sometimes there’s blood, sometimes barely any. Sometimes the fire burns for hours, other times it sputters out within minutes. There are shell casings and shattered limbs, bits of bone, and lots of black. Everything is black after a strike: the ground, the car, and whatever’s left of the bodies. Oftentimes the dead are terrorists; sometimes they’re not. That night in Yemen they were both.

Standing under the palm trees less than an hour after the strike, Faisal couldn’t tell where one body ended and another began. He was in a slaughterhouse. What the US military called the “kill zone,” he called home. He’d been born a few hundred yards away. He’d played under these trees as a boy and walked here as a man. And now nothing was recognizable. Everything smelled and all the pieces looked the same: flesh made meat. One of the men sifting through the sand with a plastic toy pail and shovel, collecting pieces for burial, pointed at a flap of skin near his feet. Faisal stared at it for a few moments before he realized what he was seeing. It was a mustache, part of a cheek and a section of lip. Waleed.

A few hours later, Faisal’s cell phone rang. The man on the other end of the line knew exactly what had happened. “Salem and Waleed were not the targets,” he said. Faisal listened, but the man wouldn’t say much. He didn’t have any answers. But he did have a phone number. “This is who you want,” the voice on the phone explained.

Faisal dialed the number three times that night. He wanted to explain that there had been a mistake. Salem never should have been killed. He wasn’t a terrorist, he preached against al-Qaeda. As Faisal punched the keys on his phone, redialing the entire number each time just to make sure he hadn’t made a mistake, he felt himself getting angrier and angrier. Al-Qaeda hadn’t done this. The US and Yemen had. They were the ones responsible. They were the ones who had murdered his brother-in-law and cousin. In his hand, the phone rang and rang.

2. Tails

I stomped hard on mushy brakes, and the embassy’s ancient ‘87 Land Cruiser shuddered, slowed, and rattled to an unsteady stop inches from the lowered tailgate of a battered Hilux. Sanaa’s night traffic had wound itself into the usual knots, twisted and tangled as four-pound test line. Taxi drivers held glowing cigarettes out open windows with one hand and adjusted the volume of dueling Lebanese pop songs with the other. Late model Mercedes jockeyed for space and pole position against an unruly mob of medieval mule carts, past-their-prime Peugeots, and assorted European castoffs. “Yemenis are the world’s nicest assholes,” my predecessor as chief of station had warned me during our handoff meeting. “They’ll stuff your face with their last piece of bread even as they sink that curved dagger of theirs into your back. Watch how they drive. That’ll tell you everything you need to know about this sweltering hellhole.” He wasn’t wrong. After qat, Yemenis flock to the roads like escaped djinn out of a sorcerer’s lamp, gleefully cutting each other off and delighting in the vehicular chaos of smashed mirrors and busted bumpers they leave in their wake.

In the back of the Hilux, two pre-teens cradled collapsible AK-47s and stared Sphinx-like at my white face, three-day beard, and Padres cap. I knew what they were thinking, and for once they were right. But so what? This was my job, and I was good at it: 47 years old and chief of one of the hottest stations on the planet. 24 confirmed kills in just over seven months in country. Not quite a record, but not bad for my first time at the controls. I stared straight back at the boys until they blinked and looked down. Part of me wondered if I’d ever see their faces in a targeting deck? God, I hoped not.

My mind caught, skipping thousands of miles, multiple time zones, and one enormous ocean. I looked at my watch. 8:13 in Sanaa meant 1:13 in Falls Church. I ran through the schedule Diana had e-mailed me at the start of the semester. If Adam was where he was supposed to be – no guarantee – he’d be sitting in tenth grade English. Katherine would be in place and on time, which thanks to the oddities of a middle school block schedule I still didn’t quite understand, meant an end-of-the-day lunch she’d calorie count and chuck untouched in the trash. And Jonathan? How did a seven-year-old boy with a serious Lego addiction spend his school days? Diana had sounded worried during our weekly phone call. She said he was slipping into our bed at night again, curling up on my side and refusing to budge.

“He’ll be fine,” I’d assured her. “Don’t worry. It’s just a stage.” But what did I know. I’d missed three of his last four birthdays.

This wasn’t the life I’d promised my wife. ‘Twenty and out,’ that’s what I’d told her. Pick up the pension, pay off the mortgage, ease into the cushy life of a 9-to-5 contractor, and send the kids waltzing off to college debt-free. But that was before the attacks and this one big war, which turned out to be a million tiny ones, happening everywhere and all at once, and somehow my 20 years had turned into 23 and counting. Still, if Sanaa went well I could hit SIS-level and the land of golden pensions.

“Rationalize it however you want,” Diana said the last time we discussed my perpetually postponed retirement. “But I know who you are, Julian Fisher. You complain about the work but deep down you love it. You love the mission, and you’re petrified of what will happen if you’re not there to do it. Just remember,” her fingernails tapped a warning on my chest, “when you’re there, you can’t be here.”

I shook my head and recited my half of the argument. Of course, I liked the work, but what mattered is that I was trained, experienced. If I didn’t do the job, someone else would. Someone a little less trained, a little less experienced, and a little less skilled. That made things less safe and how – in this world – could you justify making something even a little less safe?

I pounded the dash, bouncing a few coins and some scattered cassette tapes. It was impossible to have these conversations with civilians, even well meaning ones. Even ones you shared a bed with. No one knew what it was like. Not really, not unless you’d been there. Crunched through broken glass and chalky debris, smelled the acid smoke and nitroglycerin that lingered for hours after a blast, tasted the grit and grime in the air knowing you were inhaling the dead, and then tried to puzzle-piece broken bodies back together again into something suitable for burial.

Terrorist attacks only felt random. In reality, they were plotted and planned by individuals, people who made mistakes and left a trail, people who could – and should – be stopped before they started. That’s what I do, I explained in the colorless briefing voice I knew she hated. I reduce the odds, play the angles, work my sources, and use every last trick the lawyers bless. And even then I still don’t know if I’ve done enough.

Enough. I blew out my lips and resisted a pre-meeting cigarette. To calm myself, I recited all 15 verses of Psalm 91, said a quick prayer asking the Lord to protect my family when I couldn’t, and told myself to focus.

Somewhere up ahead, tucked into the Sanaa shadows, back pressed against a rough stone wall, crouched my pick-up, Ghalib al-Qamish: counterpart, agent, and, more recently, friend.

Ghalib was an officer in Yemeni intelligence, which meant he wasn’t a unilateral. Officially, Yemen’s Political Security Organization was an ally in the war on terror. But in practice the organization was about as loyal as Art Modell. Ghalib was our insurance, a mole buried deep in the PSO. Unlike most of his jihadi-leaning colleagues, he actually knew the US. He’d been a student at the University of Arizona on September 11, and the unlikely trifecta of that day, its disorientating aftermath, and the unflinching kindness of a host family had, more than a decade on, paid off in the form of an excellent reporting agent. Ghalib said he owed the United States a blood-debt for 9/11, which he paid down by handing over raw intelligence on al-Qaeda and making sure we were well-informed on the inner-workings of the PSO. “It’s tribal,” he’d told me once in an aborted attempt to explain his motivation and Yemen’s code of ‘urf.

“You mean like collective responsibility?” I’d asked, remembering a pre-country briefing. “The actions of the one implicate the whole.”

Ghalib masked his smile behind a heavy blast of cigarette smoke. Kamaran lights, I noticed. “Something like that,” he’d said, and politely changed the subject.

That had been seven months earlier at our first meeting. The meeting when I told him my first and, to date, only lie. The relationship between Ghalib and my predecessor,redacted , had been fraying for weeks, missed meetings and the usual domestic squabbles of an officer and agent who’d been together too long. redacted didn’t smoke and Ghalib did. Sometimes it’s that simple. Running an agent is half first date flattery and half the bedrock trust of ‘till death do us part’. Neglect either side of the equation, and the whole charade collapses faster than the Phillies in a pennant race.

redacted suggested he make the introductions and then disappear, while I bonded with Sanaa Station’s most valuable asset. To kick-start the process, I tweaked my bio, trading out a football scholarship to Chadron State for a political science degree at the University of Arizona. “Wildcats unite,” I told Ghalib over a bottle of diplomatic pouch Lagavulin, explaining we’d graduated 14 years apart, “like brothers.”

He smiled and held his glass up to the light. “Bear Down.”

We toasted the memory of John Button Salmon, sang an off-key rendition of a fight song I’d memorized the night before, and talked about our daughters. I showed him cell phone pics of pre-teen Katherine, and he produced one of look-alike five and three-year-olds in matching red dresses with white bows. Sama‘a and Nour, Sky and Light. When I asked about the names, Ghalib blushed and swirled his scotch. “Daughters lift your eyes. They force you to look up and out. Plus,” his grin was unguarded, “they’re always laughing.”

We agreed to meet every other Thursday for a quick check-and-chat. Ghalib would brief me on the latest from Political Security; I’d ask my questions and hand over a Ziploc bag, taped down and stuffed with twenties. He hadn’t wanted to take the money at first. But redacted had insisted. Motivations matter on the seventh floor. Cash was acceptable,‘urf was not.

Ghalib’s preferred spot was the Sailah, the sunken stoneway that separates Sanaa’s crumbling old city from its just as crumbling new one. He’d squat along the edge of the road in ratty robes, I’d swing by in a clean car, and he’d crawl inside. We called it a drive-by and on that Thursday we executed it perfectly.

Ghalib came out of his bedouin crouch slowly, like Piazza that last year in San Diego, eased open the unarmored door, and slipped into the passenger seat. He tucked a plastic Rothmans bag between his feet. I’d switched the dome light off an hour earlier, a precaution like the Toyota’s civilian plates and Ghalib’s stained street robes. I doubted anyone was watching, but we were in Indian country and you could never be too careful. “Mistakes in the field,” an instructor once warned me, “are a lot like marriages: the wrong one can ruin you for life.”

I flashed my lights twice at an oncoming taxi with purple running lights and cut behind him up the ramp toward Tahrir. Outside my window, white-haired men sat at metal tables on the steps of the Mahdi al-Abbas mosque, clicking prayer beads and sipping at milky cups of tea. Across the street, their younger selves, teenage grandsons and boys younger than Jonathan, kicked a lopsided soccer ball against a wall and waited their turn at a brightly flashing video game. SEALs v. Terrorists, probably. I wondered what the boys thought as they played at American soldiers gunning down bad guys who looked strikingly like their fathers, uncles, and brothers.

A dented minibus blocked the narrow street ahead of us, leaking Thursday night shoppers into the gold market. An angry horn sounded three cars up, and the bus lurched back into sluggish motion. Ghalib leaned forward in his seat, eyes locked on the side mirror, scanning for tails. Two more turns and we were on Abd al-Moghni Street headed south toward Haddah.

He made the call first. “Clear.”

I waited another thirty seconds, until we passed the Taj Sheba Hotel, to second his assessment.

Ghalib pulled two cigarettes out of his pack of Kamarans, lighting both and handing one over, as I pushed Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” into the tape deck for noise cover.

“So,” he smiled, looking younger than his 33 years. “We got him.”

“Yeah?” I slowed to let a white-and-yellow taxi with no fender dart in front.

Ghalib blew a line of smoke out the open window and pointed to the Rothmans bag. “It’s all there. The source delivered.”

The source, whom I’d codenamed “Greenmantle,” had appeared three months earlier, just after Christmas, claiming to be Samir al-Zayadi’s brother-in-law and second-cousin.

Ghalib debriefed him for four hours in a PSO safe house that first week. “I think’s he’s legit,” Ghalib told me after their initial meeting.

Greenmantle was close to his younger sister who, in the tangled thicket of tribal bloodlines, had married their second cousin, fellow tribesman, and local al-Qaeda commander: Samir al-Zayadi. For the first year all was bliss. The sister was happy, soon pregnant, and Greenmantle found work as his brother-in-law’s driver, chauffeuring Samir back-and-forth to al-Qaeda meetings. But one night Samir got slap happy and the sister miscarried. Greenmantle didn’t confront his terrorist brother-in-law – who would? – but it was clear his sister wanted out. Equally clear was the fact that Samir wasn’t going to grant her a divorce. Ghalib made an executioner’s chop with his hand. “This is his solution.”

Together we worked out a deal: Ghalib would run Greenmantle and I’d run Ghalib, sort of. Neither the source nor Ghalib’s superiors at PSO would know he was talking to us, but the station would have full visibility.

For weeks there had been nothing. Samir hid in his spider-hole and Greenmantle refused to hand over his location for fear his sister might get hurt. “Wait ‘til the bastard’s traveling,” he messaged Ghalib.

And now he was. “Tuesday’s the day,” Ghalib said, as Young and Whitten rasped about “chasin’ the moonlight.”

I nodded. “Anything else?”

Ghalib pulled a transcript sheet out of the Rothmans bag. “Greenmantle will receive a courier at some point on Tuesday,” he translated. “The courier will take him to collect al-Zayadi. He doesn’t know where he’s going or who al-Zayadi will be meeting, only that’s its someone important.” Ghalib looked up from the paper. “Remember, Greenmantle will be driving the car. You have to wait until they’ve cleared the vehicle to fire.”

“When were you guys going to give this to us?”

Ghalib offered a sheepish smile. “Tuesday morning. General Ali is going to rush over to the embassy with an ‘urgent’ tip.”

“Not really enough time to get an eye in the sky.”

“No, not really.” Ghalib hesitated. “Be convincing, Julian. It’s my neck that’s on the line. But” – he flicked his cigarette through the cracked window – “this is your shot. Don’t miss.”

*

“Sir,” the marine guard on the phone sounded jumpy for 11 am. Too many Rip Its, most likely. The marines drank them by the case, crushed the empties, and stacked the carcasses beneath their desk like Genghis Khan piling bodies. “Sir, there is a General Ali Muhammad here.” The lance corporal lowered his voice. “He says it’s highly urgent.”

I nodded into the phone. Game time. “Escort him back, please.”

General Ali Muhammad: fifty-seven, fat, and one of the last holdovers from the old regime. I remembered how redacted had described the man: “As dangerous as a swaying cobra and with the same hooded eyes.”

I double-checked the recording equipment in my desk and waited for the Marine’s knock.

“Sir.” The lance corporal escorted our visitor into my windowless office, before stepping back outside.

I poured steaming tea into hourglass tumblers, and offered him one. “General.”

Ali Muhammad took a careful sip, wiped his mustache, and got straight to business. “This morning, we received information about the location of the Mr. Samir al-Zayadi.”

“That’s excellent,” I interrupted half-standing, overselling for effect.

The general grimaced slightly at my display and rested his hands on his belly as if it might bounce away. “Yes, of course, excellent. I wanted you to know as soon as possible.”

“Do you have the location?”

General Ali slid a torn scrap of paper with handwritten coordinates across the desk to me. “Unfortunately our information says he’ll be moving soon, likely within the hour.” He blew out a theatrical sigh. “I do not think that is enough time to get a drone from your base in Djibouti into the sky, no?” The General shook his head at the unending cruelties of this world.

I leaned back in my chair, savoring the next few minutes Ghalib had gifted me. “Care for a cigar, General?”

He nodded, warily.

I clipped a pair of Padrón Anniversaries and leaned across the desk to light his. “Just between us,” I said, my voice conspiratorially low.

Ali Muhammad’s eyes flickered hungrily beneath their hood, and I thought of reading Jonathan Rikki-Tikki-Tavi the last time I was home. The General gave a slight “go ahead” nod.

Somewhere in my desk was a memo instructing Ambassador Rees to brief Yemen’s new president on everything I was about to reveal. The ambassador wouldn’t like it, but there was no real harm in jumping the gun by a few days. I blew out a mouthful of Nicaraguan smoke. “To tell you the truth, we have just completed transforming an old Saudi airstrip – airfield 30 – into a new drone base.” I tapped the torn edge of paper with Samir’s coordinates. “It will be close, but I think, thanks to your help, we can do this.”

The General coughed slightly as he exhaled, but made no comment.

I stood quickly. “Thank you, General. But as I’m sure you understand time is tight. The lance corporal will escort you out.”

*

I dropped General Ali’s scrap of scrawled coordinates in the trash, and walked up two flights of metal stairs, through three sets of cipher locked doors, and into the Box. Exact same smell anywhere in the world: stale air and unwashed bodies. Strip away the burnt coffee odor and the stress, and I could be walking into Adam’s 16-year-old bedroom back home.

Two of my targeters, Alyssa and Doug, sat at a conference table, staring silently into a row of screens, surrounded by $250 million of machines that hummed, clicked, and whirred like an insect army.

“Anything?”

Alyssa’s eyes didn’t move, but her 28-year-old ponytail swished back and forth, carving an arc in the dead air. “Nothing yet. But we’ve got two Reapers stacked on top of the site.”

Alyssa had been a senior in high school on 9/11. A decade later, and five years into her Agency career, she’d already been on the ground in Pakistan and Iraq and was on her second tour through Yemen. She was short, Asian, and one of the best. Doug talked less, but beneath his blue light glasses and acne-flaked exterior was just as good. He’d been part of the al-Awlaki strike team the year before, earning a medal he’d touched once at a private ceremony before surrendering it back to the director and a sunless life in the Agency vault.

I sat in a swivel chair in the back and clicked open a screen to catch up on cable traffic. Greenmantle’s information would either be right or it wouldn’t. Either way, I’d have to call Peter, my boss at the Counterterrorism Center. But – I checked my watch – 4:13 am DC time was early, even for Peter the Wolf.

I knew his reputation: a workaholic obsessive – like Angelton only worse – who’d converted to Islam to understand his enemy better. But Peter also knew what it was like to operate in the field. Shortly after I arrived in Sanaa, he’d axed the dreaded “triple trigger,” which required the ambassador, the station chief, and the head of CTC to all sign off on a strike. Now it was just the two of us, completely in-house, a much more efficient process.

“Boss.” Alyssa’s voice was higher than usual. “One man entering the house.”

I walked over to where she was pointing. On the screen things looked the same: a dusty brown building in a dusty brown desert. But Doug confirmed her spot.

Twenty minutes later two men walked out of the house and climbed into a white Toyota Hilux with an orange racing stripe. I had Greenmantle as the stocky driver and the courier as the taller passenger, but without sound it was impossible to be certain.

Alyssa and Doug tensed like a pair of birddogs. I kept my voice steady. “These are our guys. Put both eyes on the car.”

Alyssa relayed my directions to the pilots at an off-site facility in Virginia, and the twin 66-foot Reapers climbed a few thousand feet, steadied, and locked onto their prey. Barring a technological mishap, cloud cover or, God forbid, a sand storm the drones could follow the vehicle for the next 18 hours.

The Hilux bounced over a barely discernible track for several minutes, sprouting a rooster tail of dust that splashed a grainy white on the screen. At 1:45 pm local time Greenmantle stopped outside what, from 17,000 feet, looked like the world’s saddest roadside restaurant: a tattered canvas sunshade, cracked once-white plastic tables, and no customers. The courier got out, walked inside and, a few minutes later, three different men exited the restaurant and climbed into the Hilux.

“Ok,” I told the room. “That’s Greenmantle, Samir al-Zayadi, and two likely AQ members. Remember Greenmantle is red, everyone else is righteous.” Time to call Peter.

Two hours of slow driving later, the Hilux stopped outside a cluster of mud-brick huts. Everyone walked inside and no one came out. “Nap time,” a voice from Virginia joked.

“Qat time,” Alyssa snapped back, popping her gum.

An hour later, one of the men walked out on the flat roof and stared straight up into the sky, shielding his eyes with a brown hand.

“Can he hear us?” I asked.

“Not a chance,” Doug said.

“Well, give us a 30,000 foot floor to make sure.” Alyssa’s fingers tapped at the keys, and the image on the screen blurred, dropped out of focus, and reappeared at ¾ size.

Shortly after 6 pm local time, the men walked out of the house, climbed into the car, and started driving northeast across a hard, flat plain. They stopped after 27 minutes just outside a village.

“Where are we?”

Alyssa clicked twice. “Baraqish.”

The village wasn’t familiar. “Do we have anything on it?”

“Nope.” Her voice sounded tight. “It’s clean.”

“What do you think?” I asked Peter.

“Let’s watch them, see what happens.”

On screen, the passenger door opened and three figures in robes piled out. “Greenmantle’s staying with the car,” Alyssa said.

“I see it.”

Peter broke in from Langley. “Who are they talking to?”

Doug pointed at the screen. “Some kid.”

“Ok.” I took a deep breath. “We wait.”

A minute later the boy’s pixelated body scampered away, just as a low-altitude cloud drifted beneath the drones, blocking the camera. When it cleared the three men had drawn off by themselves, about 100 yards outside the village on the road into town.

“They’re clear,” Alyssa said from her seat.

“Not yet,” I said. “They’re supposed to be meeting someone.”

Fifteen sets of eyes, in Yemen and Northern Virginia, watched Samir al-Zayadi and his two companions walk slowly toward a cluster of date palms. They looked animated and in good spirits, waving their arms and kicking off bright heat signatures on the infrared monitor. One of the men broke off from the group, ducked behind a tree, and knelt to piss. A few minutes later, two men walked out of the village and joined them.

“Is this the meeting?” I asked Peter.

Silence on the line, as Peter contemplated scenarios. “Male, military age,” his voice was a croaky whisper. “But your source, your call.”

I hesitated. On screen the five men were greeting one another, cheek kisses and shoulder hugs. One minute stretched to two. Alyssa’s gum popped.

“Julian?” Peter’s voice chimed in my ear. “Window’s closing.”

I thought of my first buck. Eight years old, breath fogging the frozen October air, my father’s hand on my back, reassuring me. I nodded. “Go.”

In front of me the screen flashed, then flashed again.

So Senior Reyes, the new night shift sup. I see him and the new airman walking around the hangar bay. Just talking. Honestly, I thought they were working and I’ve got my binder with me so I come up behind them and go, hey Senior, can you sign off my qual? He whips around and goes NOT NOW. I’m thinking I might get my ass chewed, but then I see the airman, I think it’s Haley, Airman Haley. I look at her and she’s all flushed. Now I’m thinking what did I interrupt? I look back at Senior and he puts together what I’m putting together. Changes his tune. SORRY SHIPMATE, he says. WHAT DID YOU WANT?

Nothing, Senior, I tell him. No worries.

C’MON, he says. C’MON, YOU WANT A SIGNATURE?

Yeah, I go. And he takes my qual book. Signs off a couple sections, looks up at me and signs off a couple more sections. THERE YOU GO, he says. Airman Haley slinks away.

I tell him thanks and Senior just stands in front of me. DON’T MENTION IT, he says. TO ANYONE.

*

Okay, so Senior Reyes. He takes over the maintenance meeting. Guess who he brings to take notes? Fuckin Airman Haley. They go down the list of which bird is up, who’s got budget, whatever. End of the meeting and Senior is walking away and Haley takes the big green logbook and whacks it across his butt. I mean like WHOMP. Senior spins around, sees it’s her—starts laughing. I shit you not. We’re just watching them, the lovebirds. It couldn’t have been more obvious if we walked in on them fucking.

The rest of us don’t know what to do.

CMC clears his throat. Kinda sweet you ask me, he says.

I’m looking around like what the fuck? Everyone breaks out after the meeting and I catch up to the CMC.

Kinda sweet? I say. What the fuck?

And he goes, okay, what’s your problem?

Well, I say, it’s against the regulations.

CMC goes, okay, what should I do?

I go, I don’t know, I’m not the command master chief.

CMC raises his eyebrows and pokes me in the chest.

Okay, let’s say you’re me, he says. And here’s your shipmate, your brother. Married to the Navy. Just about to retire. Now he meets the kind of girl he should’ve met twenty years ago and that’s his fault? Oh, and she likes him too? You’re going to tell him to knock it off?

I guess not, I say.

You guess not, CMC says.

Fuck, I say, shaking my head.

My thoughts exactly, CMC says.

*

Couple months go by and I start dating the corpsman, right? I’m over at her place and I mention Senior Reyes and she goes, OH MAN. She starts to say something before she stops herself. And so now I’m like, you gotta tell me and she says, I’ll get it so much trouble. But I keep on her about it and I can tell that she wants to spill it.

She says Haley was part of the maintenance crew that was doing touch and gos on the Vinson a couple of weeks ago and it was Haley’s first time on the boat and she thought it was just motion sickness but eventually she went to get a pregnancy test and yep you guessed it.

No shit, I say and she says yes shit. What’s gonna happen now, I say.

Well, I think they’re gonna keep it, she says.

It, I say.

Her, she says.

Her, I say.

Well, they’re hoping, she says.

Hoping, I say.

For a girl, she says.

Back at the squadron, they’re not even acting like it’s a secret. Haley waits for Senior by his car at the end of the day and they drive off together.

They’re gonna make it official and everyone thinks good for them. Sure, there’s an age gap but consenting adults and all that. One of them will have to transfer. There are protocols to follow. This has happened before. An old story.

*

On the news they call it a microburst. An isolated weather event. They say it comes out of nowhere. They say it took the little fishing boat that Senior and Airman Haley were on and sucked them out to sea.

The funeral makes the front page of the base paper. They invite the whole squadron.

Day after, I’m sitting in my car outside the flightline before work. Just staring at the dashboard. Someone knocks on my window and it’s the CMC so I roll down the window. He asks me if I wanna tell him I told him so.

Will it make me feel better? I ask him. Would it have mattered?

Probably not, he says.

What’s the lesson here? I ask him.

CMC says oh, you wanna learn something? Go to college.

I get out of the car and we’re walking together to the turnstiles when WHOMP two birds fly into the briefing room window. We watch them drop to the ground. I start going over to where they fell and CMC says what’re you doing but I go over to them anyway. I crouch down and can feel him standing behind me. I’m just trying to figure it out, you know? Tiny crushed beaks and twitchy little feet. I need it to make sense. I’m down there for a while and CMC says, c’mon shipmate so I stand up. We’re looking at these fuckin birds when the base 1MC starts playing colors. So we turn towards the flag and salute the national fucking anthem and when we look down again I shit you not the birds are gone. They’re just gone. And I’m looking at the CMC like what the fuck and he’s just looking at me with this little smile.

Kinda sweet, you ask me, he says.

****

You can watch the author read an illustrated version of this story, below:

Three Pieces of Flash Fiction

1. Things That Stood Out

There was a boy in Izard. A brave boy. Everyone knew him. Ricky Dunkle. The Dunkles were quiet people. They lived across from the school in a little blue house. The kind of blue house that made people shake their heads and mutter. Mrs. Dunkle raised sunflowers. They rose tall and spindly. They grew in knots throughout the yard. Mrs. Dunkle loved her sunflowers. She walked amongst them every day, caressing the petals, smelling them. She lifted their faces to her own, kissing their dark centers. Mrs. Dunkle always wore the same housecoat. A ratty, purple and orange thing. She wore slippers. Even in the yard. Even in the rain. Sometimes, she talked to herself.

Her husband worked out at the water treatment plant. A gnomish man, he stopped at the Squirrel’s Hole every night and got the same thing. A burger for Ricky. Fish and Chips for Mrs. Dunkle. Mrs. Dunkle didn’t cook. At night, he sat in his backyard with a telescope looking for things in the sky. Stars. Planets. Meteors rushing toward us. They were an off bunch, the Dunkles. People talked. That’s what people in Izard did. They talked. But they talked sideways.

Every morning, Ricky walked from his folks’ house to work. He owned the Dragons’ Stop. A pool hall on the corner opposite the Post Office. The Dragons’ Stop was a place for people to go. It was loud and dark and filled with cigarette smoke. Sometimes, on the weekends, they had dances. It was the hangout for high school kids and people who didn’t go to the bars. It was also where folks went to get weed and pills.

Ricky wore purple boots and black, satin pants tight as a condom. He wore pink rodeo shirts and a belt buckle the size of a salad plate. He dressed like an Easter egg. Black hair rose in a wave from a wide forehead. Rhinestones glittered from his fingers and collar.

People like Ricky Dunkle didn’t fit in places like Izard. In Izard, people liked things simple and quiet. Things that stood out stood out. In Izard, everything had a place. Not Ricky Dunkle. Ricky Dunkle made his own place. He knew people. Men who wore leather and rode Harleys. Men who carried guns and knives and a history of using them. Not that it mattered. Ricky was braver than all of us.

“Look at him,” Uncle Mike said. “Asking for trouble.”

“He’s helpless,” Mom said. If I could have, I would have turned to ash. I would have crumbled and disappeared.

“I saw him at the school the other say,” Uncle Mike said.

“What’re you afraid of?”

“Afraid?”

I went to my room. I closed the door and hid. Silent. Ashamed. They talked through the walls. Their glasses clinked against their teeth. I was the faggot in the corner wishing I had the guts to wear purple boots.

2. Civilized Behavior

In my family, we killed things. We hunted and trapped. Fathers taught sons and sons taught their sons. The women waited at home, preparing for the slaughter. They knew how to cut the carcasses into pleasing pieces. They knew how to wrap the meat in white paper and how to stack it just right in the freezer, oldest on top. In my family, killing was providing. Men provided. Women prepared and preserved. I was not yet ten but Grandpa was determined. “A man,” he said. “A man does what’s necessary.”

It seems spilling blood was necessary.

*

We lived in the crotch of a small valley. All around fields and pastures. Barns and sheds. An old outhouse slumped in the backyard, unused and emptied. Chickens searched for seeds. At the edge of things, a forest rose and scratched at the sky, a mix of oak and hemlock, spruce, pine and fir. Brambles lined the floor. Mast softened it all. The woods were always wet, except in the final weeks of summer when the sun shined hard enough and long enough to pull the moisture from the thick soil.

Grandpa and the uncles carried flashlights and they kept the beams on the ground. A narrow path cut through the meadow. Dew painted the weedy pasture a bit silver in the moonlight. Goody, the milk cow, lay in a patch of tall grass slowly chewing her cud.

The path ran rough and knotted under ancient limbs. I stumbled but didn’t fall. Grandpa was a massive shadow in the dim morning. I was cold and tired. But I was scared too. Grandpa had something in mind and he didn’t like questions.

We walked without words. We found the first trap. Empty. And the second. It held a raccoon. Grandpa shot it with his revolver. He skinned the carcass, gutted it and cut its head off. We moved the trap down the trail.

“This,” Grandpa said. “This is how we live.”

*

I learned young how to cope with violence, or the promise of violence. I was a small kid, scrawny and lean. I was often a target. People seemed to think I wouldn’t fight back. “If you’re going to fight,” Mom said,“fight dirty. If you’re going to fight, make sure someone goes to the hospital.”

*

Becket Smite was a square headed boy and mean. Tall and thin, his eyes sat too far apart and his lips were thin as worms. His big hands made big fists. Everyone was afraid. I was afraid. He came to me in the lunch line. He came and cut between me and Lotti. Mostly, at school, no one bothered me. I was a Neel. But Becket liked a challenge.

“Are you tough?” he asked.

“What?”

“Do you think you can take me?”

He put his hand in the center of my chest and pinned me to the wall. I told him to stop. My voice was stronger than I felt.

“Or what?”

“Just go away.”

Becket smiled.

“You sound tough,” he said. “Are you tough?”

I grabbed his wrist. He looked at me. This was it. This was how it was going to work. This was a fight I wasn’t going to get out of. I swallowed. I swung the lunch tray. The crack was too loud. His nose broke. Becket dropped and howled. Blood. Things got thin and sharp. He held his face. But then got up and it was on. We punched and kicked. I lost track of my fingers. I lost track of everything.

*

Mr. Sawyer lectured us on civilized behavior. He called our folks. Mom came. Tired and bent. Unhappy. Days were her nights. She asked if I was hurt.

“I’m fine.”

“Is he?”

I remembered the crunch of bone and the blood. The whole thing left me sour and tangled. “I hope so.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

That’s how it worked in my family. Violence and regret. Shame kept just under the skin.

3. Back Then and Back There

There was this girl. Back when I was a kid. Rudeen. Only, no one called her Rudeen. Except her mom. We called her Ding Ding. Silly but back then and back there, silliness wasn’t always silly. Ding Ding lived across the road. Her people’s land bordered mine. Somewhere back in time, we were cousins. Generations removed. One of her greats married one of mine.

She was in my class at school. A pretty girl. Blond and small. She painted her nails blue and gold. Boys fluttered about her like crows. They flapped about and brought her shiny things. Bright things. They told her jokes that fell like stones to the floor and rolled about but she smiled because she was a good girl and, back then, back there, good girls smiled when boys told them jokes.

Terry Shaw, with his high and tight haircut and quarterback hands, knew how to talk to her. He knew how to get her to look at him. Terry Shaw sat with her every day at lunch. He lived in town. His dad was a banker or something. They were perfect. I hated him. I was a poor boy in hand me downs and re-soled boots. I was skinny, long haired and shy. I was not like the others. I preferred books to people. I preferred the library to the football field.

We had a deal. Back then and back there, good girls didn’t walk alone in public. Ding Ding was a good girl. Her mom talked to my mom. Because I was a good boy and back then, back there, good boys did what their moms said, I walked Ding Ding to and from the bus stop. A mile. Maybe a little more. It was faster to cut through the fields, but there were snakes in the fields and gophers and traps. If you knew what you were doing, the fields were safe but our moms didn’t like the fields and back then, back there, we didn’t do things our moms didn’t like.

But there were rules. We didn’t talk. Ding Ding only talked to boys like Terry Shaw. We focused on walking. After school, we had chores and then there was dinner and then there was homework. She walked ahead of me, all pretty and bright in the sunlight. The road stretched on and on. Dirty and rutted. I counted my steps. One hundred. Two hundred. Three.

At our driveway, I stopped and watched her walk to the twin willows marking hers. She took her time. Ding Ding’s home was loud sometimes. Her dad was known for meanness and drink. Saturday nights, he sat in the bar with my grandpa. They told stories and bought each other whiskeys. They stayed up too late and slept through Sunday mornings. She stopped that day, under the willows. She looked at me and nodded. Ding Ding never looked at me. She never nodded. I was a shadow. I followed her around but I didn’t mean anything. We weren’t friends. I stood there until I heard her screen door slam.

Later, when the sheriff came with the fire trucks and the county ambulance, no one knew what was what. People ran here and there. Mom stood on the porch with Grandma. Grandpa came from across the way in his jeans and sweat stained undershirt, one arm around Ding Ding. She wore a thin, green blanket. “Gas,” he said. “Pilot light.” Back then and back there, some folks cooked with gas. Sometimes, the pilot light went out. Sometimes, gas filled the house. Sometimes, people died.

The funeral was long and solemn. Mom made me wear a suit and tie. She made me polish my shoes and wear socks. Pastor talked about valleys of death and shepherds. Ding Ding wore a black dress and black sneakers. She sat up front with her grandparents. Stone faced and pale. No tears though. Back then and back there, crying in public just wasn’t done. Later, they shook hands and they tried to eat with rest of us. They thanked everyone face to face. I sat with Ding Ding for a bit. There were no words. We were thirteen. Back then and back there, we knew about death. We hunted and we raised our meat. But this was new. This was something all together different.

Her grandma came, a big woman with big hips and too many chins. “Rudeen,” she said. “It’s time.” I blinked up at her. Rudeen? It seemed right. Yesterday, Ding Ding. Today, Rudeen. We knew when to leave things behind.

In Atlanta at the Ritz Carlton we stopped at the bar by the lobby on our way upstairs. Fred saw Newt Gingrich who was dressed neat casual wearing loafers (I don’t know what a loafer is but that’s what he was wearing). His wife, Callista, was in the corner talking on a razor cell phone.  Fred got up and introduced himself to Newt, and pulled me over. Newt said he hadn’t been in the Army but that his dad served at Fort Benning.

When I turned around, Sam was talking with a tall, statuesque woman
in a red-white-and-blue bikini. Wonder Woman.

She was not the kind of woman you could ignore, equal parts power and beauty. But Sam, I could tell, wasn’t interested.

“I’m gonna put my lasso around you, figure out what you’re about,”
Wonder Woman was saying, leaning in towards Sam.

“We uh need to go upstairs to the room, now, right? Sorry Newt
Gingrich, my friends and I need to stow our stuff. Yeah, totally we’ll see you
later,” Sam said to Wonder Woman. “Definitely.”

Frank said we ought to wear our Class-A’s for cocktails. But when
he walked in the business lounge in uniform he was the only one.

“What the fuck, guys,” he said. Sam and I were wearing khaki
slacks and polo shirts. “Way to blue falcon me, now I look like an asshole.”

An older man wearing a white cowboy hat and a bolo tie thanked him for his service as Sam grabbed a round of Heinekens. I noticed three women sitting in the corner, looking over at Frank. They were about our age, maybe a little older. We gallantly introduced ourselves. After some pleasant bantered and flirtation, I started to make moves.

“We’re married,” said the tall brunette. 

“All three of you?” 

“Well, what happens in Atlanta, stays in Atlanta,” Sam said. The blond
laughed and exchanged some kind of glance with the third woman. They were
housewives. I guessed in the South at that moment, it was still possible. To be
a housewife and still get to go out on one’s own in the city, talk with strange
young men. Fred excused himself to change out of his uniform.

Somehow or other we didn’t end up meeting back up with the three
married women after all. The one I liked had been pregnant, anyway. 
Instead we crossed the street and found an upscale steak joint. Fred, who got
lost the night before at Fort Benning during training and had to retake his
“land navigation” test, almost faceplanted into his mashed potatoes he was so
beat. He prepared to excuse himself when a party of Atlanta Hawks cheerleaders
sat down across from us at a table for six.

“Could’ve used your class-A’s for this one, buddy,” Sam hissed.
Fred tried to rally. I gave him my Red Bull and ordered him a coffee.

“Go outside and smoke a cigarette.”

But I knew that look on his face, Fred wasn’t coming back. He
waved goodbye to us from the door. The cheerleaders laughed and chatted with
each other while tables like ours stared. One aging woman at the next table
said to another, “they comin’ or what?”

“They paid for us, they’ll be here,” her friend said. She gave me
a sardonic smile. “What are you looking at, sugar?”

I was noticing that Wonder Woman had just entered the restaurant.
She seemed to be looking for someone.

“Sam, buddy,” I said.

“What, you see Newt Gingrich again?”

“No. We gotta leave.”

When I got a text from Fred it was nearly 1130pm. I called him back, which I knew he hated, but not as badly as he needed a boost. “Come out, dude,” I yelled over the club’s music. Sam was getting drinks, some kind of Irish beer he liked. Sam was Scottish or part Scottish. Irish beer somehow factored into that identity. He’d visited Ireland in college. Maybe he was part Irish, too. But then, he wore a kilt and played the bagpipes. That night he kept craning his long neck, trying to chat up different girls. Whatever energy we had with the married women had fizzled out, all the conversations ran dry. So we lied and told Fred it was worth it. “It’s great here,” I yelled into the phone.

*

A few years later Fred and Sam came to my wedding. It was Texas hill country, in the middle of summer. The water in the river behind my wife’s parents’ house was low. The heat was dry but intense. Fred brought this Italian girl I liked, and Sam was with a special needs teacher he’d met near his base. We were all sitting on top of a hill drinking wine, and Sam said “remember our last trip to Atlanta?”

“How could I forget,” Fred said. He was getting out of the Army by
then, and he’d stopped smoking cigarettes. “The gay pride parade. The
cheerleaders. The accident.”

“That was the same trip?” I couldn’t believe it. 

“Don’t forget about that other thing,” Sam said. The group fell silent just before my fiancée retrieved me for some rehearsal task. None of us wanted to say it. Wonder Woman, the X factor, the uncertain variable.

*

Back in Atlanta, Fred had arrived at the club, and wouldn’t you know it, a short blond woman struck up conversation with him almost immediately. She was cute, so Sam and I tried to do what we could to break them up. Fred wasn’t there more than a half hour before she pulled him away and drove off with him in a Mustang GT. He looked so sleepy, holding a whisky in his hand and swaying to the music, like he never fully woke up from his nap. How could any single lady resist.

The next morning when I woke Fred was in bed, too. Sam slept like
a rock, and I didn’t remember Fred coming in. He’d stripped down to his boxers,
a plaid pattern. There was barely enough room in bed for the three of us so I
rolled out and showered.

When I finished, Fred was already up pacing back and forth
impatiently.

“I’m meeting back up with Penelope,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah I need to take a quick shower. We’re grabbing brunch.”

Sam rolled over to take up the whole bed, now that it was vacant.
“Will you two shut up already. My head’s killing me.”

I waved Fred into the bathroom. “I’m done, knock yourself out. Just remember, we need to check out by 1pm.”

“Yeah I’ll be back by then,” Fred said, hurrying into the steam.

Sam and I made our way back up to the business lounge having
packed our bags. It was empty, so the two of us took seats with bloody mary’s
and looked out over the city.

I unfolded a copy of the Journal-Constitution and reclined.

“Is that a parade?” Sam said. Sure enough, there was a massive line of and people snaking down a main boulevard several streets to the east of the hotel.

“Gay pride parade,” I said, pointing to the front page story in
the newspaper.

“Well, now we know where Fred hurried off to,” Sam said.

“Yeah, why did he bother making up a name, ‘Penelope,’ as though
he needed to lie to us.”

Sam laughed and took a drink. The sun was hidden behind a cloud
and a shadow fell across the room. It occurred to me that these moments of ours
were being measured out as though by a spoon—that one day, we’d all go our
separate ways to build families and careers, but here, at this moment, we were
all happily engaged in the pursuits that suited us, freed by friendship to
enjoy ourselves unconstrained by want or need.

Twenty minutes passed in this manner. Clouds hurried across the
sky, and we passed through their shadows below. I read about the baseball
season’s progress and what novel scheme the Bush administration had to
immiserate us. The World Cup was in full swing, Italy was a contender to win.
Sam called his sister and was speaking softly. I couldn’t hear about what.

The door burst open. It was Fred.

“Time to leave, guys.”

“What’s the rush,” I said, looking up.

“Wonder Woman. I saw her in the lobby. She’s waiting for us and
now her outfit’s purple and gold.”

Sam said “I have to go,” then hung up. “What do you mean? Also,
were you just at the gay pride parade?”

Fred shook his head impatiently, he didn’t have time for crude jokes, and motioned to us to make haste. His backpack was slung over one burly shoulder, which lent his urgency an air of credibility.

“All right,” I said, “all right, we’re coming.”

*

A half hour later we were congratulating ourselves on having escaped Atlanta without further incident. Racing down the highway south toward Fort Benning, what had been a beautiful summer day turned gray, ominous. Before long it was raining.

“Man, this Georgia weather’s ridiculous,” Sam said. “Can’t wait to
get out of here. I’m never coming back.”

Fred didn’t think it was supposed to rain much. Just enough to make the coming week’s training uncomfortable.

I was driving. “The paper said it’d be showers, nothing too bad.”

Just then the rain picked up. It was like God turned up the dial
from a one to a ten. It was coming down in buckets.

“What the hell,” Fred said in the back seat. “Holy shit! What the
hell?”

“Look out,” Sam said.

The car in front of me had slammed on its brakes. I swerved around it into the fast lane, slowing abruptly as the antilock brakes pumped and my truck fishtailed crazily. Off to the left, a minivan, one of the older models, a Chrysler, had been following too closely and lurched off into the grass median. It skidded to a stop.

We nearly hit the car in front of us but it accelerated just in
time, and I avoided the crash.

“Oh my God,” Fred said. “Guys.”

Behind us, cars smashed into one another. One car flipped into the
air, spinning, and I could see the driver turning the wheel as though to
influence his vehicle’s flight.

“Drive, man, drive,” Fred said. Glancing in the rear view mirror I
watched as a tractor-trailer fell to its side and slid toward the pile behind
us. Then, through the heavy rain, I saw a figure leaping over the
wreckage—Wonder Woman!—had she been involved, somehow? Her golden lasso
shining, a beacon through the chaos, she caught the car and set it down gently
as we drove further into the storm.

“Been to Las Vegas? Clean. Corporate. Sleek, serious suit. We’re that guy’s kid brother selling Adderall in the parking lot.”

That’s a line I use at cocktail parties and readings and the like. Book people – literary people, apologies – tend not to be New York natives (quibble away, literary people) so a natural social lubricant is the Where Are You From fancy dance. There are good answers: Georgetown, Paris, Hong Kong. There are bad answers: Tampa, “near” Chicago, Long Island.

And then there are strange answers, answers like Reno, which is my answer.

Home lingers in us all. Mine just happens to smell of sagebrush while sounding like slots.

Really, truly: that’s the first thing anyone notices at the airport. The cheery singsong of slot machines doling out quarters and dimes. (It used to smell like cigarette smoke, too, dense as blubber. Then bin Laden came along and something, something, travelers of the sky can only drink while they gamble. I don’t know. I don’t pretend to understand the world anymore.)

So, Reno. Born in it, raised in it. Mixed feelings galore. Left at 18 with the grace of a startled dog, been gone for about a decade. Back this evening, for reasons I’ll get to. Now, though, I’m waiting for this dear and precious Mormon family of twelve to unload themselves and their matching ash blonde hair from the airplane. They, and I, are the only passengers who remain. All this for a rear window seat.

“So sorry,” the dad says, loud fluoride shine rushing out like sword blades. “Don’t ever have kids.” He pulls down stroller number four and backpack number eight from the overhead bin. Mormons are breeding for the end of the world, and winning at it. People out east don’t know that but they should.

“It’s no problem,” I say, because I am a fake person.

He keeps talking with affection about the rigors of family life, and while I nod and smile, I don’t respond. It’s not that I mind his friendliness, aggressive though it may be, or even that I distrust it. It’s more that it’s draining. Besides, I think, I came home to reckon with the silence of the past. Nothing else.

Mercy eventually intervenes, and we empty the plane. Ascending the jetway, my ears search for the familiar jingles of the shakedown. “Hail, Hail, Hail,” they will ring. “Our hometown boy done good.” I step into the terminal. Other than the Mormons, it’s deserted and dumbstruck. The sound of a faraway vacuum cleaner fills the space between.

In my head, I say, “Hello, Reno,” like a slurring British rock star. Some horde cheers in response, made up of fuzzy yearbook faces from yesteryear. In reality, I just nod at the Mormon dad, who’s on a knee strapping in his brood. Then I follow the signs for baggage claim.

*

I pass the vacant slots. I pass a stuffed brown bear that’s been an airport staple since the eighties. I pass a Kaepernick display with photo prints and a signed football encased in glass. He was a college quarterback here, a local legend before he became a national third rail. Some rube attacked the display with scissors last year. Hence the glass.

Near the escalators are neon signs pushing second-rate casino buffets and third-rate lawyers. I recognize one of the lawyers as a high school classmate. MARCO LO DUCA, the sign reads. THE ZUMBA LAWYER. An image of Marco Lo Duca in bright fitness gear dancing in a courtroom grins down as I descend the escalator. Marco Lo Duca must be a better lover than he is attorney – the gossip cables hath informed that he’s dating Sasha Caughlin.

Which is bullshit for a host of reasons, chief among them that I never dated Sasha Caughlin.

I retrieve my luggage and step outside and take a big, sloppy breath of mountain air. That, at least, is as sweet as remembered. Tonic for the body, balm for the soul. The downtown casino lights wash celestial against the dark well of vast sky. Bliss, I think. No wonder those silver miners and pioneers stayed way back when. I’ve long held that if it weren’t for other people, my hometown would be utopia.

“Thrope!” I turn to the call of my teenage nickname. It’s Ali, waving from an idling white Suburban parked illegally across a handicap spot. “You goofy bitch, over here.” She’s shouting four decibels louder than necessary because that’s how people like Ali speak. I toss my bags into the back and get into the passenger seat.

“Greetings,” she says. “Hello Ali,” I say. We exchange a half-hug and she peels out for the freeway like a racecar fiend. Ali is my oldest friend (since sixth grade, we bonded over Magic: The Gathering cards and the discovery of sarcasm) and the bestower of my nickname: Thrope, short for misanthrope, earned after one too many ignored video-game invitations. It spread through the suburban hills like wildfire. The jocks called me Thrope. The druggies called me Thrope. My sophomore-year girlfriend called me Thrope. So did my senior-year almost-girlfriend. My own sister took to it.

Ali asks if I’m game for some beers. I tell her it’s been a long day. We drive to Malarkey’s, a pub in the old south. Confusingly, the district has been rebranded by the Chamber of Commerce as midtown. Many locals view it as cynical ploy to attract hipsters from the Bay Area. Perhaps that’s true. If so, it’s working. Buildings I knew as seedy gas stations and porn shops are now trendy restaurants and art galleries.

“The hell is happening?” I ask.

“There is no remedy,” Ali says, faux-wisdom coating her words. “If we stopped putting out all carbon, this very instant, the oceans will continue to acidify to the point that coral and shellfish can no longer exist, kicking out the legs of the food chain. Everything. Is. Fucked.”

Ali’s become a doom prophet in our old age. She sends occasional texts to our group chat about the coming fate of the anthropocene. (I didn’t even know that word a year ago and I’m the writer.) Ali’s not an environmentalist, mind you – I’m not sure she even recycles.

“Dude. I meant the gentrification.”

She laughs, then points to the center console. A worn copy of my book sits there, wedged between the gear shift and a cupholder. “Gonna need to sign that.” I nod. I’m not sure how Ali feels about her character’s depiction. She’s never brought it up, which I appreciate. She’s probably pissed. Most are.

We take a corner table. Malarkey’s has that chic warehouse aesthetic going on, complete with chalkboard menus. Novelty beer tap handles line the bar like sentries, little guitars and wolf heads denoting different craft brews. A mural of Kaepernick kneeling against the American flag covers the far wall, framed by an angular silhouette of Nevada. I don’t know art but it seems like good art. It’s also quite the political statement for a local business to make. As with the nation as a whole, Kap’s anthem protests have divided our hometown.

The only other people in the pub are an old man in all denim and a cowboy hat and a group of white, bearded twenty-somethings staring into their phones. “It’s Sunday,” Ali explains. “Band night on the other side of midtown.”

I don’t know what any of that means so I order the most commercial beer I see.

The thing I want to talk about, the thing I’m back in Reno for, seems like the kind of thing to ease into. Instead I ask Ali about Marco Lo Duca, Zumba lawyer. This is the right string to pull; a holy crusade of expletives forms across the table. Ali’s a lawyer, too, and from what I can tell, a good one – an assistant district attorney who has served as our group’s legal counsel for years, from our friend in tech selling his start-up for beaucoup coin to advising our aid-worker friend through her divorce. Ali can’t stand lawyers who advertise, like Marco Lo Duca. Ali can’t stand lawyers with reputations for swindling lower-income clients, like Marco Lo Duca. Ali can’t stand lawyers who went to shit law schools, like Marco Lo Duca, yet who still have become citizens of local renown, like Marco Lo Duca.

“And now he’s fucking Sasha Caughlin!” Ali shouts this five decibels louder than necessary, causing the bartender and the man in the denim to look over in irritation. That’s it, though, as Ali is 6’2 and rugby thick. “The world’s a cruel and unjust place, Thrope. Beyond salvaging.”

“And how’s Paula?” I ask.

“That’s Doctor to you, son,” Ali says, raising her fingers for another beer. Paula is Ali’s wife and an anesthesia resident at Saint Mary’s Hospital. They’re bona fide, a true power couple as these things go. Not elites – this part of the west doesn’t have those, at least not in the eastern sense of the word – but still, known. Moneyed. Both families have been in the area for generations; Ali’s dad is a regional supermarket baron while Paula comes from a venerated Basque clan that owns cattle ranches and produces a senator every forty years or so. Perhaps most significantly, Paula’s uncle was the head football coach of the 2001 Hidden Valley Indians, the last northern Nevada team to win state in the big-school division. (Vegas high schools dominate everything now, much to the consternation of the various has-beens and never-weres among the Reno dad population.)

Belatedly, Ali recognizes the intent behind my question. “She’s fine. We’re going to try again in the spring, we think.” After a strained beat she adds, “She’s over that business being in the book. You wouldn’t be staying with us, otherwise.”

“It’s a novel,” I say. “Fiction. Borrowing from life, it’s the job.”

“Mmm.” Ali does something with her mouth that conveys both skepticism and acceptance. I wonder what she thinks about my use of their personal tragedy. It’s maybe my second biggest regret from the book. Before I muster up the courage to ask in a roundabout way, she asks if I’m dating anyone in New York.

“Here and there,” I say, which is true.

“Poor bitches. Communicating their feelings to you must be like trying to negotiate with a vending machine.”

We drink two more rounds then call it a night. I ask if Ali’s good to drive, she laughs and flashes her ADA badge. I stare at her, hard, until she rolls her eyes. “Seriously? Four beers on a full stomach. Wasn’t that long ago I spent my Saturday nights out-chugging Kap’s o-line. Get in the car, princess.”

She may not be feeling the drink but I am. We roll smooth through the streets of Reno on a magic carpet of SUV might. I’d forgotten how quiet everything is here, the kind of quiet that chews up human folly and human triumph and spits it back out into the high desert like little bones. The Bonanza Casino shoots a searchlight from its roof, casting the strip of fast food restaurants across from it in half-shadows. The east coast doesn’t have good fast food, I think. No Jack in the Box. No In-N-Out. Carl’s Jr. goes by some charlatan name which stales the cheeseburgers, somehow.

The Bonanza searchlight sweeps across the intersection to our front. We went to school with the Bonanza kids, the Rouhanis, who came and went in stretch limos. My mom likes to say that people in the casino industry don’t understand The Godfather films are a critique and not a celebration, and then lo and behold, the Rouhani parents got arrested for federal tax evasion. I believe the kids run the casino now, which, hey, I think, good for them. As long as they’re paying their taxes. Uncle Sam always gets his. Why don’t the libertarians out here grasp that? Fever cowboy logic leftover from the old days.

All of this will be Great Basin fossil someday, I realize. The Jack in the Box. The libertarianism. The Bonanza limos. All like that ancient dinosaur fish whose name no one can spell. I unroll the window hoping to hear something. The churn of the river. A siren. Maybe a distant coyote howl. Instead there’s only more annihilating silence.

“Good of you to come,” Ali finally says. “Leaving after the memorial?”

“That evening.” I pause, swallowing to wet my throat. “True he collapsed directing traffic?”

Ali nods. “Morning drop-off. Died as he lived. Yelling at idiots.”

We share a laugh. Mr. Flores had indeed enjoyed yelling at idiots, something our high school provided ample opportunity for.

Ali and Paula live on a sleepy cul-de-sac in a bungalow near the river, in a neighborhood we used to call “near the river.” Who knows what nonsense it goes by now. A few blocks out, we drive parallel to Lake Street and the old city arch. “Reno,” it reads in clean steel lettering. “The Biggest Little City in the World.”

“A good title, really. The Biggest Little City.” There’s not a drop of inflection in Ali’s voice. “Gets at the duality of it all.” She’s talking about my book. Nevada literary legends tend to use broad, mawkish titles like The City of Trembling Leaves and Sweet Promised Land for their testaments to our home. I stole mine from the fucking arch.

“Yeah,” I say through a yawn. “I got that much right.”

*

Saint Ignatius was, and remains, the only private high school in Reno. Can’t speak to the current student population, though I’d guess the makeup’s about the same: 150-ish students per grade. One-third of those from old Reno, good Catholics baptized in the church who tithe and confess with regularity. These folks form the bedrock of northern Nevada, hard middle-class and proud Republicans since the days of Ike. Their kids skew toward nice and interesting enough, though no one’s meaner than a Reno Catholic teen set on it. These select jackwagons become Saint I’s linebackers and social merchants, year after year, decade after decade, rinse and repeat.

Another third of students come from new Reno, everything from lapsed Catholics to [insert prim Protestant sect here] to Jewish. (Yes, Reno does have Chosen People.) These kids come from both coin and fast crowds, so their parents determine that sending them to Saint I’s will cure their little darlings of their drug/alcohol/sex habits. Problem is, other parents with the exact same issue settle on the exact same solution. It’s like sending a bunch of angry young terrorists to an island prison and letting them further radicalize each other. (That’s a great line, I know. Used it in my novel.) This is why Saint I’s has a reputation as a party school.

The last third of students go to Saint Ignatius for academic and/or small-classroom reasons: a gray-haired band of geriatric college professors teach the honors courses. That’s why I went, that’s why Ali went, that’s why most of our friends went. There’s overlap and exceptions in that sweeping overview, of course, because life is always more complex and layered than memory allows for. But human minds must dissect and categorize, if not for order, at least for the guise of it.

Anyhow. That’s the ecosystem in which we all met Mr. Flores, and where he became my mentor. He was the first teacher in my life to tell me to read widely and write free. He was the first teacher in my life to say that I possessed a gift. He believed in me, as few ever had, as few have since.

I repaid all that by making him the antagonist of my novel, severe and draconian in ways he only feigned at in real life. He never forgave me for it. Then he collapsed dead in the Saint Ignatius parking lot directing morning traffic, yelling at idiots.

*

I wake in the guestroom of the bungalow, unsure where I am. Awareness comes as I sit up and look out the sliding glass door to a narrow garden patio. The door is cracked, a low October bite nipping through it. A pile of golden-brown leaves sits in a corner of the patio, waiting to be picked up like a dutiful child after school. I close my eyes and take in a sloppy breath of clean morning air.

I’d stay here forever, I think, but for this dash of hangover lurking about my skull.

Ali has already left for work but Paula sits in their kitchen, sipping from a mug of coffee. She asks if I want one and I join her at the kitchen counter. We small-talk so we both can inform Ali later we did so.

I tap the most obvious vein first, doctoring. She hadn’t gone to medical school thinking about anesthesia, she begins, and we’re off. She’s lopped her hair, I notice, into something like a bob. It’s a striking change. Years before, a dark scarlet sheen fell from her head like a waterfall. I’d probably have fallen in unrequited love if I hadn’t found something about Paula so deeply unknowable. Then I’d thought it an elusive dreaminess, the result of talking to too many horses on her family’s Washoe Valley ranch. With time, I realized it was just apathy. She didn’t share Ali’s (and my) appreciation for whimsy and bullshit. She didn’t have time for people who weren’t going to help her achieve her goals. I’d admire it if I hadn’t been assessed disposable.

“And your family?” she asks, bringing me back. My mind had drifted from the conversation. “How are they?”

“Same ole’,” I say. My parents filed for divorce the day after my little sister left for college and both were gone themselves within the year. My mother retired after twenty-two years as a paralegal at the local power firm Donner Douglass & Hagen, moving home to Virginia, while my father – the last Porsche executive still in Reno after the headquarters fled in 1997 – finally joined his comrades in Atlanta. A beat late, I remember Paula was one of my few friends to visit with my mother during that long year.

“My mom sends her love, of course,” I manage.

“She’s great. I know you know that.” Paula liking my mother more than she likes me is one of those unknowable things I was going on about. “So. Gonna see the big sights? Saint I’s? Maple’s? Rattlesnake Mountain?”

These are oblique references to my book. Paula thinks Saint I’s is full of “privileged mediocrity.” (Did she actually say that or is it something her character said? I can’t tell the difference anymore.) My first summer job was at Maple’s Casino, where the valet overlords judged me tender because I couldn’t yet drive stick. I became a health club attendant instead, and occasionally, older gay men would hit on me while I collected towels in the locker room. This experience served as the crux of Chapter 3. Rattlesnake Mountain (a lonely, dusty hill in the old southeast) was where a young maiden claimed my innocence, a historic moment forever dignified in the final pages of Chapter 6.

“Getting lunch with Robert Bonilla, actually.”

This makes Paula smile. Everyone likes Robert. Thinking her intimations an opening, I begin to stammer out an apology. She cuts in after eight words.

“I’m glad you’re here. Say hi to Robert for me.”

With that, coffee with Paula is over.

I shower and shave and think about the nature of forgiveness, who should seek it, who gets to issue it. I lock the front door, as instructed. The day smells of pine needle and kerosene. To the near east, saws of black smoke mark what’s left of industrial Reno – most everything that can afford it has moved to rural Storey County, where Tesla’s built a gigafactory. To the hard west, the snow-tipped Sierras shoot from a meadow of sun-browned tumbleweeds, giant earth castles shaped by a manic god. Today’s sky is big, I observe, even by the standards of the west. On the sidewalk across from the bungalow someone has spray-painted a note in money green. “ARE YOU HELPING,” the sidewalk asks. “ARE YOU HURTING.”

Walking north, it doesn’t take long to hear the crawl of languid water. The Truckee is more creek than river, but I don’t tell that to the ducks paddling about its reedy banks. They’re nostalgic holdouts, I decide, clinging to a summer that’s never returning. I make a mental note to walk back this way with bread. A noon bell tolls, but from where I’m at, I don’t know if it comes from a church or casino.

I find Robert on a bench in front of the old Riverside Hotel. The city was founded in this very spot in 1859 by an entrepreneur who built a log bridge over the river and began charging mining prospectors for its use. The hustle endures. A sign promoting an upcoming poker tournament at Maple’s rises from a pole next to the bench, everyone in the photograph smiling with big carnivore teeth, winners and losers alike. This strikes me as off. The summer I worked at the health club, a state assemblyman shot dead a Chinese high roller in the VIP poker room. I wanted to see the body but security wouldn’t let me in.

Robert’s wearing new cowboy boots, faded hipster jeans, and a striped button-up open at the collar to let flow his chest hair. Dark, carefully-cultivated stubble swathes his face. He looks up as I approach and I see a pale reflection of myself in his metallic sunglasses.

“Thrope.” He puts out his hand and I help him up. “I bring bad tidings.”

“Oh?”

“Sasha Caughlin. Marco Lo Duca. It’s a belligerent act.”

“Good for them?” I try. Robert shakes his head. “The world’s beyond salvaging,” I offer next. He nods at that.

Robert’s our friend who got rich, the one who sold his tech start-up with Ali’s help. He splits his time between San Francisco and Tahoe, an amateur angel investor and ski junkie. Ali’s taken to calling him “The Baja Globetrotter” because of a predilection for the foreign-born. Like all professional romancers, Robert plays bashful when pressed on it, smiling distantly before changing the subject. He’s come a long way from the boy who flew his desk around science class pretending it was the Starship Enterprise.

The ground floor of the old Riverside is now a grill known as Comstock Willy’s. We decide to eat there, taking an outdoor patio table. Ska punk pumps from unseen speakers, a form of music you don’t hear in New York, I think. Too jumpy.

An old woman in an electric scooter rolls by, a large plastic cup of coins primed for the slots wedged into a front basket. She’s attached to a portable oxygen tank and a miniature American flag flies from the scooter on an antenna. I can’t help but notice the message on the woman’s outsized tee shirt: “SHUT UP AND STAND UP,” it reads. “KAEPER-DICK.”

“There’s no place like Reno,” Robert says, a mystical sort of irony splashing his words. “For all the mortal delights.”

This is a line from my book. I cribbed it from Didion, but the overlap of readers between her and me is limited to my mom’s book club. Robert didn’t mind his fictional rendering, unlike most, though he still insists I exaggerated his libertine persona. Which I may have. Fact and interpretation blurred a long time ago, of both place and people.

We get beers and sandwiches and catch up in a breezy, tranquil way. Some old friendships fray, some adapt, some remain fixed and exact through time and rigor. This is how it is with Robert and I am glad for it. It’s nice to pretend at being aimless again.

“I feel like we know them.” I follow Robert’s eyes into the grill, where a father, mother and three small children have taken nest. It takes a few seconds but I place the parents.

“Jason and Amanda Jankowski,” I say. “Class ahead of us. Dated all through Saint I’s.”

“Ah. They look – ” he shrugs. “Like each other.”

“That can happen,” I say. “Marriage is a face blender.”

The Jankowskis’ food arrives from the kitchen and they clasp hands and begin to pray.

“Stop, Thrope,” Robert says. I haven’t done or said a thing.

“What.”

“I see the gears moving up there.” He shakes his head. “Big-city writer, can’t go home again.”

I hadn’t thought that or anything about the praying family. My mind, really, truly, had been on the river ducks, and the graffiti message on the sidewalk. I tell Robert this, and say that I admire the conviction and sincerity in an act like public prayer. Hell, I say, I could use more of both.

He just shakes his head again. He doesn’t believe me.

We finish our sandwiches and get another round. Robert leans back in his chair and crosses his legs, his cowboy boots catching a glint of peeking sun.

“Flores, dead and gone.” I tilt my head. “You guys ever … ” He trails off, not finishing his sentence. Whatever word he intended, my answer remains no.

“Too bad,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“All because you made him a fake villain who shuts down a pretend student newspaper.” Robert and I have had this conversation before, almost word for word, but I still appreciate his going through the motions. “So weird.”

“He was a prideful man.” I pause. “Though ‘Mr. Flowers’ as a stand-in for Flores could’ve been more subtle.”

Robert shrugs. For him, the book is someone else’s lark, someone else’s ball and chain. He’s like I was before, free of the burden of others’ lives. It’s ignorance, perhaps, though without that ignorance I’d never have been able to see it through. Maybe Ali’s right about everything being fucked. Robert asks if I want to go to a party in Basque Creek that evening. “Some fancy folk will be there. Good material for your next bestseller! Text Ali, the power couple should come, too.”

I don’t want to go to a party with fancy folk in Basque Creek. I came here to brood and remember, not to find and enjoy. But Robert’s easy swagger has infected the best of us over the years.

“Why not,” I say.

*

Here’s the thing about the book: it did fine. People in publishing would call it a nice debut. Solid. Which means: middling. Ordinary. Meh. Which really means: On to the next one.

Did The Times review it? Reader, it did not. Did The Post? It did not. A Sinclair Lewis scholar reviewed it for The New Republic (online only) and found it “engaging in a belabored, post-ironic kind of way … perhaps this tale of youthful blundering could’ve charmed if only its author had recognized the characters’ complete lack of stakes.” I have reason to suspect that half the hardcovers sold reside in my dad’s basement.

A novel about growing up in Sante Fe came out a month after and sold eight times as many copies. It made every award short-list ever coveted. I met the author in New York at a reading. He didn’t even do me the courtesy of being an asshole.

So. Middling. Meh. On to the next one.

But! The Biggest Little City did generate some interest in pockets of its namesake. The Reno Gazette-Journal ran an author profile, positive enough. The Sparks Citizen didn’t hate it, despite the truly terrible things I wrote about Sparks. (“Reno’s crusty sock,” for one.) The alt weekly sketched out a map showing “my” Reno, buoyed by short interviews with people who knew me when, to include one Eugene Flores, honors English teacher at Saint Ignatius High School.

“He always kept an active imagination,” is the entirety of his statement. The weapon of restraint can strike so clean by those who know how to wield it.

Was my intention to malign? It was not. (With the exception of a couple minor characters from the baseball team.) I’ve just always needed to tell things as I see them, straight and clear and bemused, the way an addict needs a fix, the way Chambers of Commerce need hipster midtowns. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not saying it’s healthy. I’m only saying it is. I’d have done the same to the moon had I been reared there.

But I wasn’t. I’m from Reno. So I wrote about it. Straight. Clear. And so very bemused, not by place, or people, but by the strange and bitter magic of life.

(Yes, I cribbed that line, too.)

*

Reno is a place of constant change, which means to survive, it must also be a place of constant reinvention. Robert reminds me of this as we drive out to Basque Creek. When an industry dies, new ones must be found. The old mines and timber mills became marriage chapels and railroads. The prewar shine of heavyweight title bouts and a divorce courthouse fit for Hollywood couldn’t be golden age forever. Corporate gaming came, inevitably, for the self-made casino pioneers. Companies from Lear Jet to Helms Construction to Porsche, all local saviors of their time, all empty tombs, now. But hear the old refrain, once more: Reno’s back, baby.

“Gigafactory’s changed everything,” Robert says through gulps of open convertible wind. “Panasonic’s leasing space there, making battery cells. Google just bought a shit-ton of land down the road for a data center. Those are the direct jobs. Who’s building out that road? A local company. Who feeds all those employees? Local companies. Economic impact’s in the billions, easy. That’s why tonight’s happening. Birthday party for a Tesla exec, sure. But it’s also a statement. Of what we are, what we’re becoming.”

I ask again about an open bar.

We’re well past the city limits I once knew. My Reno ended with the waterpark off the freeway. The waterpark marked the edge of civilization. Now, the wilderness beyond has become subdivision after subdivision, sprawled across the valley in a blanket of stucco houses. It smells like drought out here.

“Might as well be Vegas,” I say. Robert laughs.

We keep driving. Robert’s red Miata begins to crawl up sun-scorched hills like a bug on a picnic table. We keep driving. The orange sun of the high desert fades behind us, slowly. We come to green manicured lawns and little thumbprint ponds and keep driving. Then comes a marble statue of a bighorn sheep and a sign etched from stone: Basque Creek Golf & Country Club.

I make a joke about the sprinkler bill but Robert doesn’t hear me anymore. He’s running his tongue over his teeth and checking his nostrils for loose hairs in the rearview mirror, making himself fancy for the fancy folk. I do the same.

We leave his convertible with college-age valets covered in tattoos and furry goatees who possess that young aimlessness I miss so much – they just shrug when Robert tells them to take care of his beloved. He hands over a twenty-dollar bill. They call him sir and say yes, no problem.

We’re directed toward a dim ballroom. Hundreds of bodies mill about, the low roar of boozy chitchat ubiquitous. There’s an honest to Christ ice sculpture of the gigafactory in the center of the room. Robert wiggles an eyebrow and says he needs to go glad-hand with other techies. He disappears into the throng.

Jeans and cowboy boots surround me like hostiles on an open plain. I’m wearing the only nice clothes I brought, my black funeral suit with no tie and scuffed wingtips, and have never felt so New York in my life. Someone asks if I’m the Adderall guy. I go to the nearest bar and order a local Great Basin beer to show the others that I’m one of them. Then I park myself against a column and crowd-watch, because, well. I am also Thrope.

For the many people I don’t know or recognize, there are some I do. The old mayor who lived near us, which meant our neighborhood always got plowed first after a snowfall. The fourth wife of a mafioso who inherited all that Tahoe waterfront and turned it into an environmental research center. A tax lawyer from Saint Ignatius who’s gone bald. Another Saint Ignatius grad I could’ve sworn died of a meth overdose. The hot middle school counselor who’s still got it. Channel 2’s evangelical meteorologist. The trans snowboarder who brought home Olympic bronze. The libertarian radio host who went on hunger strike during a land rights dispute. Donner (Junior) of Donner Douglass & Hagen. The desert explorer who works with special needs children. And others.

It’s a real cross-section of the community.

A club employee in a polo shirt finds me at the appetizer table. “So sorry, sir,” he says. “The others are already in the back.”

“What?” I say.

The employee’s eyes splinter. “Google marketing exec, right?”

It’s because I’m the only person around wearing a suit, both youngish and disheveled enough to maybe be from Silicon Valley. Before I set the kid straight, I think, what the hell. Some dead writer advised that still-living writers need to take chances. So I tilt my head and say, “What do you think?”

This makes the employee apologize again, and we’re off, striding across the ballroom through all the high ceremony Reno can muster. He leads us to a room behind a code. This room feeds to an escalator that takes us to another room behind a code. This room snaps with the brittle chill of too much air conditioning. That’s the first thing I notice. The second is that it’s filled with some of the most important people of northern Nevada, movers and shakers I’ve never spoken with but know from reputation and news interviews.

There are about two dozen, mostly men, mostly white, mostly thick, either in the shoulders or the gut. There are the Maple brothers, of Maple’s Casino, one smart and one drunk, though no one can tell them apart until happy hour. There’s Donner (Senior) of Donner Douglass & Hagen, who’s made his name and fortune lobbying for tobacco and liquor. There’s a man in a white stetson whose name I can’t summon but know is a big land developer all over the state. (Of places like the Basque Creek master-planned community.)

I spot the Governor (Saint Ignatius Class of 1980) in a far circle near a muted big-screen turned to football. He’s wearing a western dress shirt and talking with Tesla suits and an air guard general. The Governor’s teeth are dentist-commercial white and I want to ask how he does it. All in this room seem very pleased with themselves, and with one another. I wonder if anyone here has read my book. It seems unlikely. I look again at Donner (Senior), recalling a story my mom told of him in a heated negotiation, reminding the other attorneys he was descended from Donner Party cannibals, and that some things were just in a man’s blood.

She’d told the story with respect, proud of her firm’s chieftain because he’d won. In the room above the ballroom, I feel a pang of dark regret, sudden and forceful. It’s for Mr. Flores. There are so many more deserving villains, I think, than a lifelong educator who devoted himself to literature and good order.

“Mister Google.” It’s the man in the white stetson, pointing to me with a stubby thumb. “Enjoying the native spoils?”

He means the Great Basin beer in my hand. It occurs me that if I’m to play this role of new prospector I should do it well.

“Drink local, think global,” I say. This earns some chuckles and entrance to the near circle of important men.

They’re discussing Kaepernick. “Of course you have a right to kneel during the anthem,” Donner (Senior) says, with all the understanding of a wall. I’m not surprised he doesn’t recognize me – it’s a giant firm – but bothered, perhaps. My mom worked there twenty-two years. “It’s still the wrong thing to do.”

He looks across the circle, straight at me. “Imagine Silicon Valley thinks different?”

“All depends,” I say, because I imagine it does.

Talk turns to the future of the city. The gigafactory’s changing everything, they agree, which means the possibilities are endless. Another youngish, disheveled man I figure to be from one of the tech companies asks about the arch. It seems outdated, he says.

“It’s an icon.” The man in the white stetson speaks with volume, the gobbler under his chin shaking with authority. “A reminder, in its way. Now, a new city slogan? Some of us have been looking at that.”

“I still like ‘Reno Rising,’” one of the Maple brothers says. Most everyone else groans.

The man in the white stetson squares himself toward me. It remains cold in the room but his eyes probe colder. He’s short but broad and full like a shovel head and it’s easy to understand, in this brief nugget of time under his stare, how he’s attained power. “You tech kids are good at this,” he says, speaking in a slow monotone packed with old Nevada cunning. “Any flatlander ideas?”

For a few seconds, I realize, I have the rapt attention of men who affect change. This is no insignificant thing. Their techniques might not always be clean and their intent might not always be pure, but hey, I think, that’s life in the wild west. I want, desperately, to provide what they seek: something good and true for our city.

It comes like genius lightning.

“How about,” I say, “Reno: for all the mortal delights.”

A long, strained moment passes, then another, and then all the important men laugh, at once and together, at one of the most beautiful lines ever written about their home.

*

Mr. Flores –

Hope this finds you thriving at Saint I’s and otherwise. All good here – New York’s a beast of a city, but I’m learning to navigate it. Through much trial and error, I’ve taught myself how to sear pork chops and vegetables. A welcome break from Chinese takeout.

I’ve emailed you a couple times with no response. Did my book offend? I’m truly sorry if it did. It just kind of tumbled out that way, and I thought I’d have plenty of time to edit and revise and change things. Then it found a publisher, and things happened so fast … the newspaper thing was unfair to you (well, Mr. Flowers). For what it’s worth, you weren’t like that at all as a teacher. You were judicious and thoughtful. If the character wasn’t nuanced enough, the fault is mine. Like you used to tell us in class, “Be better next time.” That’s my aim now.

Be well, Mr. Flores.

He never replied to that message, either. So I stopped trying. What’s a man to do? Mr. Flores wasn’t the only one trying to reconcile hidden pride with someone else’s memories.

*

I escape the air-conditioned room before the important men grasp who I am not. Talk had turned to zoning laws and Donner (Senior) seemed to be sorting my face through his memory annals. Besides, I’d gotten what I needed.

Flatlander, I think. Hurtful! But also: a great insult.

The next book will get much use from it.

My mind’s whirring with plot ideas as I return to the ballroom. I look for the club employee to ask for a pen and bar napkins. So many villain options, I think. The challenge will be deciding who to emphasize. The man in the white stetson seems an obvious frontrunner.

It’ll need to be third person, of course, to prove I have the range …

“Thrope!” It’s Ali, four decibels louder than necessary, standing near the ice sculpture. She’s doing something with her face that conveys both amusement and alarm but it’s not until I’m steps away that I realize why: the stranger she’s talking with isn’t a stranger at all, but Sasha Caughlin.

I remember to breathe, smile and hug, in that order.

“Hey, Thrope,” Sasha Caughlin says. “Been a while.”

She looks up with big, dark eyes and a coy smile, too, and glory be, those tender, pretend hopes of the far past can be realized by the abrupt present. One only needs will it to be.

“Where are you now?” she asks.

“Went east a few years ago,” I say, hoping for the effect Yale grads have when they tell people they went to school in New Haven. “How are things here?”

“Freaking Ali! Freaking Thrope!” It’s Marco Lo Duca, predictably ruining everything. He slaps my back and Sasha Caughlin settles into his shoulder like a Lego piece. I wonder if anyone else in the history of the world has known personal tragedy such as this.

Marco Lo Duca compliments Ali on a recent case she won before turning his charms on me. “Great to see you, man.” He sounds eager, even genuine. “Your book – what an accomplishment. Wow!”

“You wrote a book?” Sasha Caughlin sounds confused and I want to scream into the abyss. “I’d no idea.”

“Yeah, babe! A novel. We have a copy at home, in the den somewhere. Funny stuff.”

“He was always funny,” Sasha Caughlin says. “Weren’t you, Thrope?”

I only nod in agreement and stand there, open-mouthed and dead-souled, as Marco Lo Duca explains my own creative offering to the girl I spent much of my youth daydreaming about. He even gets some of it right, in a straightforward, literal-thinking, Marco Lo Duca sort of way.

“Sad that Mr. Flores took it to heart the way he did.” Marco Lo Duca purses his thin, stupid lips and then finishes the question no one else has. “You two ever talk it out?”

I shake my head. “Student newspaper thing really upset him.”

“Well. That wasn’t quite it.” Marco Lo Duca grits his teeth and sighs, in that showy way showy people will do, and launches into his tale. He and Mr. Flores hadn’t been close in high school, he says, but they bonded later when the older man helped him with law school essays. Had this been around the time The Biggest Little City was published? Marco Lo Duca thinks it must’ve been. He remembers Mr. Flores being excited for me, then confused by what I was trying to say in the book. About Reno, about Saint Ignatius, about him.

“The bit about his character no longer speaking with his grown daughter.” Marco Lo Duca’s voice is so knowing, so certain, I want to shatter it. “Too much, maybe.”

Marco Lo Duca keeps talking, but I’m no longer listening. My novel did contain a sentence about Mr. Flowers’ strained relationship with a grown daughter. A short line, a quick line, a throwaway line I’d never thought twice about. Had I taken that from the real teacher, the real man? I must have, I realize, far too late and far too away to do a damn thing about it. Ali’s looking at me from the corners of her eyes with a sharpness I’ve never before seen directed my way.

I wish Robert was here. Or my parents. They like the book for what it is. They never expected it to be anything else. They never expected it to be anything but a book.

Ali’s glare remains fixed on me. It holds and it holds and it holds. Forgiveness isn’t a thing or even an aim, I think, too late, always too late. It’s a process. A process without end.

Desperate to change the subject, I ask about them. Sasha Caughlin talks about her business development job at one of the casinos. Marco Lo Duca goes into detail about the rigors of Zumba lawyering. Then they say that they’re calling it an early night but it was great to see us, and we’ll talk again at tomorrow’s memorial.

Left with nothing else, I smell Sasha Caughlin’s hair as they turn to leave.

I look at Ali. She looks at me. Shame burns through me and I want nothing more than to be under a blanket somewhere, hiding from the world. Ali hails a waiter with a tray of beers. Great Basins, of course.

“Paula’s not here?” I ask.

“She’s not,” Ali says.

“Because of me,” I say.

“Because of you,” she says.

I close my eyes. Ali’s my oldest friend and I’ve hurt her deeply. The others I’ll get over. This one matters, though. She deserves more. She deserved better. I begin to stammer out an apology. She cuts in after four words.

“Another time,” she says. “The fuck were you?”

So I tell her: about the air-conditioned room, and the Governor’s teeth, and the man in the white stetson, and the conversation about the arch and flatlanders from Silicon Valley.

“Sounds crazy, I know,” I say. “But I almost sold that Didion line.”

Ali considers that, then points to the ice sculpture of the gigafactory. “Might help to think about the rising oceans and humanity’s goliath carbon footprint. Little to no chance we’ll slow either enough in the coming decades to keep society from total collapse. This? It’s the End.”

We clink our bottles together in a wordless toast.

*

Before the memorial the next morning, I borrow Ali’s Suburban and drive into the foothills of southwest Reno to see my childhood home.

In the mid-eighties, this was the fringe of town, the new master-planned community where all the white-collar casino families and hotshot Porsche execs were supposed to live. My mom wanted a house in old Reno, near the river, a big Colonial Revival along California Avenue. My dad came from a humbler background and besides, the suburbs were the future. The possibilities, well. They were endless.

It’s a shadow blue home at the top of a hill, with a front yard of honeysuckle my mom planted herself and a rolling side yard perfect for summer slip ‘n slides and winter sledding. I never thought much of it as a physical space for the eighteen years I lived in it, it was just there. Where I ate, grew, dreamed. But now, here, I find myself thinking about things like its bright, open dining room and the way the bathroom faucet water felt in my palms and the peculiar cranny in the garage where my mom found an angry rattlesnake and then killed it by driving our Volvo station wagon over its head forty times.

I park in the cul-de-sac across the street and leave the engine running. The honeysuckle garden remains, though it’s more feral than we ever let it grow. There’s a strange weathervane on the roof – a black zit on a face of shingles, looking out of place in the way only reality infringing upon memory can. My sister used to rollerblade every day in this cul-de-sac, I remember, until some sixth-grade mean girl told her you can’t be pretty if you rollerblade.

The return ticket to New York sits in my back pocket. I know already how today’s memorial will go: there will be Catholic pomp. The Saint Ignatius community will turn out in force. There will be scriptural readings but no personal eulogies, no way Mr. Flores would allow indulgence like that. At some point I’ll tear up because I’m sensitive, and people around me will think it’s because of what happened with the book, but it won’t be about that at all, it’ll probably be because of something random like the sidewalk graffiti that demanded to know if I’m HELPING or HURTING. Then there will be hugging, much physical hugging, and maybe I’ll get to smell Sasha Caughlin’s hair again.

I realize my old home must be inhabited by a young family. There are play-patches in the grass and the top of a basketball hoop peaks out from the backyard. This is right, I think. Maybe it’s the Mormons from the flight here. Or the Jankowskis. I’d like that.

I consider ringing the doorbell, asking whoever answers if I can look around. But I don’t. This way, my old home remains boundless.

An homage to Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (The New Yorker, June 1978).

Wake up at oh-my-god-o’clock on Monday and run six miles; run another six miles at the same time Tuesday through Friday; to get night vision, keep one eye closed in a well-lit area and then open it in darkness; always field strip a MRE (meal, ready-to-eat), trade the veggie omelet but never the ChiliMac; when buying your dress blues, be sure to buy two sets in two different sizes, that way you can look sharp even if you lose ten pounds after coming back from deployment; Is it true that you desecrated corpses?; always have two designated marksmen for over-watch, especially when you eat; on Sundays let your subordinates rest, don’t wake them up early to watch beheading videos; don’t urinate on the enemy corpses; you mustn’t video record firefights, not even for your family; don’t feed the pack of wild dogs – they will follow you; but I never pissed on dead bodies and wouldn’t think to; this is how you perform an emergency tracheotomy; this is how you cut the trachea through the second and fourth ring then quickly shove the tube through it; this is how you call for a MEDEVAC and prevent yourself from pissing on a dead body like you’re so hell-bent on doing; this is how you disassemble your weapon; this is how you clean your weapon; this is how you lube your weapon, but not so much that it attracts sand and grit; this is how you construct a Burn-Out Latrine – far from where we eat and sleep, because human waste harbors diseases; when you are conducting your daily burn out, make sure to use plenty of diesel fuel to incinerate the fecal matter; this is how you clear a room; this is how you clear a whole house; this is how you clear a village; this is how to interrogate a subordinate; this is how to interrogate a detainee; this is how to interrogate a terrorist; this is how you ask for tea in Arabic; this is how you ask for tea in Dari and Pashtu; this is how to behave in the presence of tribal elders or sheikhs who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the corpse-urinater you were warned against becoming; be sure to do hygiene every day, even if it is with baby-wipes; have a plan to kill everyone in the room – you’re a warrior, you know; don’t drive over or step on fresh asphalt – you might trigger a buried IED; don’t throw stones at IEDs, because it might not be an IED at all; this is how to call for fire; this is how to win hearts and minds; this is how to conduct an ambush; this is how to conduct a raid; this is how to kill a child before it even becomes a terrorist; this is how to conduct peacekeeping missions; this is how to stage a scene, and plant evidence and get away with it; this is how to snatch and grab; this is how to torture a terrorist; this is how you torture yourself; this is how to water-board someone, and if this doesn’t work there are other ways to make them say what you want, and if that doesn’t work you haven’t improvised enough; always accomplish the mission; but what if I can’t accomplish the mission; you mean to say after all this indoctrination, you are really going to be the kind of soldier who let their country down?

The Staff Sergeant shifted in his tight, class-A uniform and frowned. Phones rang and keyboards, the primary weapon of administrative Marines, clicked in the busy Personnel Support Detachment office. I said please a lot even though, if I hadn’t lost my eye, I’d never beg a guy like that for a thing.

“Please, Staff Sar’nt. Who else can I talk to?”

“For what, Sergeant Bing?”

“So I can stay in the Marines. I want to do my job.” I leaned in close so no one could hear me insisting, and pulled on the ragged border of my destroyed eye, the pink skin bubbling where the upper eye lid should’ve been. “I can still be a grunt.”

“Yeah?” he said, holding his black government pen on my blind side. “Catch this.” The falling pen disappeared into the darkness of my non-vision and he groaned as he bent over to pick it up from the floor. “The Med Board makes these decisions. Not me. But it’s obvious you can’t see out of that eye.” He took one last look at my paperwork before putting it into a folder and handing it to me. “You barely have an eye.”

“But they let wounded guys come back a lot. Last year in the Marine Corps Times they wrote about that Recon Gunny who went to Iraq with a fake leg.” A line of Marines looking to sort out pay issues, Basic Housing Allowance disbursements, life insurance policies, built up behind me and the Staff Sergeant became anxious to move me along.

“Marine Corps says you gotta have two eyes for combat shooting.”

I’d been to Iraq, two times, and Afghanistan. I had my Combat Action Ribbon.  Even had a gold star device on the damn thing. This guy, whose uniform was too tight, whose hands were too soft when we shook, knew fuck all about shooting, let alone combat.

“All due respect, Staff Sergeant, your rifle range isn’t the same as my deployments.”

“I understand, Sergeant Bing. What I guess I’m saying is,” he leaned down to his cluttered desk, grabbed the hefty wad of my medical record and pushed that into my chest too. “People come here every day wanting out. Faking injuries, getting arrested just so they can get kicked out. They want out bad. We process them quick so they can go back to whatever fucked up place they came from. But you,” he came around his desk, put his arm over my shoulder and walked me out because I wasn’t getting the point. “You’ll be medically retired. Have free health-insurance until you die.  Get a pension. The whole nine. This is your new life. You gotta embrace it.” At the front door, he turned away and called the next person in line.

It only took walking those 20 feet and I wasn’t a marine anymore.

*

I was in the Holding Company for another week before they finalized my medical retirement pay. Legally restricted from driving, I had to ask my parents to pick me up from the base. We rolled through the gate, past the marines in formation, in pairs, in dress blues, class- A’s, and cammies and I felt like the kid who was embarrassed to have his friends see his mom pick him up after school. They were in. I was out.

We drove from Camp Lejeune to Virginia Beach in record time if they give records for being as slow as possible.  My dad was against me living alone, so during the entire trip he was stalling at rest stops, barbeque restaurants, and those giant road signs marking long destroyed historical sites.

“I’ve always wanted to read these things. Haven’t you?” he yelled over the scream of passing cars on the highway as he read the tiny, raised print. My mom was quiet and probably just very happy I wasn’t in the Marine Corps anymore. What none us ever talked about was the fragments, from the bullet that hit me, lodged in my brain. My parents were honest, even blunt people, but these fragments, which could migrate and possibly kill me, were something they were never honest about. Instead, they just talked about all the reasons me living on my own was a terrible idea.

Every time my dad slowed the trip down, I told him, making sure to thrust the badge of my eye forward, that I was still an adult. We’d lived in Virginia Beach when I was a kid. I knew the area and might even run into a few old friends. All I needed to do was dry out for a minute, get settled, and then start regular school. Through the internet I’d already rented a small, terrible apartment. Seriously, I’d been in much worse. When we got there they helped move my three cardboard boxes inside, took me out to eat, and lingered for a half-an-hour wanting to ask me, or tell me, to come home before they finally left without mentioning a thing.

*

I took a job interview at a grocery store because I could walk there from my apartment.

The assistant night shift manager, an older lady who seemed afraid of me but masked it with a sample tray of rainbow cookies from the bakery she put as a barrier between us, asked me the standard questions.

“What’s your work experience?” “I’m a Marine.”

“Is that,” the assistant night shift manager touched her eye socket unconsciously, “what happened?”

“Afghanistan.”

“Oh, okay.” She marked something on her piece of paper. I had the job if I was willing to work first shift, ready to help open the store at 0600. That was easy. What was hard was the slow pace, old people in the morning, unemployed people before lunch, working people shopping with no time to be shopping when work let out. Every instruction was broken down Barney-style until even my dumbest co-workers could get tasks done with little supervision.

Other than being on time, I had no responsibilities. It didn’t matter that I led a fire team in Ramadi or Musah Qaleh. No one cared that my platoon had captured six High Value Targets in Iraq. Or that we fought our way out of multiple ambushes in Afghanistan, including when I was wounded. I “didn’t yet have the grocery experience to be a morning lead cashier.” Sitting back wasn’t the way I had been raised to work so when I saw problems I addressed them at the lowest possible level. That went wrong too when they wrote me up for approaching a chronically late coworker:

“Listen, Robbie. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but you have to be on time.” The kid rolled his eyes at me. I moved forward, touched apron to apron. His eyes were brown and dumber than a blood hound’s. “Don’t fucking roll your eyes at me.”

“Listen man, you ain’t the boss.” He smoothed his short moustache, licked his lips and stared at me meanly.

I clenched his apron. I was strong. He was not. Lifting him off his feet was an inevitable result of the laws of physics. “It’s everyone’s job to do their part. Don’t be a Blue Falcon. Don’t be a Buddy Fucker.” He was embarrassed, which was good—embarrassment is the truest motivation—so I put him down.

“This ain’t the damn military,” he said without looking me in the eye. He walked away before turning to add, “bitch.” I’d confronted him in the small break room in the back of the store, to avoid attention, but they’d heard the scuffle and the room filled with the fat ladies that worked in the dairy cooler. It took four of them, wrapping their soft arms around me, to hold me back from finishing him. I was suspended from work for a week.

Once a month, my father took me to my appointments at the VA Hospital. It worked out, because when the doctor asked if I was maintaining a “social support network” I could fake it and point to my dad who sat there, never betraying my independence, rubbing his face. I had the same doctor every time, which was good, but it was always the same speech. My scar would become less prominent. There’d be less fluid leaking. The unspeakable fragments in my brain couldn’t be removed and our only option was to keep watching for migration. When the appointments were done, my dad would take me out to eat, argue cheerfully with me about sports, and as he dropped me off ask me to move to northern Virginia so I was closer to my parents. I refused, every time, and he’d nod sadly before driving away.

At night, in my apartment, I’d pace. I would pace for hours and be unable to control the energy of my legs, feet, and hands. I had no idea what I should be doing other than pacing.

*

When I first used the Adult Services page on Craigslist it was because I wanted to do something dangerous again. Something with a pay-off.

I only looked at the ads with pictures. They didn’t offer sex, explicitly, but an hour of companionship. It was something they had to write in order to keep it legal. I called a few of the listed numbers to see what would happen:

“Yeah?”

“Hey, I saw your ad on Craigslist and was interested.”

“Okay sweetie, what time did you wanna come see me?”

“Hold on a minute. What’re your rates?” Money wasn’t really an issue for me. My apartment was cheap, I sat on lawn furniture, slept on a twin mattress on the floor. I had no bills. I just wanted to keep her on the phone.

“Everything,” she covered the phone and violently coughed. “Oh, ‘scuse me. Everything is on my ad, sweetie. I don’t discuss anything over the phone.”

“Will you give me a blowjob?”

The silence bulked between us. “I don’t discuss anything over the phone,” she said again, then hung up.

I kept searching and found a girl who called herself Octavia in her ad. 95 roses. Roses was code for dollars. I called, this time skipping the part where I asked for a blowjob, and she told me her motel. I walked there and called her again from the parking lot for her room number. Short and thick in a red velour jump suit, she was not as pretty as her picture. She had a tattoo of the Columbian flag on her neck.

“Columbiana?” I said.

“Ya,” she motioned for me to sit on one of the unmade beds in the dim room. “How’d you know?”

“Took a guess.” I didn’t know what to do next. I took out the 95 dollars and put it on the bed. She didn’t look at my face, my eye. She looked at the money. Then she looked at my cock.

When it was over, I walked home slowly in the delicious quiet. I’d tempted risk and won. It was good, felt like the old days. That night, in my rat-fucked apartment, I paced the beaten brown carpet. I felt like myself again. If I’d turned out the lights I would’ve sparked through the darkness.

The next escort I saw was a brunette. She had a tattoo like the other girl, except on her tit, but I couldn’t even tell what it was because it looked like she’d done it herself. It was gray and, in the dim motel breezeway, looked like scratches over her stretch marks. When I knocked she swung the door open all the way and stared at me with her hands on her hips.

“Hi.”

“You da boy dat just call me?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t move out of the doorway and I couldn’t see inside the room except for the reflection of street lights on a mirror.

“What happen’ to ya face?” She crossed her arms over her chest and the tattoo swelled out of her low-cut shirt.

“I kinda got shot.” My skin prickled. I looked over her and nervously scanned the dark shapes in the room.

“Oh f’real? Damn. You got ma money?” I nodded and she suddenly dropped her arms to her sides and jumped out of the door way, jamming tightly against the frame.

A huge man ran out from inside the dark motel room and punched me in my destroyed eye. I heard his boots squeaking then there was a flash of white light, searing pain and heat. I fell down and couldn’t move. He stomped on my legs and ribs.

The girl was screaming, “take his shit! Take all his shit!” He lifted me up by my belt, almost ripping my pants off, taking my wallet and phone. He looked for car keys and, not finding any, kicked me harder. When he found the keys to my apartment he threw them down into the parking lot.

“Not even a fucking car!” The girl screamed.

The man dragged me to the stairwell at the end of the breezeway. He punched me again in the eye before he threw me down the steps. I never saw his face and I can’t tell you what he was wearing. But I can still smell his dusty breath and feel the drip of his sweat on my face as he worked me over. No one came out to investigate the screaming at that cheap motel, though there were lights on in some of the rooms when I walked up. No one cared about me.

I was bleeding heavily from my face. Even my ears bled. I didn’t try to find my keys. I limped as fast as I could through some woods to my apartment and kicked in the locked front door. I’d tell the complex manager to fix it in the morning.

The last time I’d been hurt this bad was when I’d gotten shot in Afghanistan. After I was hit, PFC Meno dragged me down a wadi for cover, treated me for shock and held my hand until the medevac helo arrived.

Inside my apartment I wet some towels in hot water and mopped the new wounds. That Admin Staff Sar’nt who processed me out was right: this was my life now. I had to embrace it. I was alone and nobody was coming to save me. I had to adapt or be killed. I’d continue doing this dangerous thing, because that’s who I was, but I decided that something like this would never happen to me again.

*

I developed selection methods to help pick the escorts I would meet. I bought multiple Trac phones and called the girls from those. I’d never use a personal phone again. I set up a Tactical Operations Center in my living room. Multiple dry-erase boards hung from the walls listing phone numbers, girls they belonged to, and the copy from their Craigslist ads. I searched ads by phone numbers in other cities and states to develop a pattern of life analysis on which girls shared phones, worked with each other, or how often they left town, where they went, and when they came back. I had huge maps of Virginia Beach with acetate overlays so I could mark in wax pencil their motels. There was a kill board too, if something happened again while I visited a girl and my parents came looking for me they would know where I was last.

I called multiple girls to ask for the rates and chose to engage only the politest. This was no indication of safety but it was a method and better than my previous efforts. I’d send them to the wrong address in my apartment complex and watch from my window what they did when they got here, who was in the car with them, who followed them in another car. If a girl came to my fake address with a man in the car I never called her again. If a man followed in a separate car I never called her again.

Another thing I did was sit counter-surveillance in restaurants near their motels.

Sometimes late at night I’d hide behind a dumpster in the motel’s parking lot and blow an air horn to see who came out of their rooms. If, after I blew the air horn, she came out with another man I’d never call her again. I mitigated risk at all cost.

I was visiting one escort a week but stopped having sex with them. It wasn’t about that anymore. We’d talk for an hour and I’d pay them for that and leave. I really was paying for the company.

My focus returned at the grocery store and around the same time I got an award from management. We even had a ceremony like the ones in the marines. I was the most productive worker for January. Everyone forgot about the time I’d been written up.

Besides the first one, the only other escort I had sex with was blond and slightly taller than me. She called herself Starr. Her thighs were thick and she had a small belly. Her face was beautiful and her hair wasn’t brittle like the others. It was long and full and it looked strong, bouncing in the pony tail high on her head. She’d been drinking wine and watching television when I knocked on the door. She hugged me after I said hello, told me to sit on the bed.

“You’re in the military,” she said. “Why do you say that?”

“They hurt you.”

“That was a long time ago.” The room was dim and the fine smell of cigarettes came up when we shifted on the bed. It was warm. “Believe it or not it used to look worse.”

“Either way it’s no good.” She reached up and touched my cheek. “My cousin is a Marine.”

“Really? No way. I’m a Marine,” I said.

“Oh, you must be the hot guy in his unit he was always telling me I should call.” We laughed. “Come on.” She kissed me, which no other girl ever did. “Let’s have some fun.”

When we were done I paid her for the hour even though I didn’t stay. She insisted I keep half of the money. “Really, it’s no big deal,” she told me.

I usually showered immediately after I came back from a motel but I could smell the wine, cigarettes, and the lived-in feeling of her room. I went to sleep with all my clothes on.

*

The Motel 8 was on Virginia Beach Boulevard. It was L-shaped with rooms that faced a large parking lot. Every room had two windows, four feet by two feet, on either side of the door. All the windows had red curtains except rooms 108 and 222’s were blue. The doors had hinges that opened to the inside. The six-digit grid for the Motel 8 was: 18SVF657453. I wanted 10 digits, which would be accurate within 10 meters, but my civilian GPS couldn’t do it.

The maids began cleaning the rooms without Do Not Disturb signs around 0730 and usually finished at 1000. There was one maintenance man, black, 45 to 55 years of age, 5’8 to 5’10, 165-175 pounds, athletic build, short salt and pepper hair, goatee, glasses, thin gold chain around his neck and left wrist, usually in a gray button up shirt and black pants. The name “Sam” was stitched in red thread over his left breast pocket. Noticing these types of details kept me safe and tactically proficient.

The escort I was meeting in that Motel 8 posted a Craigslist ad titled JuSt wHaT YoU nEeD J . She offered half hour incall sessions for 100 roses and hour outcalls for 175 roses. An incall was me coming to the Motel 8, outcall was her getting into a 2002 sea green Honda Accord, license plate WSJ-1463, and driving to my apartment.

I was watching the motel from the Denny’s across the street, shifting uncomfortably in the booth from the taser in my waistband digging into my hip. I almost left it at my apartment because when I got beat up the guy didn’t use weapons but I’d just bought it and it was cool. I grabbed it, figuring it was like the intelligence I gathered; just another way to diminish the danger.

I finished the runny eggs from my Grand Slam and called the escort on my cellphone, scanning the motel windows for movement. It rang four times as I slid down the sticky green vinyl booth to avoid the constant hover of the waitress refilling my coffee cup.

“Hullah?” She answered softly in a lilting southern accent.

“Hey, I called you earlier about meeting up.” The blue curtain, room 222, second floor, north side, moved. That’s where I had guessed she was staying. “Yep. I’m pulling up to the parking lot, just like you told me.” She scanned the parking lot from her window. “What room should I come to?”

“222. The door’s open, just come in.”

“Be up in a minute,” I said. I waited for her to close the curtain, took a last bite of a burnt sausage link, threw down twenty dollars and left the Denny’s to go to her room.

Climbing the stairs to room 222, I unzipped my jacket. I wore the taser on the right side of my body, streamlined, low profile, and accessible. It was barely noticeable and I needed the extra seconds it would’ve taken to unzip a jacket in case something happened.

When I knocked she cracked the door and stared at me.

“Are you Krystal?”

“Maybe, are you James?”

“Yessum,” I said. “My name is James Webb.”

“Come on in, James.” She smiled, opened the door and motioned me inside. Petite, her brown hair was teased into an obnoxious wave and held in a pink, ruffled hair tie. She looked exactly like her picture, which’d never happened before. The beds were made like they hadn’t been slept in. There were no suitcases in the room. I immediately didn’t like the situation.

“Well, shit ya don’t mind if ah smoke, d’ya?” I said, faking an accent. The room smelled like it had been scoured with chemicals.

“Honey, this isn’t a smoking room.” I knew something was wrong. I hadn’t met an escort yet that didn’t smoke. She went over to the bed and patted the cheap, magenta comforter. “Come over here, James. Right next to me. You got the money?”

The hair on my neck went stiff. My balls tightened into a knot. “Money for what?” I scanned the room. The bathroom door was closed. There was a door in the wall beside the two twin beds that led to the adjacent motel room. The chain lock was unlatched.

“We need money if we’re going to fuck.” She rubbed her face nervously. “Come on, take off your jacket.”

“No. You take off your shirt, Krystal.” I took a step back toward the front door.

“No, no, no, James. Not without money. You did come to this motel room to pay me to fuck, right?”

I started to breathe heavy. My hands clenched and unclenched. I threw my jacket open a little and it caught on the taser under my shirt. “Take your shirt off, Krystal.”

“What’s under that jacket, James?”

“My cellphone. See ya later.” I reached for the door knob.

She quickly stood up from the bed, walking backwards to the door that joined the two rooms. “Brisket.”

“What the fuck.” I drew my jacket completely open.

“Brisket,” she said again and the connecting door exploded inward as a tall, fat, bald guy pushed it until it was completely open. Another man was behind him. He had a blonde handle bar moustache and a jean shirt. They both pointed pistols at me.

When you’re in an ambush, particularly a near ambush, the only way to survive is to rush that ambush. I crouched and combat-glided toward her pimps, reaching for the taser.

When I was an E-2 or E-3 and deploying to Iraq for the first time, a psychologist gave us a lecture on something called Cooper’s Scale.  It’s a color-coded scale of mental states in stressful situations. It started with white, which was being completely in la-la land and progressed to yellow which was having your head on a swivel. Next was red, when you focused in on one thing to the slight detriment of other events around you. You usually went red when you were engaging the enemy in combat but it was best to be there for just a moment and quickly peel back to yellow. The spectrum ended with black.  Black was pure dumb instinct.  If you went black you had no recollection of what you did. Go white or black in a fire fight and you will die. Yellow and red are fucking fun. When that connecting door opened and I saw those guys with guns I went pure yellow, like the color of melted butter.

“He’s going for something!” The big, bald guy screamed. He was in Weaver stance with his gun on me at center mass. That’s when I knew they weren’t pimps. Pimps aren’t tactical.

The two cops cleared the corners and moved down the wall just like they were supposed to. The girl was gone. I dropped the taser and raised my hands. I’d seen enough movies to know what to do next.

“I hate to break it to you fellas,” I lifted my shirt above my chest to show them I didn’t have anything else. “But this isn’t the first time people’ve put guns in my face.” That wasn’t the truth. I hardly ever saw the people who’d shot at me. It just sounded badass.

Do you see how war works? You train to fight an enemy by transforming yourself through pain into whatever it is you need to be to win against that particular foe. But, when you have worthy adversaries, there’s always something else waiting to surprise you. I assumed I’d get beat up and robbed again. Getting arrested never even crossed my mind.

I was cuffed after they punched me a couple of times for scaring the shit out of them.

*

Later, the big, bald cop interrogated me in a barren room at the police station. “Your name’s Rod Bing, right?”

“Yep.”

“Not James Webb.”

“No, but it was clever wasn’t it?”

The bald cop snorted like a bull. “Do you regularly see prostitutes?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you pay them?”

“Perhaps.”

“Do you see a lot of prostitutes in this area?” “Possibly.”

He slapped the table forcefully. “I can’t help you if you don’t help me, Rod.” “Help with what?”

“You seem like a smart guy. In shape, good looking.”

“Damn straight.”

“Why would you do something like this? Don’t you have friends? Girlfriends?” “I was trying to figure out my next move before I got around to that.”

“Tell me what’s going on. So I can help you.”

“Sure,” I said. “But you’re not going to get a narrative response out of me by asking leading questions. That’s amateur shit. Didn’t they teach you how to interrogate?” I threw up my cuffed hands and smirked.

“Okay, maybe you don’t want me to help you.” He looked around like he was searching for something that had just been in his hand. The room was as tight as a broom closet and the cinderblock walls were sweating with condensation. “You smoke cigarettes, Rod?”

“No.”

“You want a soda?”

“Never.”

“What the fuck do you do other than meet prostitutes?” He slammed his hand again but not to scare me. He was genuinely frustrated.

“There you go! An interrogative! What do I do? Look at me, I’m a beast.”

“So you like to work out? Okay. What’re your favorite supplements?”

“Fuck that,” I said. “If it had a face, soul, and a mother I eat it. If it grows out of the ground or you can pick it from a tree I eat it.” I smirked again. “All that other shit’ll kill you.”

“You like music?”

“Sure.”

“What type?”

“I’ll be that asshole and just say I listen to everything. That’s what everyone else says, right?”

“You look like a rock guy.”

“Uh.” I shrugged. “Okay.”

“Who you like?”

“I don’t know, man. Okay? I like fucking music.”

“You were in the Marine Corps, right?”

I nodded.

“I’m in the Army Reserves. I’ve been to Afghanistan twice. You deploy anywhere?”

“Iraq twice, Afghanistan once. Marine Corps Infantry, man. You see? That’s what I’m really supposed to be doing. Not this prostitute shit.” I leaned across the narrow table. “You know what a Pashtun is?”

“They’re the people in southern Afghanistan, right?” “You got it. What about the Popalzai?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what those are.”

“The Popalzai are a Pashtun tribe. See, that’s what I do. I try to be the best at my job. So I studied Afghanistan harder than my officers because knowing everything would keep my marines alive. I was good at my job because I put in the work. That’s who I am.” I placed my cuffed hands on the table, pushing them toward his scribbled note pad. “The Pashtun tribal structure is tight because it’s really what they all have in the end. Without your tribe you don’t exist. If you’re a Pashtun that gets kicked out of your tribe, you might as well be dead. It’s like being shit out.” I licked my dry lips. “Do you know what it feels like to be shit out?”

“No,” he said.

Of course he didn’t. But I did.

*

“Turn here,” I told my dad. He hadn’t said a word since he picked me up from the police station. “You want to get something to eat?”

“Nope.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I was only in jail for 36 hours with no food.” I stretched in my seat. “But then again I’d rather be a skinny dog in the streets than a fat dog on a leash.” He was mad so he was giving me the dramatic silent treatment. Typical for my dad. “It’s just a misdemeanor.”

He accelerated to a red light and stuck the brakes hard.  “How are you going to keep your job?”

“The grocery store? Fuck that job.” Turning into the parking lot of my apartment complex, he found a spot and threw the gear violently into park. “Look, I know it took you awhile to get over me being hurt,” I said. “You were mad I even joined the Marines. But being in the Marine Corps was good for me. Really good.”

“Shut up, Rod.” He sat back and exhaled loud. It was all fucking drama. “You’re being a stress monster, dad.”

“Yeah, really? What’d I tell you would happen if you lived on your own? Look at this place.” He motioned through the windshield at my rundown apartment complex. “You can’t live here. You need to come back with me.”

“Fine, whatever.” I pulled the handle on the car door. “Not much left for me here anyway.”

“Rod,” he whispered. Still all theater. “You’re not well.”

I opened the door and swung my feet out, back turned. “You need to understand that I’m only coming to live with you because I don’t want to live here anymore.  Not because you’re asking me to.”

“Rod, you’re in a lot of trouble.”

“And you’re more drama than Shakespeare.” I got out of his car. “Come inside and help me with my stuff.”

My dad lost his mind when I opened the door to my apartment.

“Holy shit, Rod. This is bad.” He spun in place, taking in the entire living room, the maps, the kill board, the six digit geocords of motels on white boards, the picture printouts.

“This is bad bad bad.” He walked over to the comms gear on the sagging card table. “How many phones is this? You got a dozen cell phones?” He picked two up, raising them over his head, and turned toward me.

“Trac phones,” I said. “Throw-aways. The primary communication method of drug dealers, insurgents and terrorists at large. And this guy.” I smiled at him, his shock, but also at the order and symmetry of my work. He dropped the phones, their backs blowing open and lithium batteries spilling on the carpet. I stooped to the ground. “Come on, these are fragile.”

“—Is this a HAM radio? Is it? What is this for?” His mouth hung open in surprise. I put the reassembled trac phones on the card table and took hold of his wrists before he broke something else. He let me move him, like a tired child, toward the single nylon lawn chair in the middle of the room. Seated, I placed the HAM radio on his lap.

“I bought it on E-Bay for like 20 bucks. It’s fucking useless. Just looks badass.” I sat at his feet, cross-legged on the brown and dirty carpet, looking up at his face for something more than terrified shock.

“Rod, son.” He placed the radio at his feet and looked away from what he must of thought was a terrible sight. “Not good. None of this.”

I laughed when he said that to convince him that this wasn’t a problem. It was cool. This stuff, this way of life, was cool. “Look.” I swept my hand across the space. “You’re getting a glimpse into what I did for 6 years. Welcome to my TOC.”

He stood from the lawn chair, stared at me. His eyes were lined with tears and he tilted his head back to keep them from spilling out. “Come here. Stand up,” he said. I grabbed his hand and he took my shoulders for a moment before pulling me against his body. “This is not the only thing you have to be.” He pushed me away to see my face and held my head on the wounded side. My dad rubbed my scar softly. “You can be something else.”

I slapped his hand away impulsively then grabbed it again, pushing it into the thick bands of my scar. The tear ducts in my wounded eye were gone but I cried from the other. “But I didn’t want to be anything else, Dad. This is what I wanted to be.”

“Come home with me. We’ll figure it out.”

Just like mom, my dad had never wanted me to become a Marine.  He didn’t get it, never had any desire to do it himself, hadn’t ever even known anyone in the military except for my grandfather who was in World War II but never talked about it—like everyone else’s fucking grandpa—and had spent his life wearing a collared shirt and some khaki pants hanging out in an office and drinking coffee with co-workers he called friends but never came over to our house for birthdays or holidays or even a summer party, let alone hide him in a wadi and keep him alive as bullets screamed over their heads.  And he was convinced I would get PSTD, probably because he’d watched too many sad Vietnam movies.  I couldn’t explain to him that machine guns had made me excited the same way footballs and baseball bats or SAT prep had for other kids.  And sometimes I wish I hadn’t been their only kid, had an older brother or sister that joined just so I could blame it on them and make it easy.

But when I graduated boot camp, and especially when I started to deploy, my dad became prouder than anyone I knew.  He bought a Marine Dad hat at Parris Island and a t-shirt too, put my goofy looking boot camp photo on his desk at work.  My mom once told me that he faced it toward the opening of his cubicle just so people could see it when they walked by and would ask him about me.

Later, when I was wounded, my dad barely came into my hospital room in Germany, and when he did, he’d spend five minutes there, never sitting, looking out the window before leaving again. I thought he was an asshole. Really, he just couldn’t stand seeing me hurt.

Standing together in the living room, my dad asked me what I wanted to pack, but I was crying so hard I could barely talk. He took my clothes and we left as soon as he was done stuffing them in my sea bag. I never went back to that apartment in Virginia Beach. We went to my parent’s house in Fredericksburg and they set me up in the newly finished room over the garage.

That first night I slept well and in the morning I could hear him downstairs talking to my mom before they went to work. It was the first morning in eight months I hadn’t woken up alone.

Both him and my mom eventually went back to Virginia Beach and cleaned out my apartment, throwing out all of the TOC gear and bringing what was left home. There were boxes full of uniforms. The three boxes labeled Afghanistan had frayed, dirty cammies I’d worn for five months straight.

When my parents were at work I put one of the cammie blouses on, pulled a pair of the trousers up to my waist. In front of the bathroom mirror I almost looked like myself. There was my wounded face and the muscle I’d lost but I was almost myself. It was the uniform that was wrong. On the chest there was the left name tape with my last name, BING, and another on the right that read US MARINES. I found my pig sticker knife in the same Afghanistan box and used it to cut off the US MARINES. I pulled the rest of the uniforms from the box and cut US MARINES off them too. I went back to the bathroom mirror. With just my last name the uniform looked much better.

I looked like who I was. I was good to go.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Could be an ambush.”

“Could be.”

“But here? The corps is miles back.”

“Looks like it broke down.”

It was true. Steam trailed through the windows in the engine. Driggs could see the shimmer of heat from the stack all this way off without the binos. The tracks went through a wooded stretch, but the high desert loomed off in the distance and vegetation grew sparse. They could see intermittent open stretches along a length of the train. And in those stretches, no cigarettes burned, no bayonets glinted, no enemy moved. Not that Driggs could see.

“Let’s take a look.”

“Let’s report back to Captain first.”

Driggs looked from Cote’s left eye across her freckled nose to her right and back to her left. Cote gazed, unblinking, back. She broke the silence.

“You know about Captain’s and Donwalla’s beef. You were at muster this morning. You were standing right next to me when he leaned in with his pink cheeks and spat in my face. Shouldn’t be wearing my SSI for the 3rd Rangers? Are you shitting me? After what happened? Driggs, the man doesn’t trust us. He doesn’t like us. He has no faith in us. Until we do something about that, we’re on our own.”

Cote had been blessed with the gifts of persuasion. Driggs had been wary of this fact since soldier onlining in Tacoma. Despite the war, one night she had gotten her hands on a bottle of whiskey. When half of it was gone, she then had talked Driggs into climbing one of the base’s mobile towers. From the top, they could see Mt. Rainier in the moonlight and, to the north, the remnants of Seattle still smoldering.

“The Janks could be back any minute,” Cote broke in again. “If we take this back to Captain, he’ll chew us out for not taking a closer look. And then he’ll round up a half dozen more experienced rangers and investigate. And if—if—this freighter is still around when they come back in a couple hours, they’re going to keep all the scotch and cigars they find for themselves.”

Driggs twitched. Cote chewed a twig and stared off at the train. It didn’t resemble any commuters or freights he’d seen. It was black and dilapidated. It looked like the trains from the pictures he’d seen in his history textbook.

Finally, he spat. “Ok, we take a closer look. And then we report back.”

Driggs scrambled down the bluff face after Cote. He jumped the last ten feet and skidded through the scree. The two rangers made their way forward, hugging the red pines and stopping every 100 yards to listen and scan. Only hawk calls broke the silence, along with their own footsteps, which were impossible to stifle on the tinder-dry pine needles.

***

Whenever the sirens used to blow and they sheltered in their basement, Driggs’ father would always tell him by the light of their LED lantern about how he took up smoking on the day of November 3rd, 2062.

“It was then that me and just about everyone else in Port Angeles knew for sure that the house was divided against itself,” he used to say. “You had President-Elect Morrison parading across screens and broadcasts, celebrating his 92% landslide victory over the so-called ‘Supreme Commander.’ We thought he was such a plushed-up load of wash—the ‘General’ or whatever else he was calling himself. He really showed us. Suddenly, everyone realizes we’re not hearing a chirp from regions all across the country. The Southwest, the Rockies, the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic, Alaska, Florida, Maine—they all went dark. Nothing. 404 Error Page Not Found. Then we heard rumors about the transport and information sector sabotage, the round ups, the murders.

I walked to the corner store and asked for a pack and a lighter. Red Robert who owned the place knew all too well I was 14. He didn’t say a thing to me. Didn’t even look at me. He just kept staring at his screen.

I walked home, sat on the front porch, and I’ll always remember this: The Church of Latter Day Saints across the street, they’d put up a new sign a few days before. It said, ‘Free trip to Heaven! Details inside.’ I hated it and I loved it. I wanted to believe it. I wanted somewhere to escape to. I wanted faith. But all I had was a pack of smokes. I flicked my butts at that sign all afternoon.”

***

There in the high desert, twelve years after his father had passed, Driggs remembered the last cigarette he had smoked with painful clarity. When the word got out that tobacco rations had been cut altogether three weeks back, he started measuring his supplies. He took out his three remaining packs from the waterproof pocket in the top of his rucksack. He lined the blank government issued labels side by side. Two were full, and four remained in the third. He took out two darts, lit them at the same time, and resigned himself to two a day for the next three weeks. Maybe by that time, things would change.

Six days and twelve cigarettes in, the Third Rangers made it over the Cascades and down onto the plains. Screening the movement of the main corps, his unit skirted the edge of the forest. Then they were ordered to scout ahead. Intelligence believed a Jank division sat camped some miles off and were backed up by guerrilla mountain people, no less.

At dusk, the corps was 10 miles back, and dark clouds began to pour over the foothills to the West like slow-flowing lava. Captain Donwalla ordered the rangers to camp. They posted sentries, ate a cold supper, and staked out their bivouacs for the night. Cote had wandered off to piss. When she came back, she told Driggs about a cave she’d found and how there was room for two. And then the rain started coming down by the gallon. Driggs gathered up his roll and followed her through the storm. It was some ways out and it took Cote ten minutes wandering around before she found it again. But a cave it was, and it was dry. The two laid out their rolls and soon were sound asleep.

They woke at first light, collected their things, and headed down the gentle slope. Mist hung just above the treetops. Their fellow rangers’ shelters lay among the pines glistening from the rain.

“How about that,” Cote said. “First ones up. Guess that proves Donwalla does sleep after all.”

But as Driggs stepped beyond the next tree, his captain’s eyes met him with a stare. He wheeled about in horror. Donwalla’s high-and-tight head was pinned to the tree with a rebar stake. His body was nowhere to be seen.

Driggs ran over to the nearest bivvy and kicked it. No response. Same with the next. And the next. Looking closer, he saw knife cuts through the denier nylon.

“We need to get out of here,” Driggs said to Cote, who was slumped down below Donwalla’s head with her rifle raised.

“Cote!”

Cote held up her hand, and Driggs clammed up. He caught some movement at his 2:00. And then Cote’s rifle went off and a body fell in the distance.

“Go,” she whispered.

Shots responded.  The instinct for survival lifted Driggs’ feet with the momentum of generations, tipping him onward.

After they reported back to the Colonel, Driggs smoked every cigarette he had left. Their unit, the Third Rangers, which now numbered two, was dissolved and absorbed by the Fourth.

***

They could see the train through the trees now and they began to smell the faint smell of death.

“Are those dogs barking?”

Driggs stopped walking and listened.

“Not dogs … vultures.”

They followed the sound and sure enough came upon the bodies of three horses beside the first car. After pausing for a few, the rangers approached.

They hadn’t been dead long. Their coats still gleamed and the few carrion birds that had arrived were only just beginning to battle over the choice spots. Driggs could see no apparent cause of death.

“If these horses just died, where’s the smell coming from?”

Cote shook her head. A trail of blood ran off toward the train. They followed it across the coupling and around the other side.

A Jank lay slumped against a wheel. He wore a moustache not unlike the one Driggs’ father used to grow. His bewildered eyes gazed up into the muzzles of Driggs’ and Cote’s rifles. With his left hand, he clutched his right arm. It had been severed off cleanly—surgically—below the elbow. His sand-colored uniform was stained crimson down one side.

“What happened?” Cote whispered.

The dying man raised his eyes.

“Do you have a cigarette?”

“No.” They said in unison.

His mouth went slack. And he lowered his gaze to the horizon.

“What happened?” Driggs said and nudged the dying man’s stump with his muzzle.

He gasped and, in racking breaths: “We—we—we—we …”

“We what?”

“We found … out.”

He used his last breath to say his last word. His left arm dropped and his head swung forward.

“Found out what?”

“Fuck knows. Check him and them.” Cote gestured to a distance away from the train where a half dozen dead Janks lay lined up in a neat row. “I’m going inside.”

Like the horses, none of these Janks bore any visible wounds. Driggs searched their khaki pockets. He found a locket holding the picture of a woman that could be a mother or a wife to the late wearer, a stained embroidered handkerchief, some worn polaroid porn, two journals, a deck of cards, fishing line and three lures, along with the six Jank regulation cantines, carbines, clasp knives, fire pods, watches, bivouacs, and extra rounds. The unit leader, one Captain Harrison, also carried a pair of binos, a compass, a spot device, and one melted ‘government’ issued Jank chocolate bar.  Driggs tore open the package and shoved the melted bar in his mouth. He tightly closed his front teeth and slowly pulled the plastic out, trapping the chocolate within.

***

When Driggs was 17, Jank guerrillas blew up the Port Angeles supply stockpile. He and most of the others started walking south towards Olympia. The rumors were that the Mounties at the Canadian border had orders to shoot migrants on sight. Still, some scraped supplies together and set off in boats hoping to land somewhere on Vancouver Island or to venture further north and seek shelter with the Haida.

With his father dead and his mother off running a field hospital somewhere around Fort Vancouver, he loaded up a backpack and headed south alone. He walked from sunrise to sundown and on a little further, lighting the way with his headlamp. The road was full of others like himself.

When the sun rose the next morning, he carried on. Toward noon around Briedablick, Driggs found himself in open farm land, with the Olympic range framing the horizon. The road ran beside a river bordered by blackberry bushes and poplars. Two quads motored up towards him, traveling in the opposite direction. It was two shirtless boys with shapeless torsos, younger than Driggs. As they neared, they slowed, and then stopped ten feet away. One showed him his shotgun.

“You can stop right there.”

Driggs stopped.

“Put your pack on the ground and empty your pockets.”

“I don’t have any money or much of value. I’m heading to—“

“PUT your pack on the ground. And empty your pockets.”

One of the boys’ quads had a trailer fixed to it. Driggs saw other packs, suitcases,  and miscellaneous gear in the back.

Then all three heard a ping followed by the sprinkling of glass. The left rearview mirror of the quad ridden by the boy with the shotgun had been shot off. A  sandy-haired young woman wearing tan waders with a fishing net on her belt walked slowly up from the river bank with a rifle under her cheek.

“The next one is going through your ear if you don’t throw that shotgun down.”

The unarmed boy towing the load looked to his friend.

“Do it, Jackson.”

Jackson tossed his shotgun on to the pavement.

“Good job. Why don’t you go pick that up?” Driggs knew she was talking to him. He walked forward and grabbed the gun. The woman now hurried forward to face the boys.

“If it were olden days, I’d say you boys are going to hell, robbing refugees in times like this. But we’re past that now. I guess I’ll say you better think about how you treat your fellow humans, otherwise you’re bound to wind up dead. Get out of here.”

The boys fired up their quads without a word and rode them past. At last, the woman lowered her rifle.

“My name’s Cote.”

“Driggs.”

***

“Driggs!”

He turned to see Cote’s head poking out the doorway of the engine.

“Come on and check this out.”

He sneezed as he entered the cloud of dust in the engine car. Cote had her undershirt up over her nose. It was hot; fuel still burned in the engine. A fine layer of dust covered the controls, the sills, every surface. It blew like smoke out into the car behind. The only marks in the dust were their own.

“Cote—what the…?”

“What?”

“What’s with the dust?”

“It was windy last night.”

“The windows are closed.”

“The door’s open.”

“This isn’t sand.”

“Whatever. Look at this.” Cote held a piece of a single piece of paper with a dull red seal at the bottom corner. “Can you read it?”

Driggs brought it into the light, but it was so heavily mildewed that the words had been all but completely obscured. He saw marks that looked like ‘תיבת.’

“Not a chance.”

They jumped out and headed to the next car. Driggs struggled to pull the iron latch down, and it creaked along the way. They needed to push together just to crack the door ajar. But the second they had it open, they were hit with a wave of aroma and moisture. Cote and Driggs climbed in to another world.

All was dark and dank; heavy and hard to breathe. Driggs had to sit down. An aisle ran down the center of the car and, on either side, there were dense rows of lush plants. Their green stretched out, down, and up toward the glass-paned ceiling.

Orange-purple flowers sprang from the gaps in the husky trunks and yellow fruit hung in bunches.

“What on earth …”

Driggs wandered closer. He’d never seen flowers like these. And now that he was close, he could smell the ripeness of the fruit. He picked off a bunch and brought them to his mouth, bit, chewed, and swallowed.

“Cote!”

“What the hell, Driggs?”

“Try this fruit!”

Cote grabbed her own bunch. A second passed.

“Jesus on a jet plane! That’s good!”

“Hehehe, pretty tasty, aren’t they?”

The laugh sounded a guttural baritone and echoed throughout the car. Driggs and Cote froze. In the corner, a dark figure rose from a sitting position in the shadows.

“FREEZE JANK.” Juice ran in a stream from Cote’s chin down on to the stock of her raised rifle.

The shadow raised its hands and spoke. “Hinene. There is no need, for I am unarmed.”

“Where is this train headed?”

The figure walked forward. He was tall and wore a black coat with tails. A black, brimmed hat hid his downturned face from view.

“The official documents say Seattle, but its true destination is Vancouver, and on from there.”

“Seattle? But our forces are all the way south to Bend.”

“The present conflict between your state and your opponent’s state does not concern me.”

“Well then how’d you get all this fruit past the Jank inspectors?”

“They’re called chupas, and I have a few cards up my sleeve.”

“Are those cards Verified Greenbacks?”

“Hehehe oh no.”

“Why’d you break down?”

“I didn’t. I received word your forces have pulled up the tracks a few miles north. I just stopped.” He drew these final words out.

“Who are those Janks outside?”

“Part of a platoon from the Army of the Supreme Comander.”

“Why are they dead?”

“Why? Were you family?”

“No, but—“

“Why’s the engine so dusty?” Driggs’ voice cracked.

The figure paused, slowly turning his head. “I like it that way.”

“So, what is this? What—“ Cote paused. Her rifle dipped. “—what are you bringing north? Why are there a half a dozen dead bodies outside? It’s time to start making some sense here pal.”

“Why don’t you see for yourself?”

Driggs’ mouth opened wider. Cote stomped her foot.

“Whatever man. First, I want you to step forward. Driggs, go pat him down.”

When Driggs slapped the figure’s breast pocket, a hollow thud sounded. Out of it emerged an unopened pack of Marlboro Reds.

“Want a smoke?”

The figure raised his head to reveal a pale grin.

***

Outside, his skin looked even paler. Nicotine washed over Driggs in gentle waves. Despite the heat and the black dress, the man did not sweat.

“What’s your name?”

Cote had already finished her cigarette, after dragging furiously with it clenched between her teeth. She still held her rifle raised with both hands. The man offered her one more.

“You can call me Jo.”

“Where are you from?”

“Down south.”

Driggs finished his cigarette and took one more. They all smoked in silence down to the filter.

“Ok, let’s see the rest of the train.”

“Yes Private Cote. I have another car of the chupas here.” He gestured inside the following dank container. “Their root can be used to mix a psychedelic tea. Many find it heals afflictions of the nerves and the mind. It can also serve as an undetectable poison in highly concentrated doses.”

Jo cracked the latch on the car and thrust it effortlessly open. Cote and Driggs followed him inside to the close air.

“Chupas have an amazing ability to regenerate if injured.”

He reached out and snapped off a green outgrowth.

“And their shoots make for an excellent salad addition.”

He popped it in his mouth.

“Look.”

Driggs and Cote bent close. In the place where the shoot had grown, already another young outgrowth had emerged to replace it.

“I love these organisms for their structure. Human society for centuries now has prized and supported the lone individual, The Napoleons, the Michael Jordans, The Supreme Comandante who overthrew the hold of the technologists that bound him.”

“That’s not us, pal.”

“But he’s still in charge, isn’t he?”

“Down there he is.”

“It makes no difference. The purpose of life is to live, to love, and to spread life and love. And with luck, new creations will do the same. Over the years, organisms typically do one thing well. They either love well and spread love, or they live well and spread life. Too often, they destroy life to spread love or destroy love to spread life. They see things as a competition. But these chupas strike a balance. Like the poplar, or the hive, or the rhizome, they have no conception of the individual. They may appear to be single organisms, even being potted here individually for more convenient transportation. But in the wild, they exist as a network. Each grove represents a hub of chupa life. If one falls ill or suffers damage, others will divert resources to help it rebuild. In potting them like this, I have done them a great injury. I hope they will forgive me.”

“So this is what all those Janks got jacked up for?”

“I doubt those men had seen a chupa in their lives.”

“Look, Jo,” Cote scratched her narrow hip. “These plants are great and all, but we need to get this tour moving so we can make our report to our superior. And I’m also gonna need another of those Reds.”

“As you wish, Private Cote.”

The next car was refreshingly cool, refrigerated well below the heat outside. The walls were lined with illuminated glass cases filled with glass cylinders. The cylinders were filled with liquid, and through the liquid floated particulate matter.

“What’s in those?”

“Other creatures. Well, their DNA at least.”

Driggs coughed. He remembered his mother’s lab where she collected dead specimens in jars. Always in the evening, after her office hours had ended, his father sent him down there to call her for dinner. She left her work with gravity. Driggs’ older brother and sister had died of the measles. His own cheeks and forehead still bore the scars from when he had it. His mother would talk about how humans once knew how to cure and vaccinate against it. But since the Breach, doctors in the Resistance had lost much knowledge.

“What creatures?” Cote still held her rifle pointed between Jo’s shoulder blades, though she had lowered it to her hip.

“Some of my favorites. The cuttlefish, the bonobo, the venus fly trap. The three-toed sloth—they’re cute. I very nearly made room for the Welsh Corgi too …”

“Why aren’t the chupas in one of those?”

“Well, they can’t bear fruit if they’re just DNA in a test tube, can they?”

In other cars, Jo showed Driggs and Cote an assortment of bins filled with precious gems and earth metals, jagged materials that glinted with sunlight. Another held rows of filing cabinets. In another, they found dusty shelves full of old holy books, all written in honor and glory to the creator.

They walked back outside just before the caboose. Jo turned and said, “I want to tell you about a people I once knew.

When once, they were lonesome, I took them in. They had nowhere to go, no values to live by. I gave them purpose. When once, the yoke wore and wore till it fit too snug, I handed them the axe. I gave them the grinder, the haft, and the bronze point to crown it.

I bade them to rise up against their enslavers in Mizraim, and brought them to the land which I promised unto their fathers; and I said, ‘I will never break my covenant.’ I parted the waters.

When once, and many times more, fires of rival tribes burned too close, I raised the spirit in them and sent rider after rider galloping down the mountainside. I cared for them like children, and in return, they called me father.

They were very much like you—taking up arms, offering their lives to further their cause, even under a commander who thinks you should have perished alongside your comrades and his rival whom he hated. I know they would recognize you both as a brother and a sister in arms in the fight to preserve life and love.”

Driggs felt his vision go warm and hazy. A low buzzing became audible. He realized that he was slowly nodding. Cote fixed him with a quizzical expression, and he quickly regained his focus. Jo was still talking.

“With them and with those that came before, I built a beautiful society of plants, mammals, fungi, cetaceans, bacteria, Noah, Abraham, Lot, and countless other houses, domains, and families.

But these great men and women have passed. Like rain upon the mountain, they have all passed. As the years went on, fewer and fewer loved me. Some claimed they had killed me. And now, I fear the conflict between your warring factions will destroy all I—all we—have built. I ask that you grant me safe passage. I carry with me only life and love. All I ask is you help me spread it. Go unto your commanders and rally your brothers and sisters with my message. Re-lay the tracks south of Bend and allow me safe passage north.”

The sound of Jo’s voice died away slowly in the dry desert air. Driggs looked from Jo to Cote. He was about to speak. And then—

“What’s in that car?” Cote asked, sucking on another red, pointing with her thumb over her shoulder to the caboose of the train.

“That—that car holds more chupas.”

“Uh-huh.”

The buzzing subsided. Driggs stood up straight and raised his voice. “Why aren’t those chupas with the others at the front of the train?”

“I wasn’t sure if I’d have room.”

Cote looked from her fellow ranger to Jo.

“Go open it, Driggs.”

“It might interest you to know a unit of the Commander’s cavalry will arrive within minutes. I can only delay them for so long. I beg you, make your report.”

“I don’t hear anything except those vultures.”

Cote pointed her rifle at Jo again.

“Open it, Driggs.”

Driggs started walking toward the caboose. Jo looked to Driggs and back to Cote, who kept her rifle raised.

Impossibly fast, Jo crouched to the ground and threw sand in Cote’s face.

“Driggs!”

He wheeled around to see Jo flying across the sand. His knees collided with Driggs chest and knocked him to the ground.

“I thought I could convince you—I thought I could inspire you,” Jo spat, his face growing taunt and drawn beneath his black brim. “But it appears you’re like the others. And like the Amakelites, you shan’t be spared. It is written.”

At that moment a bullet passed through Jo’s head from jaw hinge to jaw hinge. He was knocked sideways off Driggs. Cote sprung forward, running toward the caboose door. Jo rose unscathed.

“NO,” he shouted. Driggs felt his bones vibrate. Cote made it to the door and popped the hinge down with the butt of her rifle. A sound like a shell blast emitted from the car. The door exploded open and Cote and Driggs were lifted from the ground and thrown through the air. Cote struck a tree and landed unconscious among the dry needles.

Driggs landed hard a few dozen feet away and scrambled over to his fellow ranger. But before he could rouse her, he raised his head to watch the train. A kind of smoke or cloud was issuing from the caboose. Behind it, he saw what looked like masses of limbs and pulsing organs. They were hit with a wave of stench. It smelled like thousands of nameless carcasses left to rot under the sun. Soundless bolts of lightning flashed, followed by a howling gale. Jo stood beside the train, but had inexplicably grown in size. He grew larger still, towering over the train, seeking to contain the cloud with his hat. His enormous bare head revealed tattoos of ancient characters and deep, purple scars.

Fire, ice, toil, and sickness flew from the open caboose, igniting the forest floor beside the tracks. The wind from the train spurred the fire on, toward where Driggs and Cote lay. Driggs hoisted Cote over his shoulder and ran north along the track. Past the train, he crossed the ties and made his way into the forest. He knelt and laid Cote on the ground. After gently lowering her head, his hand came away bloody, and he uncorked his canteen to splash water on his friend’s face.

Through the storm issuing from the train, he shouted her name. Her eyes flickered.

“Cote, we have to go!”

Her eyes snapped open, her jaw clenched, and her hand thrust up to catch Driggs’ shoulder.

“Help me up.”

The rangers ran back toward the bluff and scrambled up it. At the top, they collapsed with heaving chests and looked back. The fire had spread impossibly fast. It had crossed the tracks, and approached in their direction.

“Look.”

A section of the horizon shimmered.

“What is that?”

“Hell is murky.”

Driggs raised his binos. Three Jank columns marched forward. Refocusing, he saw cavalry units peppering the sparse forest. Driggs looked back to the train. The now-massive Jo still battled amongst the storm that issued from the caboose. A noise sounded at their nine and the two looked up to see incoming Resistance birds.

“Wonder what good they’ll do.”

“Maybe a little more damage than my rifle.”

The two watched as the aircraft rained down missiles onto the Jank cavalry and into the cloud in which Jo was now obscured. Upon contact, the train erupted and flung ash and smoke miles overhead. Below, the fire drew nearer and nearer.

“Cote.”

She looked at her ranger in arms. Driggs held out the half empty pack of Reds, with one protruding in her direction.

“They were knocked loose when that thing had me down.”

“Driggs,” Cote said, lighting up, “you’re one hell of a ranger.”

He had one scar when I met him, a single blow to the back of his neck in the soft fleshy space between head gear and body armor. He liked to say, I’ll tell you this for free. I’d move in close and listen. His voice was a lyric tenor. A murmur, a whisper, sometimes a songbird’s call.  In the medic’s kit were the trappings of his profession: butterfly clamps, a triangular scalpel, and three items for clearing a blocked airway. He packed these into a metal case the night before he left.

Another case was filled with antibiotics, antifungals, and the antimalarial drug Mefloquine, which caused one soldier to have a psychotic break and go on a rampage in Qandahar. In the third and final case, he kept morphine, oxy, and a handful of drugs whose names I can’t recall.

That whole case was reserved for pain. He was constantly having to refill it.

The medic had a silver star, a purple heart, and an enormous pair of jump wings. On his neck, he had one scar. I wasn’t his wife or life partner. I was just his girlfriend but I loved him. For six blissful months I loved him. In the Carolina woods, on the Roanoke dunes, under moonlight and firelight, in oceans and cars. We had our own special places, our own secret codes. We had summer and sand, and autumn and wind. We had indigo and sepia, and waves and retreats.

By Thanksgiving I learned to play first-person shooter games. Left 4 Dead—his favorite.

I’d get shot or lose a limb. He’d pick it up and replace it. After that, he packed his metal cases. The first month of his tour passed quickly. He called to say his team had arrived safely somewhere between Kabul and Khost, but soon they’d have to move. South, I figured, then we lost contact.

I spent the next few months feverishly knitting. I didn’t know how to knit, but I couldn’t think or stop thinking, so I taught myself to knit and I made three sweaters. By the time he called, I had started an afghan blanket. It was the color of a storm cloud, between black and white.

Mela? he said.

He drew out the vowels in his sing-song voice. He knew not to say Philomela. My parents had been cruel to name me after the bird-princess who lost her voice, and let’s face it, I was no princess. Still, I felt some affinity with the bird-like qualities of the fallen Athenian. I admired her metamorphosis and had chosen for myself a perfect match: an airborne army medic who could heal people and fly.

I could hear the medic breathing and pressed my ear to the phone.

Mela, he said. Can you please pick me up?

I drove to airborne headquarters, parked my car, and ran to him. We crashed into each  other like dive-bombing birds tangled in flight. He cut his lip on my kiss; I tasted his avian blood.

Yes, I did pick him up, but we didn’t quite make it home. We stopped at a co-op for migratory creatures where we loved for hours on end. He brushed a lock of hair from my eye. It caught on an eyelash, which was thick with mascara and fairy dust and moonbeams and tears. I mirrored his motion, sweeping his brow. That’s when I noticed a fresh scar. I ran my finger along the jagged edge. It fell from his face but I caught it. I was cradling his wound in the palm of my hand. I wanted to mend his cut, put everything back in order, but I couldn’t.

For the next six months, we tried to remember. We took long walks in the steel blue fog of the Great Smoky Mountains, but only the ravens and the falling leaves spoke. We drove to Roanoke Island and waded in the sea foam, but the cold bit our toes and a massive cloud formed, dumping hard wet rain atop our two heads.

By spring, the medic started train-up. All the things a smoker loathed: running, climbing, jumping out of planes. Schlepping his shit through the Carolina swamplands. For weeks, he was a tortured, exhausted, sweaty mess.

Then came the desk sergeant with the paperwork.

Death preparations, the army called it. Where was his property? Who was his beneficiary? Who was his next of kin?

The closer it got to go date, the more detailed the process became. What type of casket would he like? What song should be played at his funeral?

He came home furious that day. He’d picked a tune by Alice in Chains, it was my favorite, too, but the admin didn’t know it, so he told her to play Bad Romance. Lady Gaga, he’d said. Play fucking Gaga.

Nowhere on the forms was a place for my name. I wasn’t his wife or the mother of his child. I was just his girlfriend and that’s the way the army liked it. Stateside commanders had learned a thing or two since smiling housewives were used to sell war bonds and make hungry young men think they wanted to fight. Girlfriends, they reasoned privately in their secret quarters, were cheap. Why buy the bird when you can rent the feathers?

I didn’t care about any forms. I held my lover’s wound in the palm of my hand.

When it was time for the medic to redeploy, I drove him to post, went home, and picked up my afghan. The thing was ten feet long by then, witness to my waiting.

I thought about giving it to a family member or friend, but what would they do with a woolen blanket? I considered this for several minutes before deciding I would send it to no one. The blanket was a harbinger, more salient for the absence it signified than the object it had become. Each stitch echoed the promise of return, and even though the medic had left voluntarily, I felt like he’d been taken.

Halfway through his second deployment, the afghan had grown another ten feet. Why hadn’t he emailed or called? Was he sick? Was he hurt? Had he lost his men or his mind? I scoured the internet for information. If you can estimate a soldier’s whereabouts within a fifty-mile radius, you might get some information. You might find a newswire about a firefight or an ambush. A special missions team can usually survive those. What you don’t want to find is an accident like a Humvee over a cliff or any kind of explosion. What you don’t want to find is a roadside bomb planted by a starving Afghan who’s been paid ten times as much to blow up your boyfriend as the Afghan National Army can pay him to guard bases.

I sat at the computer with coffee and cigarettes, digging for an Associated Press report or two sentences from a military embed. All I could find were things like, Predator drone kills twenty civilians in South Waziristan. Or, Suicide bomb kills eight U.S. soldiers in Khost, followed by, A spokesman says the attack was waged in retaliation for the death of twenty civilians killed in South Waziristan.

With no further contact from the medic, I decided to take action. I purchased the sequel to Left 4 Dead, threw myself into the zombie apocalypse. When I could fight no more, I went back to my knitting: knit two, yarn over, slip slip knit, knit three. I had altered the pattern midstream and now half of the blanket had the tightly-woven look of knit stockings and the other half was an intricate lace with empty spaces forming the shape of inverted wings. The transformation had come about quite by accident. I had slipped a stitch and decided to work in the mistake. It was pleasing to see the little holes, I wanted it to be more transparent. This is what I was thinking as I held the afghan to the light, and when I did, I realized I could see my way through, and I felt a charge in my body, a quiet yearning followed by something more vexing. The sensation was overwhelming. It had a distinctive taste and smell, a clean, utilitarian scent with an aura of hand wringing and finality, of having been useful to the entire enterprise.

The medic would understand this, I thought. For, he had been utilized too. Except, I never told him anything. When finally he called, I had traveled very far and had reached the state of Catatonia, overcome body and soul by a force with the strength of an entire army.

Still I picked him up. This time we didn’t go to any hotel, co-op, or Outer Banks beach. The medic was exhausted so we went straight home. He stumbled through the door and fell on the bed, a heap of defeated manhood, nothing but feathers and bones. I took off his Danner desert combat boots and his jacket. He was still wearing his bird tags: name, social security number, blood type, religion. All the important stuff.

I removed the tags and set them on the nightstand. I’m not going to tell you his name but I’ll tell you this for free: somewhere downrange, his wings had been soldered to his armor and he’d converted from Catholic to Holy Order of the Jedi Knights. Said so, right there on his tags.

I removed the rest of his clothing—his army gray t-shirt and ACU combat pants with the pixilated universal camouflage pattern, a mix of desert sand, urban gray, and foliage green, which made him invisible in any battlefield, all contingencies covered.

His feathers came off last. That’s when I saw the scars. Every inch of him was marked, and there was a deep black gouge beneath the skin, on his soft, fleshy heart, which was barely beating.

I reached for a salve and rubbed it over his body, counting the scars, dividing wounds over time. There were exactly three thousand scars, a thousand a year for his travels, each one concerning a distinct war story. How could his commander have missed these? I decided I was the only one who could see them or the only one who cared.

Another season changed and it started again. Fourth deployment for him, third for me. The medic dragged himself to train-up, this time coughing and hacking, sweating alcohol from his pores.

Did I forget to mention his drinking?

He came back nine months later. Families were gathered in the parking lot of the great airborne fortress, waiting for their beloved songbirds. Some came home walking, some were sitting in wheelchairs, others were missing entirely.

I stood beside my car as the medic ambled toward me. A line of cars extended behind me, each one with a lone woman sitting in the driver’s seat. The line wrapped all the way around the garrison and out the gate to Bragg Boulevard, a yellow ribbon of girlfriends all the way to the

Atlantic Ocean, not one of them crying because, let’s face it, who would hear?

The medic got in the car.

Paddy’s? I asked.

He nodded. I drove.

We walked inside and sat at the bar. He motioned the barkeep and then he looked at me and then I looked at him.

How was your tour?

Not good.

I missed you.

Me too.

I sent you an email.

The internet was down.

Where were you?

Can’t say.

Did you receive fire?

We had an accident. And the team hit a roadside bomb.

The bartender stood before us, arching his brow.

Straight up, the medic said, and knocked twice on the bar.

The man poured two glasses of whiskey and the medic downed them both. You should  find someone else, he said. He had nothing left to give.

I cleared my throat but I couldn’t speak. He had nothing to give?

He put his hand over mine. He was staring into an empty glass like he wanted to dive in.

What’ll you have, he asked.

He drank another shot before I could say beer then knocked once more on the bar.

My eyes traveled the room. Photos of fallen team guys lined the walls, their names carved for posterity like signatures of ghosts in the great mahogany countertop.

The bartender poured another whiskey and the medic turned to me. Light or dark, he asked.

I knew which one I wanted but my vocal cords were frozen, and as I watched him swallow, I thought about flying away.

Your beer, he said. Light or dark?

We were the HMDs: the human mine detectors. In a sense the job was easy, but impossible to do well. There was no good method, for example, by which to differentiate animal carcasses packed with high explosives from those concealing only bloat and maggots. If roadkill was sighted, rather than stop to investigate, one of us gunners would shine a spotlight to indicate the location of the foul thing that might kill us as we drove past, taking the widest possible berth, clinching, waiting. If nothing exploded, we had not found an IED.

That was the job, repeated most every night, with every fresh patch of asphalt, each curb that looked like it might’ve been sledgehammered and pieced back together, every mound of garbage dumped on the roadside, each stray, suspicious length of wire. We didn’t have the time or resources to search it all properly. We spotted the vast majority of devices when they were triggered, not before. It didn’t take much more than a few catastrophes like that for us to reach the conclusion: the army must not mind us finding them that way. Why else would they keep sending us out there, if not for a deep appreciation of our talents as HMDs?

It was on one of these IED sweeps, not long after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, that I was standing in the gunner’s hatch of our truck and someone first tried to kill me—I mean, deliberately tried to do it. I was fortunate enough as a cocky young volunteer soldier to sort of want that to happen, but wasn’t awake enough to realize it had. I had nodded off on my feet, my IED-finding spotlight wedged between the roof of our truck and the gun mount, so it appeared I was doing my job, scanning the pavement and rubble for the fourth consecutive overnight hour, when in fact my head was drooping, bobbing, snapping up every so often with that sudden falling feeling you get when you drift off someplace you hadn’t meant to.

We were on the return leg of the sweep, nearing Checkpoint Delta, a traffic circle, when the first RPG woke me, the rocket engine hissing and shrieking as it flew like a high-powered Roman candle, missing the truck ahead of ours and striking an adobe shanty just off the road where it exploded in a flash of orange and dust. Half a dozen heartbeats and another rocket, this one missing our truck, brought me fully awake and cemented the idea. They were trying to kill me. Who, I didn’t know. Someone I couldn’t see and had never met hated me or the thought of me enough to want to end my life right there in an instant on that lonely stretch of road, like something out of loneliest New Mexico, if you must place yourself somewhere more possible than Iraq.

Below me in the truck our lieutenant was hollering, “Turn that shit off, man—turn it off!” and when he grabbed my leg, I saw he meant me, my spotlight. Not so effective at locating hidden bombs, it was far more useful to the enemy as a million-candle-power bull’s-eye.

I switched off the light and set it on the roof of the truck, taking the gun off safe and fumbling with the tension knob on the gun mount for a few seconds until it came loose. I swung the mount toward the east, the direction I thought the rockets had come from. I couldn’t see much past the starlit road. Beyond it was a farmer’s field growing some kind of summer crop—muskmelons, I think it was—and on the far side of that, an irrigation canal I’d noticed in the day but couldn’t pick out now. A cluster of electric lights on the horizon marked a squatter village we called Squaretown for no other reason than its geography.

One of the other gunners started shooting into the field, and even though I couldn’t see anything out there, I followed his lead and opened fire, letting off a wild burst from my machinegun, I don’t mean an M-16 but a truck-mounted machinegun that could send bullets the size of fingers through engine blocks and concrete walls. Every fifth round was a tracer and there were several burning in the air at any given time, the smell of hot brass and powder, shell casings streaming out of the ejection port; somehow, one of them was ejected in such a way as to kick back and lodge under the collar of my Kevlar vest.

I had no idea what had happened. I yelped, my neck suddenly on fire; I ducked through the hatch into the truck’s cab with the rest of the crew. In the front, Yarrow was passing the lieutenant a hand mic, while in the rear, Lorcin was discharging his M-16 rapidly on single shot out the passenger’s side window. Martinez sat opposite him with his rifle between his legs and his hands placed calmly over his ears to muffle to noise. Ducking and stooped on my knees in the center of the truck, roughly at the midpoint between all of them, I spun toward Martinez.

“I think I’m hit! Can you see it, can you see it?”

The immediate burning sensation had subsided some, but it still hurt, and I was freaked, frantically lifting my chin to expose my neck to the medic, who always rode in our truck. That wasn’t by accident. The lieutenant, top man in the platoon, also always rode in our truck. The lieutenant was slick like that: keep your friends close, your first aid closer.

Martinez leaned toward me and swept his hands over my neck and shoulders, feeling for blood and in the process discovering the hot shell casing, which had migrated off my skin and down between my uniform and vest.

“You’re not shot, bro! It’s just some brass!” Martinez shouted over the deafening report of the rifle firing inside the truck. Lorcin had dropped a mag, reloaded, and resumed shooting. He was nineteen, a typical age for a private, but unlike any other I had met, he was technically still a French citizen, working on his U.S. citizenship (a fact he had been able to keep hidden from most of the platoon, not having a discernible accent, and which he had sworn me to secrecy about after confessing it one night on guard duty). The kid, Lorcin, had spent most of his life in Vegas where his dad worked as a chef. He was a good soldier. Martinez was, too. He actually was from some lonely place in New Mexico; I forget the name of the town but remember him turning twenty-two later that summer, making him about my same age. To my knowledge, it was the first time any of us had been shot at.

“Brass, what?” the lieutenant roared indignantly, turning his attention from the radios to the commotion over me in the turret. The LT was a big man who had played some college ball and was very physically brave. I’m not suggesting, with the thing about Martinez always riding in our truck, that the lieutenant was a coward, only that he was not above taking advantage. He distrusted the competence of others, is one way to put it.

“Goddamnit!” the LT yelled. “Get your happy ass back up there!” He slapped me on the helmet to hearten me. I got to my feet in the hatch, and he went back to making his radio report about the shit we were in, carrying on three simultaneous conversations: two by radio, with the platoon and higher headquarters, and also one with us, in person, in the truck.

No more rockets had been launched after the initial volley, but that didn’t stop us from shooting up the landscape a while. I don’t trust my memories of time in those situations, but it couldn’t have lasted much more than thirty seconds after the point I’d mistakenly thought I’d been shot, burned by my own brass. You could try consulting an official report to get the army’s stats on the engagement, rounds expended, an exact timeline, but that information, even if it weren’t classified, would be no more reliable on the whole than what I have put down here. What happened at Checkpoint Delta was altogether unusual but ordinary in at least one respect. The official version was riddled with omissions, errors, and lies.

“Cease fire, cease fire!” the lieutenant ordered. “Punch it around these fools! No, that way!”

Our driver, Specialist Yarrow, sped past the other trucks, leading them to the checkpoint, out of the kill zone, the roar of gunfire petering away to ringing ears and scattered pops. A short time later we pulled into the traffic circle, one truck stopping off at each of the four cardinal directions. To the west lay our camp; to the south, Baghdad proper; to the east, Squaretown; and if you took the northern spur, after passing through a number of other hardscrabble villages, you’d eventually reach desert as open and empty as the surface of Mars.

Some of us dismounted at the checkpoint to assess the damage, of which there was none. Not a single man or truck had been hit. No one had seen who had shot at us; many guys had seen the rockets, but our descriptions of their points of origin were in disagreement, and none of us had seen “an actual fucking bad guy firing an RPG,” as the lieutenant eventually put it, ending that line of speculation. Battalion ordered us to hold the checkpoint and wait there for the quick reaction force to arrive from camp. Only the throbbing red mark on my neck and our warm gunmetal yet proved the firefight was something other than a collective hallucination.

*

Our reinforcements were late. According to the latest from battalion, the QRF was “spinning up,” whatever that meant. The transmission on their status was a bad turn and it came through on the radio not long before a pair of headlights appeared on the road leading to the traffic circle from Squaretown. The eastern road. We had been fired on from the east. There was a sundown to sunup curfew in place, and no civilians were supposed to be on that road at that hour. Even without the preceding ambush, the sight of headlights approaching would have been alarming.

We prepared to face round two alone. On the lieutenant’s orders, Yarrow moved our truck to the eastern spur, supporting Sergeant [Redacted]’s position there. [Note: The occasion for this account is truth-telling and the airing of long withheld grievances. With that being the case, I do not take the decision to redact lightly. But I’ve recently learned from a trusted source that this former sergeant is, for whatever reason, struggling with severe addiction. I make it a point to say Sgt. R. is addicted for whatever reason because, by his own admission before going to war, he was a drinker. The lingering effects of combat could not have helped his disease, which was nevertheless preexisting: who knows why he originally took to drowning his sorrows? I don’t feel sorry for him, either; that’s not why I’ve redacted his name. I’ve got enough on my conscience as it is, and the small portion of the truth that I’m blotting out is not worth being questioned someday by another ghost. His, waiting in the wings, whispering to me that I got it all wrong. What would be the point in opening myself up to that? There are untold thousands like the old sergeant, wandering free in the United States of Amnesia, and I have no evidence compelling enough for any prosecutor to pursue charges against him for something that happened fifteen years ago in a foreign country. If my source is correct about the state of his health, the judicial system might be the slower route to justice, anyway, depending on how you define it. Either way, I can’t stand the thought of becoming entangled with his fate any more than I already am.]

“Sergeant R.,” the lieutenant said, never taking his eyes off the approaching headlights. “Throw a couple flares out. Far as you can.”

R. opened the hatch of his truck and found a stash of road flares in an oily canvas bag he kept there. He struck a flare to get it going and lobbed it end over end, burning bright red into the spur ahead of us. He did another, and another, a line of flares intended to signal to the approaching driver that the traffic circle was off-limits: turn back immediately.

The driver did not turn back. He did slow down, then stopped, then lurched forward again but slower than before, and continued to vary his slow speed erratically after the appearance of the flares, as if he had obviously seen them and our position, yet still insisted on approaching, albeit indecisively.

“Hold fire! Fire on my order!” the lieutenant yelled up and down the line. “Don’t come any closer, you dumb son of a bitch,” he said to himself. Only those of us near him—meaning Yarrow, Lorcin, Martinez and me—heard him say that last part.

The driver stopped again at about a hundred meters. Redacted had gone out ahead of our trucks to toss the flares, which were at fifty meters. In their backlight I could make out the shape of the car, which looked like an old Volkswagen sedan. Those were everywhere in Baghdad. We were thinking it might be nothing, but who knew. Worst case, the car was rigged to blow, the driver getting cold feet, or maybe stalling purposefully, and the second wave of the ambush would hit us at any second, a mistimed Trojan-horse-style scenario.

The driver rolled down his window and stuck out an arm, waving in apparent distress. None of us budged. He took his foot off the brake and idled forward.

“The fuck’s he doing?” Yarrow said.

“Could be wounded,” the lieutenant said. “Could be one of the guys who shot at us.”

“Or some random drunk asshole.”

“Flash your brights at him.”

It was at that point—the lieutenant telling Yarrow to flash his headlights—that I remembered my own spotlight. We carried no brighter light than the one I had with me up in the hatch, and I flicked it on and shined it at the Volkswagen. The car dipped to a stop. Another gunner turned on his light. Our crossed beams penetrated the windshield to meet on the driver, no longer a dark silhouette but a young Arab man squinting and turning his head. The hand that had been held out of the window was now raised to his face, shielding his eyes. He appeared to be alone, upset, confused or traumatized or drunk or all of the above, dazzled by the spotlight’s glare. Nothing changed from one moment to the next. Then, Sergeant R. opened fire.

Only a handful of people have ever read the official report on the incident. This exclusivity should not be attributed to its juiciness, more the opposite. It’s hard to overstate how successfully the army reduces even spectacular violence to a series of boilerplate phrases that signify little about the reality of war other than its essential bureaucracy. Like all such reports, if this one still exists, access is restricted. It’s not in the trove of documents famously leaked in 2010, not even tracked there as a serious incident in the master list, as no U.S. personnel were wounded. I haven’t seen the report since 2004, when the lieutenant asked me to proofread it before he submitted it to our company commander in the form of a sworn statement, but I remember it, and other similar reports, well enough to recreate the crux with some accuracy.

The local national driving the vehicle approached a U.S. position after an RPG ambush on Route Predators near Checkpoint Delta. The vehicle failed to stop after being warned repeatedly to do so with flares and lights. Deadly force was subsequently used by soldiers of 1^st Platoon, Alpha Company, 1^st of the 15^th Cavalry, who reasonably believed they were at risk of death or imminent great bodily harm.

Once R. started shooting, two other men in the platoon did as well, and between them they discharged a dozen or more rounds before the lieutenant could scream “Cease fire!” loud enough to stop them. Our rules of engagement stated that a vehicle or person could be declared hostile simply by the act of one of us shooting at him/her/it. So, when R. opened fire, those other two soldiers followed their training and his lead. The sergeant might’ve seen something they had missed: a detonator in the man’s raised hand, wires running into the car’s trunk, a group of insurgents creeping toward us in the dark muskmelon field.

I had seen nothing like that and was not one who fired at the car. I might’ve done it—probably would’ve, by twitchy nervous reflex—if my finger had been resting on the trigger when I’d heard the shots, instead of being curled around the handle of my spotlight. Unintentionally, it had served to pinpoint the target, increasing the accuracy of R. and the others, their gun smoke wisping and curling in the unsteady beam that magnified the trembling of my hands into the world.

The Volkswagen’s windshield, now frosted with bullet holes, obscured the man inside, slumped over the steering wheel. The car’s horn bleated pathetically and continuously under his weight.

“What happened?” the lieutenant asked, his voice missing its usual bravado. “What the hell’d you see?”

“He wouldn’t stop, sir.” R. said it with such perfect conviction that—though I’d just seen the car was stopped, had been completely stopped and the man had had his hand up, shielding his eyes—I wondered if I had missed something crucial.

“He was stopped,” Martinez said.

“Bullshit,” Redacted said. “He did for a second before he floored it.”

“Yeah, after you started shooting.”

“Bullshit.”

“Sergeant R.,” the lieutenant said sternly, “You and Yarrow go clear that vehicle.”

R. gave the lieutenant a questioning look that turned sour as the lieutenant made no move to reconsider his order. Typically, a squad leader like R. would not have been given such an immediately dangerous job as clearing a possible suicide car bomb. The lieutenant was breaking protocol and assigning this duty to him as a kind of rebuke, I thought. The implications of that were disturbing, but at the time no one said anything more about the circumstances of the shooting. We were not out of the woods, providing over-watch as R. and Yarrow hunch-walked down the spur toward the Volkswagen, which had come to rest with one of its tires wedged against the curb.

“There’s someone in the backseat!” Yarrow said. “Some dude hiding in the backseat!”

“Get out, now! Ishta!”

“I think he’s dead, man. Fuck. I don’t know.”

“Open that door. I’ll fan out and cover you.”

“You open the motherfucking door, brah. You’re the one shot these motherfuckers.”

R. outranked Yarrow but put up no more argument. He crept against the car and popped the rear door latch. Nothing happened. He nodded at Yarrow, who took up a good angle. He flung the car door open. Still, no movement, and Yarrow repeated his opinion: the man in back looked dead.

Hearing that, R. glanced in the car, stood to his full height, and poked around in the backseat with the muzzle of his rifle. I was a ways off and didn’t see it clearly, but heard Yarrow tell it back at camp. R. poked one of the dead guy’s eyeballs with the muzzle of his rifle. Not hard enough to pop it out of his skull, but hard enough. I was told it’s what hunters do with large animals they’ve shot, to make sure they’re truly dead before letting their guard down. Now satisfied the man in back was not merely unconscious or faking, R. went to the driver’s side door, opened it, and pushed the other dead man off the steering wheel to stop the horn sounding. The noise had been uncanny, the steady accusation of a machine.

“Ain’t shit in the trunk but trash and shit,” Yarrow said. “It’s clear, LT.”

The lieutenant and the rest of our crew moved closer. The inside of the car stunk of burnt cloth and blood. The man in the driver’s seat who’d been shot was in his late twenties or early thirties. He wore a wedding ring. His eyes were half-lidded, and the expression on his face made it look like he’d died in agony. It was the first time in my life I’d ever seen anything like that, and it shook me up, but not how you might expect. The lows came later. In the moment, the feeling was nearly the opposite. I felt so high I was almost sick, not from disgust, but the nauseating thrilling impossibility of being alive while this other human being was suddenly not.

“Gimme a hand here,” Martinez said. He was attempting to drag the other dead man from the backseat. That guy was older than the driver, not quite elderly but almost. Though the two were separated by decades, some of their features bore a close resemblance, too much for a coincidence, I thought. They were probably a father and his son.

We dragged the old man out of the car, onto the road. He looked beyond saving, his skin the color of a pale blueberry, but Martinez went through his checks, patting him down systematically, searching for blood by touch. He turned his head and held it over the man’s pale blue lips, feeling for a wisp of breath, using two fingers to check for a pulse on the carotid. Nothing.

“He ain’t shot,” Martinez said. “I think he had a heart attack or something.”

“Because of the firefight?”

“I doubt it. Probably just bad luck.”

To me, however, it remains an open question, one of many from that night. Did we (and the militiamen who’d ambushed us) literally scare that old man to death as he slept in his bed and we sent rounds downrange in the vicinity of his home in Squaretown? Was the driver of the car really his son? Had he brought his dying father to us at the checkpoint in the hope we could save him? Iraqis sometimes did ascribe miraculous technological powers to U.S. foot soldiers, including when it came to medicine—or was it just the driver’s terrible fate to have taken a route to the nearest hospital that happened to cross our path? Was it a series of unfortunate coincidences, or a tight chain of cause-and-effect? In the end, no one could say. They couldn’t tell their story.

Martinez unzipped his aid bag. He removed a ventilator mask for CPR and three clear packing tubes that held epinephrine autoinjectors for the couple guys in the company who suffered from dangerous allergies. He cracked each tube and shot the injectors into the old man’s thigh. Then he straddled him and with the heels of his palms started chest compressions, counting them out. Something like a tree branch snapped in the dead man’s chest. Yarrow gagged. He was holding the mask over the man’s nose and mouth, pumping the ventilator ball to breathe for him when Martinez said to.

They went through one cycle of compressions and ventilations, then another.

“He’s gone, Martinez,” the lieutenant said respectfully.

The medic acknowledged that likelihood but kept working. We were still waiting for the QRF to arrive and there was nothing better to do, so the lieutenant let him work. Someone actually said it was good training, like it was good the guy had croaked so that Martinez could practice his CPR on real flesh. Some of the men stood watch, facing out on the perimeter; others followed the lieutenant’s lead, drifting away from the Volkswagen and its gruesome scene to attend to their trucks; and still other soldiers lingered or moved closer to the bodies, beginning to get comfortable in the presence of death. Sergeant Redacted went back to his truck and found a digital camera he’d bought in Kuwait. The lieutenant stopped him on his way back to the Volkswagen.

“What’re you doing with that, Sergeant?”

“We should get a few pics of their faces,” R. said. “We might have to ID these guys. They could be important.”

“Put that shit away,” the lieutenant said.

“Sir?”

“I said stow it. Now.”

R. pocketed the slim silver camera. He elaborated no more on his intentions but it seemed unlikely he had meant we might have to identify the dead men to their next of kin. Either he was lying about his reasons for wanting a photo or he genuinely believed, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he had just shot two insurgents who were big-time enough to be known by face to military intelligence.

I have an opinion on why the camera came out, but it’s only that. By way of factual background, I can say R. was a self-described good old boy from Tennessee who liked to hunt and fish and whose dream, after serving out his twenty years, was to open a bar with a veteran’s small business loan and his pension. He hated politicians and especially liberals. Along with his outdoor hobbies he liked all things Star Trek, pulp sci-fi, tabletop wargames, and was, surprisingly, a gourmand: sort of a dorky redneck, you might say, if forced to sum up a personality in a few broad strokes.

Once, in the lead-up to our deployment, I’d heard the sergeant say he wanted to “stack a few bodies over there” as revenge for 9-11. As far as he was concerned, that was why we were in Iraq, and he was fine with it. There’d been a lot of that kind of talk going around, and it was hard to know who to take seriously. It seemed incredible to think his vicious streak ran strong and dumb enough for him to murder a man in cold blood in front of fifteen witnesses before attempting to photograph the evidence with his own camera. Then again, a state of war does afford the psychopath much leeway.

A few days later, I brought up my concerns with the lieutenant in the privacy of his room when I returned the incident report with typos and awkward phrases marked in red.

“You don’t think he did it on purpose,” I said, somewhat between a statement and a question.

“Of course he did it on purpose,” the LT said.

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant.”

“Oh.”

“Listen. I’ve talked to Sergeant R., okay? I talked to him for a very long time. I have no doubt he was in fear for his life when he made that decision.”

“He didn’t seem that afraid to me,” I said, skirting the edge of insubordination.

“You’re forgetting that two other soldiers fired as well.”

“Only because he did.”

“You weren’t afraid at all then, Corporal? Can you honestly say that?”

I shrugged, not knowing how to answer that question without sounding snippy or absurd. I was afraid every single time we went outside the wire. You learned to deal with it. Fear didn’t give us a license to kill.

“Well I was,” the LT continued. “And you know what? If I, as a reasonable person, believe R. might’ve been right—not that he was, but might’ve been? Well, you better believe I’m not gonna accuse him, or any of you guys, of a thing like that. We need men like Redacted. I can’t have you all hesitating in a decisive moment.”

“Sir. The car was stopped.”

“Briefly. You saw the guy; he was driving all fucking…herky jerky and weird.”

“You said to fire on your order, sir.”

“Do you know something I don’t, Corporal?” he said, a tired-sounding challenge.

“No. I saw what you saw.”

“Exactly. So we’re done here. Go tell the guys we’ve gotta go out tonight at zero three hundred. Another IED sweep.”

“Roger, sir.”

“Hey. Wait. I know this isn’t easy, okay? It’s a terrible thing, but we have to put it behind us. We don’t have a choice. How do you think Sergeant R. feels about it?”

I said I didn’t know, while secretly doubting the LT’s considerations were all so selfless as he made out. We were at the very beginning of our tour, with forty-some-odd weeks left to suffer the war and each other. Any serious accusation or investigation would’ve torn the platoon apart, guaranteeing discord, scandal and ruining the lieutenant’s command reputation, no matter what, if any, justice was ever done. Given the circumstances of the shooting and our rules of engagement, the scales were tipped toward R.; without a confession, there was no hard evidence he had acted with malice. The sergeant wasn’t exactly popular among us, but there were those in the platoon who would’ve had his back with testimonies of the shooting to counter any accusing witnesses, which, though some of us talked privately about our misgivings, never emerged publicly to point a finger. Even those men who had misgivings and didn’t care for the sergeant on a personal level were reluctant to inform on a fellow volunteer-prisoner, both for the sake of upholding the inmate’s code—you don’t rat, no matter what—and for fear of violating it and incurring reprisals.

There were none for the shooting. Nothing formal, at least. The killing near Checkpoint Delta went unpunished and was only avenged in a proximate and random way by the IEDs that picked us off by ones and twos every few months for the rest of the year. R. was never so much as wounded on that or any of his deployments. We are not friends, but I can see his profile pic on Facebook. It’s him looking sharp in his dress blues; the photo might have been taken at his retirement ceremony, two years ago. He made it to the finish line and got his pension, but from what I’ve heard, he blows it every month on bar tabs, and not at his own watering hole, which he’s never gotten around to opening. I think his drinking picked up so dramatically after he left the service, not because he was so torn up about what had happened overseas, but because he thrived on that sort of thing, missed the thrill, the absolute sense of purpose, and felt bored and aimless without it. He is doing now what he did back then, times he was bored and free to drink, only, there are many more free nights now, post-retirement, for him to burn out his liver with Old Crow and hillbilly heroin, neither of which should be mistaken for karma.

The only other time I heard the sergeant talk about the shooting was the day after. He was eating chow with a few of the other squad leaders from our company. One of them asked him about it, and after a little prodding, he told them the story. The way he told it made no mention of the car being stopped. Instead, he focused on its erratic approach, how close it had gotten.

“You know the deadly radius for exposed personnel in a car bomb blast? By the book it’s like three hundred meters. Dumbass hajji—how was I supposed to know?”

His story had changed in a day’s time. Whether or not the car was stopped had been the sticking point in the immediate aftermath. Now, that point had been dropped entirely, in favor of the maximum effective range of car bombs and the situational difficulty in determining whether a stranger’s baffling actions indicated hostility or foolishness.

If the Volkswagen really had been loaded with explosives, it might have killed some of us, it’s true. The sergeant’s new explanation for why he’d fired was stronger and more valid than his original one, but mostly it struck me as a red flag, upon hearing it in the chow hall, precisely because the explanation had changed. To my mind, this shifting logic suggested R. had been lying from the beginning. He had refined his initial story into one more plausible with the benefit of another day to think it through.

In that case, he is guilty of a war crime: shooting a civilian, knowing the man was probably not hostile, exploiting the uncertainty of that night’s events to get what he had wanted all along. Here was his chance to stack some bodies. The facts do fit that scenario, but I must admit they also fit one in which the sergeant acted honestly (and stupidly). It could be the lieutenant was right and R. truly had believed we were in imminent danger when he pulled the trigger. If so, the conversation I’d overheard in the chow hall was not evidence of premeditation; rather, a state of denial, which had lifted enough, in a day, for the sergeant at least to acknowledge he’d not killed an insurgent, while at the same time continuing to blame the dead man for what had happened.

Enough conjecture. It can be tediously endless and abstract. I was an eyewitness and should lay my cards on the table. In my opinion, the man is a murderer, though I don’t believe he’s ever thought of himself as one. To this day, I imagine he remains the beleaguered hero of his own story, or the victim, or something like both, simultaneously. Anything but the villain. Few of us can stomach being that.

*

“I’ve got a pulse!” Martinez said. I had moved off from the Volkswagen to monitor the radios, listening for any word on our reinforcements, but now I rushed back to see for myself. The old man remained unconscious and laid out in the road but his skin had lightened up, no longer so blue, and his chest was rising and falling rapidly.

“Holy shit. You brought him back.”

“What were those shots you gave him?”

“Epi-pens. Basically, pure adrenaline.”

“Good work, Martinez. Yarrow. Goddamn outstanding work, you two.”

“He’s not out of the woods yet, sir. He needs evac’d. Like, now.”

“The QRF are two mikes out. Soon as they get here, we’ll take him to the CASH.”

And so we did. And I cannot tell what happened to the old man after that. He was alive and unconscious when we left him at the combat support hospital. For all I know, his heart might’ve stopped again, shortly thereafter, or he might’ve wound up living for years but as a vegetable. I suppose he could have recovered from the episode only to have suffered another, more horrible death in wartime Baghdad, anytime from 2004 to this writing. Statistically, it’s unlikely, but he may still be alive. He would be a very old man for Iraq in 2019.

His revival was one of the more incredible things we were involved in during our deployment. Throughout the rest of the year, the story came up often. Hard and cynical as some of us were, I think we liked to fall back on telling it to feel better about ourselves, if you can believe a person might be comforted by the events I’ve just conveyed. Like any story, how it’s received depends on how it’s delivered, the focus of it, and where the listener is, the context. We were all eye-deep in the shit and generally proud of Martinez for what he’d done, one of the few acts of redemption we accomplished in a year of waste and toil, or so we thought. With more distance, it’s easy to realize the old man might’ve rather stayed dead of a heart attack than come back to life to learn of his son, killed while delivering him to an unlikely salvation.

We left a dead son and, in the best case, his father to live another twenty years with a cruel debt he couldn’t repay. From where I stand now, our one act of grace, that resurrection, seems closer to a tragic curse. I can’t remember anyone insisting on that obvious point, back then. Nuanced consequence was lost on most of us. We were in our teens and early twenties, even our leader the lieutenant, and the stakes were too high and stark to accommodate the over-contemplation of grey-shaded outcomes. I imagine we all would’ve preferred to be revived if it came to it, and so naturally, whatever we thought and said privately about the shooting itself, when we recalled the story as a group or to outsiders, we focused on conjuring the thing we most wanted from its elements that were actually true.

That was life. Survival. Fortunate, unexpected, persistent life, snatched from the jaws of death by a feat of willpower and know-how. A charm against death was what we all wanted, and we told our buddies in other platoons about Martinez and the old man, the incredible thing we’d seen with our own eyes, while minimizing the tragedy of the dead son and R.’s role in making it a tragedy in the first place. Instead of the one time over there when we might have saved a life without taking more.

“You hear what happened the other night?”…. “Naw, he wasn’t the one shot. Heart attack or some shit.”…. “It was crazy. Freakish, really. Dude was fucking blue, right, like his ticker had been stopped, and this sumbitch right here, this motherfucker, he brings him back from the dead, man.” “Best medic I ever saw.” “For real. Dude’s a miracle worker.”

“I don’t do miracles,” Martinez said once, fed up enough to overcome his usual reticence. “I did what I could, and it worked. He wasn’t meant to die. That’s all it is.”

As word got around, someone started calling Martinez, Lazarus. The nickname stuck and was perpetuated within the platoon by a certain dominant clique that referred to him that way almost exclusively for the remainder of the tour, even though Martinez hated the name, and even though, according to the Bible, Lazarus was the man Jesus raised from the dead, not the one doing the raising. For the allusion to make sense, we should have called the old man Lazarus. More than once, I said as much to the guys, but nobody who had gone over to using Lazarus, primarily, ever changed his behavior and went back to “Martinez” as a result of me pointing out the inherent error.

“Come on, Professor,” they said, using their nickname for me that I hated. “We’re not calling him Jesus. That’s just dumb. He’s Lazarus, brah. Seriously. Don’t overthink this shit.”

That evening, at half past nine

To William, the question of his mother is clear. The question of his father is more complicated, because there is Peter.

The night that they meet, William is about seven years old and his mother has brought him to one of Peter’s exhibits. She hasn’t said much to her son, just that she has an American friend, that he takes pictures and that the two of them are going to see that friend’s art, which is very special. That’s what she always calls it, his art.

His mother doesn’t drive, at least not in this city, and in the taxi on the way there she keeps looking at her wristwatch. It isn’t that they are late, but that she’s anxious to arrive at the right time, which is not to say right on time. The apartment she’s trying to find is off İstiklal Caddesi, which is a sort of Ottoman Gran Rue running through the heart of Istanbul, the place of William’s birth but a home-in-exile to his mother, who, like her friend Peter, is American. As their cab crawls along Cevdet Paşa Caddesi, the seaside road which handrails the Bosphorus Strait, she stares out the window, her eyes brushed with a bluish cosmetic, blinking slowly, while she absently answers the boy’s questions about where they are going and whom they’ll meet there. William holds a game called Simon on his lap. It is a palm-size disk divided into four colored panels—blue, red, green, yellow—that flashes increasingly complicated patterns, which reflect off the cab’s night-darkened windows. The aim is to repeat those patterns. It was a gift from his father and his father has the high score, which he has instructed William to try to beat.

An allée of birch canopies their route and they skirt the high limestone walls of Dolmabahçe Palace. Their cab jostles in and out of first gear in the suffocating traffic until they break from the seaside road and switchback into altitudes of linden-, oak- and elm-forested hills. When the sun dips behind the hills, the lights come on in the city. Below them the waters of the Bosphorus, cold and pulling, turn from green-blue to just black. The boat lights, the bridge lights, the black-white contrast of the skyline reflecting off the water would come to remind the boy of Peter and, as his mother termed it, his art.

After paying the fare, his mother takes him by the hand, dragging him along as they shoulder through the evening foot traffic trying to find their way. Despite the darkness eternal day lingers along the İstiklal, flightless pigeons hobble along the neon-lit boulevard, chestnuts smolder from the red-painted pushcarts on the street corners, the doughy smell of baked açma and simit hangs in the air. The İstiklal is cobblestone, she has worn heels for the occasion, and when she catches one in the grouting and stumbles into the crowd, she knocks a shopping bag out of another woman’s hand. Standing from her knees, William’s mother repeatedly apologizes and a few men reach under her arms to help her up, but her son quickly waves them away and helps his mother up himself. After that the two of them walk more slowly and she still holds his arm, but now she isn’t dragging her son, and when the boy feels her lose balance once more, he grabs her tightly at the elbow and with the help of his steady grip she manages to keep on her feet.

They turn down a quiet side street, which aside from a few shuttered kiosks has little to recommend it. The apartment building they come to isn’t much wider than its door. After they press the buzzer, a window opens several floors above. A man ducks his head into the bracing night and calls down to them in a high-pitched yet forceful voice, like air through a steel pinhole. He then blows them an invisible kiss, launching it off an open palm. William’s mother raises her face to that kiss and then blows one back. The street smells bitterly of scents the boy doesn’t yet recognize and it is filled with the halos of fluorescent lamps and suspect patches of wetness on the curbs and even the cinder-block walls. The buzzer goes off and William’s mother shoulders open the door. Inside someone has hammered a plank across the elevator entry. It has been there long enough for the nail heads to rust. They climb up several floors where the brown paint scales from the brick. The empty apartment building meets them with an uproar of scattering rats and the stairwell smells as bitter as the street.

A shuttle of unclasping locks receives his mother’s knock at the apartment door and then the same man who had appeared in the window presses his face to the jamb. His gaze is level with the fastened chain and his eyes are pretty and spacious, as if hidden, well-apportioned rooms existed within them. The honey-colored light from inside the apartment shines on his skin. His eyebrows are like two black smudges. William notices the plucked bridge between them, and also his rectangular smile with its brilliantly white teeth. The man is uncommonly handsome, and William feels drawn to him, as if he can’t quite resolve himself to look away.

The chain unlatches and then half a dozen or so men and broad-shouldered women spill across the apartment’s threshold, pressing against William’s mother, kissing her on the cheek, welcoming her. When they kiss William on the cheek, the harsh, glancing trace of the men’s stubble scrapes against his fresh skin. The women begin a refrain of Wonderful to see you, Cat, and while they escort her inside they keep saying wonderful over and over in their guttural voices as if that superlative is the last word of a spell that will transform them into the people they wish to be.

A blue haze of cigarette smoke hugs the ceiling. Tacked to the sitting room wall, next to a white hard hat displayed like a trophy, is a poster advertising this exhibit. It is a portrait Peter shot of one of the women. She was photographed shirtless from the shoulders up, her mascara runs down her cheeks, her lip is split, a small gash zigzags across her forehead, and her wig—a tight bob symmetrical as a rocketeer’s helmet—is missing a few tuffs of hair. That summer, protests had shaken the city, shutting it down for weeks. Hundreds of thousands had squared off with the authorities. William’s dominant memories of those events aren’t the television images of riot police clubbing the environmental activists who opposed a new shopping mall at Taksim Square’s Gezi Park—seventy-four acres of neglected lawns with a crosshatch of dusty concrete walkways shaded by dying trees—or even the way so many everyday people surprised themselves by joining the protesters’ ranks, but instead William remembers his father pacing their apartment on his cellphone, unable to drive into the office because of the many blocked streets as he negotiated a construction deal on a different shopping mall across town.

By the time the protests had finished, the city’s long-persecuted queer community had assumed its vanguard. This caused one columnist, a friend of Peter’s, to observe, “Among those who struggled for their rights at the police barricades at Gezi Park, the toughest ‘men’ were the transgender women.” And so, Peter had a name for his exhibit. In the poster, battered though she is, his subject’s eyes hold a certain, scalding defiance, as if she can read the words beneath her: The Men of Gezi, An Exhibit. As William’s mother wanders into the apartment she becomes indistinguishable from the others, blending perfectly into this crowd.

. . .

Catherine and William have arrived at Peter’s exhibit right on time, which is to say that they have arrived early. The apartment belongs to Deniz, the one who had appeared in the window to let them in. His date, who takes their coats, is a university-age girl with a pageboy haircut. She is as beautiful as Deniz is handsome. Her mouth is lipsticked savagely, and with it she offers Catherine and William a thin smile before retreating to the sofa, where she stares absorbedly into her phone. Soon others arrive and Deniz comes and goes from a small galley kitchen off the sitting room, where his guests pick at the food he’s elegantly laid out on the thinnest of budgets. Not much wine, but carefully selected bottles from his favorite bodegas, a few plates of fresh sliced vegetables on ice bought end-of-day for a bargain at last Sunday’s market, small boxes of expensive chocolates to ornament each table. William can’t keep track of who is who, as there are several Hayals, as well as many Öyküs and Nurs. Their self-assigned names affirm their identity, but in this political climate also serve the double purpose of noms de guerre. Who knows if one Öykü was born an Arslan and one Hayal was born an Egemen. Why so many of them had chosen the same names, he couldn’t say. What seemed most important was that they had chosen.

His mother makes him a small plate and sits him in a chair by the window. While William picks at his dinner, the scented and beautiful crowd swarms around her, saying Cat that and Cat this. To take her son here, without his father’s permission, so that she can be called Cat instead of Catherine, which is what everyone else calls her, endears her to the Men of Gezi. She has made a choice, just as they have. Having lost sight of his mother, William removes the game Simon from his pocket. He sits by the window and he plays.

Soon everyone has arrived and the apartment becomes too warm. Deniz walks to where William sits and heaves open the window. William glances up from his game. His eyes are drawn to Deniz’s muscled arms, his rounded shoulders, how strong he is. A hint of breeze passes through. Deniz cracks a door catty-corner to the window and whispers inside, “Our guests are here.” Nobody replies and he says it again. Then a man’s voice answers, “Yeah, okay,” and Deniz shuts the door and returns to mingle in the crowd, where William has lost his mother.

Whatever this night is about exists just beyond that door, so William stands from his chair by the window. Carefully, he turns the knob. The hinges open smoothly, without a trace of noise. Inside there is light: white walls, white floor and ceiling. The room is transformed into a gleaming cube. The scent of fresh paint hangs heavily around Peter, who stands in the room’s center, his back to the door, surrounded by his portraits. William steps behind him and watches.

Peter has almost hung the exhibit. A pair of photos lean one against each of his legs. They are printed in the same dimensions as the other portraits, twelve by eighteen, and the finishes are a monochromatic black-and-white matte. In front of him a single empty nail protrudes from the wall. He combs his fingers through his longish brown curls, which he often teases into a globe of frizz while concentrating. He cranes his neck forward, as if trying to stoop to a normal person’s height, which bends him into the shape of a question mark. He has pulled his glasses onto the bridge of his nose and his alternating gaze dips into their lenses and then shifts above them. None of this seems to help Peter resolve the decision with which he’s wrestling. William watches him for a while, until Peter feels the boy’s eyes on his back despite the many sets of photographed eyes that encircle him.

Peter turns around. His scrutiny is slow and accurate. “Who are you?” he asks. As an afterthought, he adds, “And shut the door.”

William does as requested but remains silent.

“Wait, are you Cat’s boy?” Peter combs his fingers back through his hair and he puckers his nose toward his eyes as if the remark had left a spoiled, indigestible taste on his lips. “She brought you,” he says, like an accusation, or statement, or even a compliment. William can’t figure out which, so, finally, he says, “Yes.”

“Come here,” says Peter. “I need your help with something.” He has transformed the cramped bedroom into a pristine gallery, and William steps carefully through the space Peter has created. “I can’t decide on the last photo.” Then Peter crouches and tilts out the two frames balanced against his legs. William crouches alongside him. One of the two photographs is similar to all of the others: a man with long, stringy hair wearing makeup looks back, a bruise darkens his cheek, a cut dimples his chin, he wears a hard hat like the one hanging on the other room’s wall by the poster. Though he stares directly at the camera, his eyes are not set on parallel axes—one wanders menacingly out of the frame.

The subject of the other photograph is beautiful.

Peter has shot this young woman in the same dimensions and lighting as the rest of his portraits. A sheet of dark hair falls straight to her shoulders. There is a bruise around her eye. Up from her chin and along her jaw she also has a cut. She wears a bright dress, whose shade in black and white is exactly the same shade as the cut. A tote bag hangs from her shoulder. Her eyes fix on William clearly, in a way that feels familiar to him, the reflection in her pupil serving as a kind of a mirror.

“This one’s a bit different,” Peter says. “She was born a woman.”

Being a boy, William doesn’t understand the exhibit, the nature of Peter’s subjects or why he would mix in a single photograph of this one particular woman. But William knows the effect the second photograph has on him. He tells Peter that he likes it best. “You sure?” asks Peter.

He says that he is.

Peter hoists the last photograph onto the wall. As he takes a step back, he crosses his arms and examines it a final time. Then he crouches next to William. Peter has pushed his glasses all the way up his nose and his hands are planted firmly on his knees. “We’d better go find your mother,” he says.

. . .

Twenty photographs hang inside of the gallery. About the same number of people mingle in the kitchen and sitting room. William recognizes many of the faces he has seen in the portraits. Peter’s eyes shift among them, as if counting the tops of their heads. When it appears that he has found all of the portrait’s subjects, he takes off his glasses and tucks them into the breast pocket of his corduroy sports coat.

A knife clinks against a wineglass. The noise comes from a woman who stands alone in a corner of the apartment. The party faces her. Around her neck on a lanyard dangles a blue badge with an embossed seal—a bald eagle clutching arrows and an olive branch between two furious talons. This places her in the U.S. diplomatic corps. In her photo on the badge she wears the same navy blue suit jacket with a boxy cut and powder blue shirt as on this night, giving the impression that she has only the one outfit, or maybe multiple sets of the same outfit. Her face is lean. Like that of Deniz’s date, her black hair is cut into an easy-to-maintain, yet severe, pageboy. Her complexion is such that she could readily be mistaken for a native of this city. A slim and no-nonsense digital triathlete’s watch cuffs her wrist. The crowd turns its attention to her. She glances down at her chest, as if she can feel the many sets of eyes settling on her badge.

Awkwardly, she lifts the badge from around her neck, having forgotten to remove it when she left her desk at the consulate. She then raises her glass. “Thank you all for being here,” she says. Her eyes land with sincerity on Deniz, who’s telling his date to put away her phone. When he looks up he seems startled, as if confused at receiving thanks for being present in his own home. “And thank you to my old friend Deniz, for lending us his apartment. He was one of the first people I met when I came here nine years ago—”

“The first and last reception you ever threw at the Çırağan Palace,” interrupts Deniz with a good-natured smile.

Kristin gives him a look and he shrugs, settling back into his seat. Her gaze then turns to Peter and she speaks to him directly. “I want to congratulate you on this remarkable exhibit and say how proud the Cultural Affairs Section is to have helped, in our small way, to host tonight’s event.”

Everyone toasts.

“That’s very kind of you, Kristin,” says Peter, but his words stall in the forest of raised glasses, and before he can say anything more, Kristin continues her remarks, speaking over him, saying that she hopes Peter’s photos will bring awareness not only to the events in Gezi Park but also to “this community’s long struggle for equal rights and dignity.” The room listens, politely, but by the time she finishes most of the crowd, including William and his mother, has migrated into the gallery.

Each person falls silent as they find their image on the blistering white walls. On one side are the portraits of the battered “men” of Gezi and on the other side are the women with their meticulously layered makeup and hair arranged as best as they can manage or covered with a wig for an evening out. Viewed from the doorway, a duplicate of Peter’s exhibit begins to form among the guests. Then the finished product appears: a set piece, the exhibit itself as subject, portraits in and out of the frame. William can’t put words to it, but he feels the effect Peter has created.

“What did you help him with?” his mother asks.

Of the twenty portraits, the only one that nobody stands in front of is the girl in the dress chosen by William. He points toward it and his mother says nothing but leaves him and wanders to its spot on the wall. Now every portrait is mirrored by its subject, or, in the case of his mother, a nearly identical subject. William turns back toward the door, where Peter leans with his camera hung around his neck. He snatches it up and takes a picture of his exhibit. Then he departs into the sitting room.

Deniz and his guests circulate among the portraits, theorizing about themselves in Peter’s work, honing in on different details within the photos. William can hear them teasing one another, saying that they look like hell, or some variation on the same. The quiet that had descended so quickly lifts. The party that began in the sitting room and kitchen now resumes in the gallery. William’s mother has drifted away from the photograph of the girl in the dress, even avoiding it, instead finding protection with Deniz and the others, who keep her at the center of their conversation with their Cat that and Cat this. William has no one to stand beside, so he follows Peter.

Kristin has forgone the gallery and stands by the window. With her thumbs she punches out a text message. Peter sidles over to her and she glances up from her phone. “I have to go,” she says.

“You liked the exhibit that much?” Peter says self-deprecatingly. “What’s the matter? Problem at home?”

“No, nothing like that. I’ve got to get back to work.”“It’s almost midnight.”

“Not in Washington it isn’t, but the exhibit’s beautiful. Congratulations.” Kristin tucks her phone back into her overstuffed handbag, from which she removes a small bottle of Purell. She squeezes a dab into her palms, which she vigorously kneads together. Heading to the door, she nearly bumps into William, who is slowly angling across the room toward Peter. “It’s almost midnight,” Kristin says to the boy in a tender almost motherly tone, as if the fact that he is up at this hour is more remarkable than the fact that he is at Deniz’s apartment in the first place.

“That’s Catherine’s boy,” says Peter.

Kristin glances behind her, offering Peter a slight rebuke. Of course she knows that this is Catherine’s boy. “Don’t let your mother stay out too late,” she says to him, then touches his cheek.

“He won’t,” says Peter, answering before William can. Kristin leaves and Peter and William install themselves at the window, staring toward the streetlamps with their halos.

“Take a look here,” says Peter, lifting the camera from his chest. William tentatively leans closer.

“The portrait you picked was perfect.” Peter guides the boy next to him by the shoulder. With his head angled toward Peter’s chest, William stares into the viewfinder. The picture Peter took inside of the gallery is a symmetrical panorama, five portraits hung on each of four separate walls, with every person a reflection of their own battered image.

“Your mom filled the last spot.”

William vacantly nods.

“One of the first rules of being a photographer,” says Peter, “is that you have to take hundreds of bad photos to get a single good one.” He points back into the viewfinder. “This is the one shot that I wanted, understand?” He is inviting William to be in on something with him, even though William doesn’t completely understand what it is.

The boy offers a timid smile.

“Photography is about contrasts, black and white, light and dark, different colors. For instance, if you put blue next to black, the blue looks darker. If you put that same blue next to white, it looks lighter.” Peter flips through a few more images on the viewfinder, pointing out pictures that demonstrate this effect. Each time that William nods, it seems to please Peter, so William continues to nod. “But the blue never makes the white look lighter and it never makes the black look darker. Certain absolutes exist. They can’t be altered.”

Catherine wanders over. She takes Peter’s hand in hers, quickly laces together their fingers, and then lets go. “The exhibit is fantastic,” she says.

William reaches for his mother’s hand and grips it tightly.

Peter shrugs.

“You don’t think so?” she asks.

He dips his gaze into the viewfinder, scrolling back through the images.

“I’m sorry more people didn’t show up,” she continues. “I’d hoped a couple of critics might come to write reviews. I know Kristin tried to get the word out through the consulate, but you know most of the papers are afraid to print anything on this subject.”

“Meaning photography?” says Peter.

“Meaning them. Don’t be cute.”

He tilts the viewfinder toward Catherine. She tugs the camera closer so that its strap cinches against his neck as she takes a deeper look. On reflex, her two fingers come to her mouth. “This whole thing was a setup for that photo?”

He takes his camera back and nods.

She glances into the exhibit, to where Deniz’s guests revel at being the center of attention, for once. “Don’t show them,” she says.

“Catherine, I need to talk to you about something.” Peter rests a hand on William’s shoulder. “Give us a minute, buddy.”

Catherine and Peter cross the room. They speak quietly by the front door while the party continues in the gallery. William reaches into his pocket and removes the Simon game. He plays for a few minutes, trying to match the elaborate patterns set before him, but he comes nowhere close to his father’s high score. While he presses at the flashing panels, he begins to think about what Peter had told him, about contrast, about how one color might change another. He glances up from his game. As he watches Peter standing next to his mother, the two of them speaking close together, she is like the blue. William can see the effect Peter has on her. While Peter looks the same, unchanged by her, like the black or the white.

*

Excerpted from RED DRESS IN BLACK AND WHITE by Elliot Ackerman. Copyright © 2020 by Elliot Ackerman. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

A nuclear reactor is nothing more than a glorified water heater. Sailors as young as nineteen, kids, bombard uranium atoms with neutrons until the binding energy of the atom is no longer able to hold it together. When it finally rips at the seams, it throws energy: heat, kinetically agitated neutrons, which strike more atoms and keep the reaction going.

Inside the core, we’ve planted the enriched fuel in such a way that we can control the reaction, but new elements are created in the process, venomous isotopes which will outlive us for hundreds upon hundreds of generations. When time has wrought language obsolete, when it has split the cities from their foundations, the Frankenstein elements will still hurl packets of energy into the dark, so that they can rest once again. We entomb them someplace where no one can reach them, where time may work its healing. Monoliths, literal pillars of stone, adorned with skulls and lightning bolts are designed in a gracious effort to keep our future selves at bay. All this simply to heat water. We’re kids with matches and an endless supply of gasoline.

*

My watch team at the nuclear plant has been operating in rotating shifts for nearly seven months now, simulating what life beneath the sea shoved into a tin can submarine will be like. A place where the hours of the day have no bearing, where sunlight has no relevance, a place where sleep will be a luxury and stress a constant companion. I work noon to midnight one week, then daybreak to sundown the next, and then graveyard to noon the next in an ever-revolving, never-failing pattern of lost memory and fuzzy intentions. I stand watch in the engine room of a submarine, quite literally, on blocks located in the center of a forest in the middle of nowhere upstate in New York, far from everything and everyone I’ve ever known. It took me a year and a half to finish the theoretical, classroom portion of my training in the swamps of South Carolina, and now I’m here to receive my working knowledge of the plant itself: the boiling, unsympathetic heart of the submarine where atoms slam together endlessly releasing their heat for us to capture.

I’ve been floating for weeks now. That’s what it feels like—floating, like I’m inside a bubble where all my senses are subdued, where light and sound and taste and touch and smell all pass through some kind of foggy membrane. When I wake for the next shift, my room is very dark. The windows are covered over by aluminum foil and heavy blankets to seal out daylight. The steady drone of white noise from the television blocks all outside sounds.

There’s a numbness which invades my every cell. This world I find myself in, a system of autonomic duty, lays waste to individual freedom of all kinds. My thoughts are not my thoughts. My deeds are not my own. My duty is another’s.

When I finally pull myself from the bed, the alarm having screamed at me for twenty minutes, I make my way through the unadorned hallway and into the small bathroom I share with a couple other sailors. I stare at the young man in the mirror without turning on the light, the day streaming in through the window enough to cause me to wince. I look him over—large ears, dark brows nearly joined at the nose’s bridge, sharpness of the cheek bones. I hardly recognize him.

*

Between schools, I was granted leave. I went home to Mississippi for the first time since I joined up. My father hosted a barbeque, inviting his enormous Catholic family. My uncles were there, a few of my aunts, and a dozen or so cousins including Trey, a close friend as well as cousin, born on the same day I was, making us the same age. Trey had recently been discharged from the 187^th Infantry, The Rakkasans. He’d been embedded with the first surge of troops into Afghanistan, then later Iraq for the ousting of Saddam. I hadn’t seen him for a couple years and only heard faint hearsay of what he’d been doing with his new-found freedom.

Trey and I sat together on the porch swing at the back of the house overlooking forest running the opposite direction. His normally healthy face was drawn taut, dark rings around his eyes. He’d lost weight since I’d last seen him.

“How’s things, Trey?”

“Ah man, you know, never been better,” he said, smiling sarcastically, exhaling blue cigarette smoke between gritted teeth. He told me of his new place out in the country in Holly Springs, Mississippi. He bought a trailer on a few acres of land all to himself and his wife. Horses and chickens ran the place. He raised fighting cocks for money and for his own entertainment. He raised pit bulls as well. “I had to shoot one of my studs the other day,” he told me. “He was growling and acting crazy with a neighbor boy, so I cut his head off and hung it in a tree on the property as a warning to the others.” He fought the cocks on an Indian reservation near his home where the laws of Mississippi don’t apply. Most of his sales of the cocks go to illegal Mexicans who carry over the tradition from their home country. “They love it, man. Can’t get enough,” he told me. “They’ve got me on all kinds of pills, you know,” he continued. “I haven’t been exactly stone sober since before I got out.”

“Is that all you’re on?” I asked him. “The pharmaceuticals, I mean?”

He grinned. “I’ve been taking just about anything I can get my hands on—street pharmaceuticals, whatever,” he chuckled.

“It really is rough over there, isn’t it?” I said stupidly, thinking outloud.

He laughed. “Shit, man, that part was easy. Over there, I knew my job and I was good at it. I didn’t have to worry about bills or what I was going to make for dinner. The enemy was clear. He was the guy shooting at me and my brothers. I only had to focus on staying alive.

Over there all the bullshit is cut out. Life is just having to survive. The petty shit didn’t matter like it does here. It’s coming back here that’s the hard part. Over here I gotta worry about being evicted if I don’t pay the bills. Over here I gotta fit into this consuming, selfish society. No one knows what I did over there,” he said, gazing out over the forest, “and they don’t care. And now that I’m back it’s hard to tell who the fucking enemies are. The bad guys here aren’t shooting at me. Here they sit behind big desks in expensive suits at the bank when I try to get a loan or they stand there with their arms folded when I try explaining how I could just use a break. They blend in with everyone else. And the enemies over there are harder to recognize too, now that I’m removed from it. I gotta keep telling myself what we did over there—what I did over there—what we are still doing over there—is right. I can’t live thinking what I did over there was a waste. I have to tell myself it was worth it all. I don’t have a choice.” Trey’s hand began to tremble, but he noticed and tucked it into his jacket pocket before I could ask about it.

*

Something inside of me shattered then, something which was already cracked. I never should have been a part of this, I told myself. It kills me to see someone I love in the shape he’s in. Trey had been a gung-ho person his whole life. He was always wound tight. The reason he was in the military to begin with was because he was caught selling weed in high school and given the ultimatum between jail time and the Army. He chose the Army, but he doesn’t deserve this, I remember telling myself, no one deserves this, to be used up and left out alone, utterly reeling from the fall. I can’t be a part of something that does this to anyone no matter the side. I can’t, I argued. Suddenly the war became concrete for me, the abstractions now solidified. A fog descended I haven’t been able to shake since.

Returning to Ballston Spa and the Knoll’s Atomic Power Laboratory, I resolve to start the process of actually trying to get myself relieved from active duty with an honorable discharge. I set up a meeting with the yeoman regarding the application for receiving conscientious objector status, a designation placed upon some people due to their spiritual belief regarding the sacredness of human life, disallowing harm or death to another person. When the day comes, I find the yeoman to be a nice guy. He wears black-rimmed glasses and has large Sailor Jerry tattoos stitched along his arms: pinup girls wearing Navy uniforms and sailing ships flying banners, sea monsters and anchors. “I’ve never seen one of these go through, just so you know,” he tells me outright, “but I’ll try my best to help you along the way.” He goes over the paperwork I’m to fill out to put the process in motion. He tells me I’ll have to build a case for myself, much like an attorney, with corroborating evidence showing beyond a doubt that my belief against harming another human being for any reason is contradictory to my moral obligations. Normally in these situations the person trying to prove oneself can lean on letters and statements from spiritual leaders or fellow church members, but I don’t have any spiritual leaders, and I haven’t been to church in years so it’s not an option available to me. The meeting only serves to reiterate how improbable this route will be. Instead of my hope being renewed, I feel as though my last option has disintegrated. The earth has crumbled beneath my feet where I fall five-hundred feet beneath the ocean’s surface.

The next several weeks are spent with my black-polished boots hovering, floating above the steel-grated decks of my engine room, the whirring of the steam turbines, the hum of oil pumps, the clicking of meters counting off various plant pressures and temperatures acting as my soundtrack. Time churns on ahead of me, catching me in its slipstream just behind enough to be unable to catch up. I wake up, attend to my duties, drive home, and fall asleep without much of anything coming into actual contact with me. The memories of the day glide straight through much like the unseen gamma radiation from the reactor itself.

*

It’s an unseasonably cold night in November and sleep won’t come to me. Something forces me get dressed and leave the apartment, which I rarely do, makes me walk the streets of my little town. The cold doesn’t faze me. My phone rings, but I don’t pay it any mind. I can see myself from behind, as though I’m walking a few steps back. I watch myself, the silvery mist exiting my lips to wrap about my head before dissipating into the air. My phone rings again, the vibration of it carries through my thigh. I continue to follow me around the block, back to my building’s door and up the two flights of stairs and into the bathroom where I can see myself shutting the door. The light is on, but I don’t recall if I turned it on. My phone rings again. It’s my father. I press the silent button and the vibration stops. Four missed calls, the screen reads. I can see my hand reach up to the shelf beside the mirror. I watch my fingers lift the straight razor my roommate uses to keep the nape of his neck clean. Without a sense of any feeling at all, I observe myself open the razor, placing its surgical edge against the bluish twists of veins within my wrist, and then I hear the vibration of the phone against the ceramic sink. I look down, this time inside myself, and see that it is again my father. Still holding the razor in my leading hand, I slowly pick up the phone after a few rings.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Son…” my father’s familiar voice trails off.

“Hey, Dad.”

“It’s Trey,” he says.

Silence.

“Son?”

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Trey’s shot himself.”

“Is he—?”

“No, he’s been airlifted to the hospital. They say he’s gonna make it.”

Silence.

“We’re, uh, hoping you can make it down here. Seeing you would, well it would…I know it’d make him feel better.”

*

With four days off between my shifts, I get a plane ticket to Memphis, where my brother picks me up from the airport with a glowing smile and a hug lasting longer than I’m used to. After a night spent at my mother’s, my brother drops me off at the entrance to the hospital where Trey’s being treated. There, I speak to a nurse and she directs me to the ICU. Trey’s father, Uncle Mark, sits on the floor against the wall smiling faintly as I walk to him. His face is sagging beneath the heaviness of sleepless nights. His eyes are blackened.

“How is he?”

“He’s doing great after the shit he pulled,” he says. “I should’ve told you, he’ll be going into surgery here in a little while…he blew out part of his tongue. He’s on a lot of morphine.”

“Can he talk?”

“He tries to talk,” he says. “He’s been singing.”

He leads me, in an exhausted shuffle, to Trey’s room.

“He got really excited when I told him you were coming,” he tells me. He stays outside the door as I enter.

I find Trey sitting up in bed, legs stretched, smiling the best he can as I walk in.

“Hey Cuz,” he slurs, with upturned inflection.

“Hey…Trey. How are you, man?”

“I’m fucked up, isn’t it obvious?” he says, smiling through his eyes because his mouth won’t cooperate.

His speech comes out mushed and drunken, but I’m able to make out some of what he’s trying to say. His face is bloated and highlighted yellow with shadows of bluish-purple bruising. He wears a metal halo, a cylindrical cage around his face, screwed straight to his skull to prevent any movement of his neck. The force of the bullet broke his neck in two places. They haven’t been able to bathe him properly since he got here because of the risk involved with moving him so he uses a suction tube to clean himself: his saliva, snot, sweat, the thick oil excreting from his pores. His skin has a fluorescent sheen to it from the glaze of the stuff. My eyes follow the journey of his murky fluids through a transparent rubber tube from the vacuum he holds in his hand, through the air, collected finally inside a clear plastic jar filled with liquid the color of yellowed bile mounted above his head onto the white wall behind him. The sucking sound of the tube against his skin pierces worse than any dissonant tone.

He speaks in a garbled mess like a three-year-old trying to tell a story, so he asks me to hand over a white board lying on the stand next to the table. I uncap the marker and situate the board upon his lap. He has a difficult time holding the navy-blue marker and I have to reposition it between the fingers of his right hand more than once. The words are hard to make out as his handwriting is nearly as garbled as his speech. I have to reread the scribbled lines over and over again before I’m able to decipher them.

“I’ve been rapping for the nurses,” he writes right before launching into some ridiculous, incoherent freestyle about who knows what, as only the syllables and a specific rhythm are detectable. I’m laughing the whole time, more than I have in a long while. He’s keeping rhythm by drumming along on the chrome bed railing. It’s ridiculous. He writes how he’s been hallucinating on the morphine he controls via pump with his left hand. He briefly describes surreal scenes of fantastical creatures and dream-world happenings. His brain tricks him sometimes into believing the halo is a chain-link fence his head is caught in. He writes of hearing the voices of the nurses gossiping and his mind blending it with his memory, building shitty soup operas he can’t escape.

“devil playing with my trigger,” he writes. “angels…scared. deserted me. dont understand. they’re automated…dont know how it is to be gods experiment, guinea pigs with habit and conscience…grieve truth.” He points to himself with the marker before writing, “still here.”

One of the nurses comes to prep him for surgery, casually offering something to the effect of, “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine.” She’s telling him, “There’s nothing to worry about.” She’s making an honest effort at resting his nerves, but a switch in his brain throws and he lights up. He pushes her with strength I wouldn’t expect him capable of, and he starts frantically pulling at the IVs in his arm. I don’t know what to do. I’m helpless. I stand frozen witnessing the scene as if I’m somewhere else watching it. He jerks the needles from his veins causing blood to run in trickles down his arms and onto the clean sheets before splattering abstract forms on the dustless white tiles below. Trey tears the electrical monitors from his chest, from his temples.

He’s screaming and for the first time I’m able to make it out, at least I imagine I can. “STOP! STOP! MY DOGS! MY DOGS! HE’S KILLING THEM! HE’S GOING TO FUCKING KILL THEM ALL!”

He’s slinging blood around the room. He yells something about a horrific worm eating his roosters alive, struggling to explain to the staff the triggers aren’t working on any of his guns, he’s trying like hell to fight a war unfolding within his mind and all I can do is stand there, mouth open and wide-eyed watching the nurses freak out. The nurse who’d been shoved has picked herself from the floor and is now crying, her body limp and trembling against the wall. The doctor runs in with another nurse, yells for me to leave and from outside the room through the glass, my uncle and I watch as the doctor strains to pin Trey’s upper body to the bed, shouting coarse commands for one nurse to “Hold the legs!” for the other to go get some medicine I’ve never heard of. The new nurse runs from the room returning a few moments later unwrapping a needle from its sterilized plastic, her face changing to iron as she plunges the needle into Trey’s jugular, pushing the stopper down, injecting him with calm. She then inches away and watches, taking her place beside the first nurse still against the wall staring straight-faced and drained, the front of her uniform speckled crimson, Pollock-like, with blood. Almost immediately, Trey recedes. His breathing slows as his eyes collapse into shallow holes.

The surgery is rescheduled.

I walk down the hallway with Uncle Mark. “I’m the only one who can really figure out what he’s saying,” Uncle Mark says. “Just like when he was a toddler. From what I’ve been able to make out, he was playing Russian Roulette with this homeless kid who’s been coming around his place. He told me this kid came over with the gun and was talking about wanting to kill himself so Trey says he decides he’s gonna scare it out of him, said he told the guy they were going to play a game. He said he put two bullets in the gun, spun the chamber, put it to his temple and pulled the trigger, and when nothing happened he handed it to the other guy but the guy was too scared so then he put it in his mouth and…” Uncle Mark demonstrates with his fingers, throwing his head back in an act he’s probably been continually playing out in his head since it happened. He then turns and looks me straight in the eyes, his gaze commanding mine. “Trey said he knew he would save him, the kid.” His eyes drop to the floor. “Here, I thought worrying about him dying stopped when he came back…I never imagined this.”

*

Upon my return to New York, I sit with my advisor, a Chief at the plant, and I tell him about what’s happened with Trey and about my decision to apply for conscientious objector. He seems to care about what I’m saying, asking me straight away, “Have you had suicidal thoughts?”

“Uh…well…” I slip, having not expected the question. “I mean, I’d be lying if I said I haven’t thought about it.”

“I want to take you to the hospital so they can ask you some questions, just to see if everything is all right,” he says grabbing his jacket. “Can we do that?”

I nod.

The next morning, as instructed, I see the base counselor, a pudgy, balding, middle-aged man named Joe Aschner, who grew up in the city; a civilian, thankfully. He sits behind a cluttered desk beside a bookshelf lined with psychology manuals. He gazes out through large, unfashionable glasses wrapped in a disheveled blue sweater vest, khakis, and worn brown loafers. He smiles when I enter. He introduces himself with a moist handshake as I sit across from him avoiding his eyes. He knows why I’m here and begins by asking general questions about my life: where I’m from, my age, my interests. “In your own words can you tell me why you are here?” he asks.

“I don’t belong here,” I tell him. “I made a mistake and now I’m finding it difficult to live with the decision.”

He nods. Then he asks me if I read, and we begin to talk about books and authors. I tell him I’ve been reading Kierkegaard, how I understand what he means when he says in Either/Or, “I say of my sorrow what the Englishman says of his house: My sorrow is my castle.” Joe puts down his notebook and tries to lighten my mood. He asks if I listen to music and I nod. He tells me how he loves jazz, especially the standards: Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker and though I share his love of them, I don’t feel like talking.

“Have you thought about medications to help?”

“I’m not gonna take the meds,” I tell him.

He nods.

*

Over the next few weeks, though the dream-states still hold sway over me, bringing with them a numbness I find hard to shake, and though the agoraphobia continues to try to coax me to remain beneath the familiar weight of my covers, I now hear the imagined words of Trey to the homeless kid echoing through my head. “You don’t deserve death…You’re just a fuckin’ coward.” The words help to ground me in some way, help me to place myself inside myself. My sessions with my counselor, Joe, begin to become the highlight of my week.

I start to feel again. Sadness mostly, but any feeling is welcomed at this point. And then, at the end of one of our sessions, Joe with uncharacteristic professionalism, seriously gazing into my eyes, tells me, “I have determined that due to conflicting with your moral beliefs, your involvement with the military is producing such stress upon you that it has affected your mental state to such a degree that it has placed your well-being in jeopardy. You are not fit for duty, which places both you and those around you at risk. Since you refuse medication, the only course of action we have is let you go. It is necessary for your improvement. I am going to write a recommendation for you to see the Navy’s head psychology department in Groton. I am going to recommend you be discharged as soon as possible. We will see if they agree.” We share a smile.

*

When the time comes, I drive several hours to Groton, I’ve been pacing back and forth wearing ruts in my mind. I’m panicking. My heart jumps along with my legs.

I sign in with the uniformed receptionist and she tells to take a seat in the waiting room. It’s bland, nearly empty: no magazines to read, no inspirational posters to occupy my eyes. I’m alone in a race with my thoughts. After what feels like an hour or more a tall slender woman in a beige uniform addresses me, motioning for me to follow. She leads me to a computer at a lone cubicle in a room down the hall where I’m asked to sit down and complete a series of questions on the screen.

Would you like to be a florist? Yes or No.

Well it depends, I think to myself. Maybe.

Have you always loved your father? Yes or No.

Yes. I mean I’ve been pissed off with him, but yes.

Do you have a difficult time relating to others? Yes or No.

Well, sometimes…I don’t think any more than what’s normal.

Do you tend to choose jobs below your skill level? Yes or No.

Uh…I’m not sure. Always? I mean, I have, but…

There are hundreds of these questions, all asking me to tell the whole truth in a single word. It’s impossible to do honestly so I end up choosing conflicting answers to make them believe I’ve completely lost it. Afterward, the lady prints my results and takes them with us as we walk to the doctor’s office. He sits in the far corner at a large wooden desk crowded with a computer and thick piles of white printer paper. The lighting is low and a dull brown washes the room. I sit in an uncomfortable chair as he takes my folder from the young officer before she turns to leave, pulling the door behind her. He reads silently for a few minutes then asks what I think has caused my “problem.” I tell him in bare words I’m in the process of applying for conscientious objector status. He glances up from the folder to give me a quick glare before glancing back down. I stare at my shoes against the brown carpet as they lay paralyzed. “You want out of the Navy?” he asks bluntly.

“I don’t think the Navy is what’s best for me,” I say.

“You’re clearly not fit for duty,” he says gruffly. “It doesn’t take a doctor to see that.”

I don’t respond.

“Well,” he says, as he takes his pen to a paper in my folder, “I’m going to recommend you be discharged administratively. The medical route would take too long.” Then without looking up he tells me, “You can go now.”

It’s all I can do not to jump up and yell and scream and slap and kiss the old man’s face and throw his piles of other people’s problems and unreliable test results off the desk and into the air, dancing in circles as they fall. The news anchors me to the ground, the first real taste of certainty in months, the finest words I’ve ever heard, the voice of a mother waking a newborn from dark dreams.

*

A couple months after returning home, I take the highway down from Memphis to Holly Springs to visit Trey. The disassociation, the fogged trances I lived with for so long have dispersed. The darkness has lifted for the most part and I’m wading through possibility as a new acquaintance. Some days I just drive without destination. Some days I sit reading for hours in the park in midtown. Some days I do nothing but lie in bed, content with simply being my own once more. As I wheel the car onto the gravel drive, I stop at the gate where I’m met with aggressive barking and snarling from several pit bulls. My attempts at calming them accomplish nothing, but moments later I see the familiar swaggered gait of Trey making his way to me. “Okay, okay,” he says, speaking lovingly to the dogs. “That’s my good boys. That’s my good boys,” he praises them before looking toward me.

We sit on his porch steps in the golden light of the late afternoon sun, the clatter of the summer insects spilling out from the trees and thick underbrush as the heat lays upon our shoulders. Trey no longer wears the shining metal halo and he looks fully recovered but for the fact that he can’t quite turn his head more than 45 degrees to the left. I sit on his right. “Just had a new litter of chicks hatch last week,” he tells me, rubbing one of his dogs between the ears. “And the tomatoes are growing like crazy, man. So much to do,” he says, “I can barely keep it together.”

“Sounds like you’re doing well.”

He nods. “Neck hurts sometimes. But I’m okay.”

“You ever see the kid anymore?” I ask him.

“I do,” he says. “Got him working for me. Just too damn much to do on my own. Started when I was still in the halo. Showed up one day and asked what he could do, so I showed him how to tend to the garden, how to handle the horses. Ain’t bad, but got lots left to learn. Still acts like a dumb kid most the time.”

I watch as he fingers a tick stuck to his dog’s ear. It’s deeply embedded and the dog whimpers as Trey plucks it off. A thin ribbon of blood drips down the fur of his neck from the wound. Trey takes a lighter from his pocket and holds the flame to it between his fingers. I hear the parasite singe and then pop.

“Trey,” I suddenly blurt out, “that kid didn’t come over that night, did he?”

Trey tosses the spent body of the tick into the dirt before continuing to search for another on the dog’s other ear.

I watch his fingers pass through the dog’s fur as he smiles faintly, nodding.

I immediately turn away as my eyes fill with tears.

“Thank you, Trey,” I tell him, the words falling from my mouth between breaths.

“Don’t mention it, Cuz,” he says, removing another tick from his dog. “Couldn’t have you cuttin’ out early on me, now could I?”

These days they call me by name: Hope. By “they,” I mean the people in our small dusty town, Masaka, where everyone knows everyone. When I was a little girl living with my grandmother, all I wanted was to be known by my name, but no, they’d call me Little Girl. I’d be on my way from the borehole, where I often went several times a day for water, a heavy plastic jerrycan balanced on my head. The sun was so hot my eyes hurt from looking at it, the heat burned through my skin, and I’d hear them whisper, “Little Girl.”

I walked by the women who sat on mats, their legs splayed out, peeling matoke and sweet potatoes, or pounding groundnuts as they caught up on the day’s gossip. Men sat on low stools on their verandas drinking locally brewed alcohol through long yellow bamboo pipes dipped in clay pots. Children skipped ropes and played football. I walked along the winding brown dirt path in my short denim skirt and blue flip-flops with semi-circles in the rubber soles dug by my heels, which I continued to wear because they were the only thing that protected my feet from stones and thorns.

“There, Little Girl goes,” they’d point as they whispered. Their whispers were loud enough for me to hear, and for their children to repeat when I tried to play with them. Whispers about my denim skirt which I wore every day, about my pantie visible beneath the skirt, whispers about grandmother.

I knew from the way they whispered that I didn’t belong. This was no surprise. If you knew my story, you too would avoid my eyes that were always begging for help. My parents died when I was two. A car accident. I was left behind with my grandmother, who they said was a witch.

“Witch, witch,” they’d shout when she ventured out of our iron-roofed house to check on her cassava, sweet potatoes, beans, and banana garden, and the two cows which were left to meander during the day, and tied with ropes to the mango trees behind our house in the evenings.

Grandmother did the best she could for me under the circumstances. The circumstances being: She was eighty years old, her health was failing, and she was thought to be a witch. Our neighbors accused her of killing several people in the town. I say accused, because I never saw any evidence. Fine, I didn’t ask for proof, but I never saw any of it, not the cowry shells, dry goat skins, drums, or a shrine. I never saw any of the things said to belong to witches.

“Look at her lion eyes,” they’d whisper, “those eyes can’t be human. Just look at her eyes, that’s all you have to do.”

*

One case involved our neighbor, Namu. The fights with grandmother about their cows destroying each other’s crops started the moment Namu married her husband. Namu, in her early twenties, had also had several miscarriages. The day she had her fourth miscarriage, she and grandmother had quarreled. Namu’s cow had come into our compound and grandmother told me to tie it to one of the mango trees. When Namu came to collect the big milk-white beautiful cow with large kind eyes that watered when it was sad, grandmother chased her away.

“You devil incarnate. The devil lives in you, and sucks blood out of your babies. The devil kills them. This one too is going to die. You hear?” she shouted, her voice carrying throughout the town. Her eyes were bright orange. They got that way when she was very angry. She continued to murmur to herself as she spread ash around her homestead to keep the devil out.

It was a cold Saturday morning and a mist hung in the sky. A small crowd of people had gathered and silently watched. They were like flies on a pile of bananas. Many of them draped blankets around themselves. The sun had taken longer than it normally did to come out. They were waiting for something to happen the way people in small towns wait for things to happen. Nothing transpired that morning. Namu left, but grandmother continued to curse and cast the devil out of our home.

“Grandma, is Namu possessed by a devil?” I asked as soon as she came back inside the house.

“What nonsense? Of course not!”

“But you said…”

“I know what I said child,” she chuckled. “There’s no devil. Just greedy, nasty people. Remember that. Now, I am tired and cold,” she said, and went back to bed.

That evening, Namu had another miscarriage. This time the clan elders decided to find the killer, and nothing would stop them. You see, in our town, no one died from natural causes. Someone was always responsible. If you were run over by a car, someone must have made the driver drive badly.  If you fell from a tree and died, someone must have made you climb the tree. Accidents didn’t happen. There was always someone who willed them. The elders ruled over the village like gods. They were in charge of the traditional courts that resolved civil matters, land, and family disputes. They weren’t supposed to have anything to do with criminal cases, but they did, and their word was final.

News of the miscarriage travelled throughout the town like lightning. Within minutes, people had gathered outside in small groups with lamps to discuss the death, and speculate on who was responsible. The elders too. And so, it was that they turned up at our home.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” grandma said as soon as she opened the door, leaning on the stick that she used to support herself and holding a lamp in the other.

“We shall find out soon enough,” said the elder with missing front teeth. The others nodded.

“What is there to find out?”

“We’re going to slaughter a rooster. If it dies in front of you, then you did kill the baby. If it doesn’t, we shall leave you in peace,” said Missing Front Teeth and the others continued to nod.

“You’ve come to kill me.”

“No one has come to kill anyone,” said the elder who made me think of the cunning gray monkeys with small white faces that descended on our town to steal bananas.

“Then what are you doing here?”

They looked at each other.

“God gives and takes life. Not you,” Grandma muttered to herself and laughed her contemptuous laughter.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. If you’ve done no wrong, you’ll be proven innocent,” said the third elder.

“Ayaaa…,” she scoffed. “Innocent? You’ve come to kill me. Why don’t you just do it now? You don’t need a rooster to pronounce me guilty,” she said, looking beyond the elders to the people who had gathered to watch. “And you,” she curled her lips towards them, “have come to witness a murder.”

It was a clear night. There was a full moon. The sky was a bed of stars.  Everywhere you looked there were stars. It was like they’d woken up to witness. Missing Front Teeth slit the rooster’s throat and released it. It jumped frantically in front of our house spraying blood on the elders and the people gathered.  Everyone except grandma watched the rooster as it fought for its life. I held my breath, expectant, but the rooster jumped further and further away from grandma. The rooster grew weaker and weaker. The silence deepened. The moonlight became brighter, and the stars grew larger. You could hear the sound of the wind. People who had blankets pulled them tighter around their shoulders. All eyes were fixed on the rooster, its white feathers soaked in blood. They waited. The rooster finally lay lifeless in front of the elders.

Missing Front Teeth bent down, picked it, stood up and pointed his finger at grandma. “Its head is pointing in your direction,” he declared.

Grandma burst into laughter. “You murderers. You touch me and I’II come for you from my grave,” she threatened before she retreated into our house and locked the door. They didn’t touch her. I think the elders were afraid of her. After all, she had just made a rooster die in front of them. They must have speculated on what else she was capable of.  I saw it all through a tiny opening in one of the wooden windows of our house.

*

Six months after the rooster incident Grandma died. Her health had rapidly deteriorated after the rooster business. It was especially horrible at night when we were the only ones awake in the town. The pain kept her awake and I stayed up to rub water boiled in herbs all over her body like she used to rub mine when I had fever. She’d scream out in pain and I’d cover my ears. Her cries travelled throughout the village, but they didn’t come to help. Can you believe it? She screamed all night and no one even asked after her health. People had a limited supply of compassion. It didn’t extend to a witch.

She died on the day I received my primary school results. I got straight As. I was elated and couldn’t wait to show her. I ran the twelve miles from school. I must have called and shaken her maybe a thousand times.  She never woke up. She was dead.

Within a day, my relatives appeared from the neighboring towns. Everywhere I looked, in the house, outside, there were aunties and uncles, wanting to help me. Can you believe it?  I couldn’t.  And this wasn’t the end of it.  They wanted the house grandma had left for me, but not me.

“What shall we do with her? We can’t leave her here by herself,” they whispered to one another.

“Marry her off. With her light skin, education and the grace of a giraffe, she will fetch a handsome dowry,” my eldest uncle decided. And until my marriage, they agreed that whoever took me would take the house. No one intervened. Not even the elders. I stayed in grandmother’s house until they found me a husband. I must say my uncle did well by me. He married me to the richest businessman in town, Tycoon.

Before the marriage, I was afraid of him, but my fear subsided the day I moved into his home as his wife and he took my hand, pulled me up from where I knelt to greet him, and said I shouldn’t worry, everything would be fine.

*

My name became Mrs Tycoon and I adapted to life as Mrs Tycoon. I was sixteen, his youngest wife, and the cherished one. To be honest with you, I didn’t treasure the position of being the favored one. Believe me, when you’re the third wife of a husband who is hardly at home, getting along with your co-wives is more important than his favors. For a few weeks, my co-wives were nice to me. They felt we needed to stick together to make sure our husband didn’t get a fourth wife. When he married wife number one, our husband had promised not to get a second wife without her permission, but then he had turned up with wife number two, and now me. Still, as soon as he left the house, they’d sit in the living room with bread and flasks full of tea and watch Nollywood movies as I cleaned the house.

I didn’t mind. I was glad to have a roof over my head. As it was, I could have ended up on the streets like so many other orphans. So I scrubbed the tiled floors of the triple-storied house. This took a big part of the morning. Once the cleaning was done I’d wash clothes and cook. By the time it was evening I’d be so exhausted my entire body ached.

*

A few months into the marriage, I got pregnant. Twins followed. Simon and Michael. Our husband was over the moon. He finally had the boys he had longed for.  Boys he already saw taking over his business. Boys he himself would groom for this. He loved their orange eyes inherited from their grandmother. He brought bags and bags of toys and clothes for them.

“Don’t buy too many clothes,” I’d say to him.

“What’s the money for?”

“But they’re outgrowing everything so fast.”

“We shall buy more.”

What could I do?  He wanted to spoil his boys. He’d play with them, bathe them. “My children,” he said as he threw them up in the air and basked in their delightful giggles. He’d look at their toothless gums and declare them the most beautiful babies. This should have been fine; a father should be proud of his children. The problem was that he had three daughters, and he acted as though they didn’t exist. He never showed any interest in them and insisted they go to boarding schools. True, children need to get an education; the problem was that they were still so young; four, five and six years old. My co-wives’ arguments to keep the children at home fell on deaf ears. He insisted that boarding schools offered the best education, but this wasn’t true. I had gone to a day school and I had learned to speak English and could add up numbers in seconds.

*

The twins elevated my status in the household. And something else happened. With the money I had gathered by saving bits here and there, I went to a salon and had my hair straightened with a hot comb. The hairdresser convinced me to buy pink lipstick. Our husband couldn’t stop looking and smiling at me when he came home. Although it wasn’t my night, he invited me to his bedroom. That night, he was a wild and yet tame lion.

He sent me to a driving school and bought me a RAV 4. I couldn’t believe my eyes when he gave me the car keys. By this time I was managing the finances of our home. When my co-wives needed to buy household items they had to come to me. I was a fast learner and he started to involve me in his business, providing loan services to people in the town. I didn’t ask for any of this. I didn’t. And do you know what all this meant? More resentment from my co-wives. Frankly, this wasn’t fair. Even if our husband had wanted to involve them in the business, they wouldn’t have managed. They had never gone to school, couldn’t read, write or count. As soon as he asked me to work for him, his business tripled. But this didn’t matter; they declared war on me.

Their plan was to drive me out of our home. When you have lived the life I have, you either crumble or become thick-skinned. I got tough. When they ignored me, I ignored them. If they attacked me, I fought like a cat and wife number one got scars from my scratches. But this was nothing compared to what they both did to me. I will give you one example: A few months into the marriage, wife number two pushed me down the stairs and laughed as I tumbled down like a sack of potatoes. It’s a miracle I didn’t break a single bone that day. I think my grandmother’s spirit was watching over me, but this isn’t what saved me from my co-wives. I will tell you what did the trick.

Whatever my co-wives refused to do, I did. I’d remove our husband’s shoes as soon as we got home and massage his feet, iron his shirts and trousers, made sure he had hot food even when he got back very late at night, and I sat with him as he ate. On the nights he was supposed to have sex with my co-wives, if they locked him out of their bedrooms, I welcomed him into mine.  Do you know what happened?  He invited me to move into his bedroom. Yes, he did.

Once I started spending more time with him he opened up and told me about his childhood.  He was the youngest of thirty-one children. Can you imagine thirty-one children? His father had no money but married four women and had a lot of children. He believed children were wealth. Many of them ended up homeless on the streets of Kampala.

He told me about endless days and nights without food, the fear of going to bed hungry and hearing his little siblings cry till their voices were grasshopper whispers. Their thin cries of hunger would stop only after they were fed. On many days, they were too weak to cry. He could never say which was worse. He talked to me about the hopelessness in his mother’s eyes and the pact he made with himself to make a better life for them. When he was ten, he started to look for money, finding odd jobs here and there, but his passion was trade. At the age of fifteen he got his first stall, a tiny space given to him by one of his father’s acquaintances, to sell sweets.

Because he had to work before running to school, he missed tests and exams, but he persisted and finished high school. Armed with a certificate and the ability to read, write English, and add numbers, he didn’t see the use of further education. Besides, he was convinced that his knowledge of street life was the essential ingredient for a successful business. By then, his tiny space had expanded into a big grocery shop and some of his siblings worked there. He tried several business ventures but his big break came when he became a loan shark.

It was during these nights that I realized we both came from poor families. I also learned that his heart was tender and kind. It didn’t stop there. He started to ask me about my life. One night, I told him how I longed to feel silk on my skin and the following day, he bought me the most beautiful silk gown, the color of the sun.

But the people of this town had no ounce of compassion left for me. Jealousy and hatred is all they had. My co-wives didn’t help matters. They spread rumors of what an awful person I was. Can you imagine? I, who couldn’t even harm a mosquito! All because I was now driving a car and working in an office. Do you know what I was doing in that office?  Managing the list of people who owed Tycoon money. Some of them would call me to re-schedule payments. I could have bought them more time. To be honest, I didn’t mind my co-wives hating me. I was away all day and came home late in the evenings. But they started to say I and my sons were witches. Their evidence was that our husband was no longer thinking straight. Why else would he allow me to work, buy me a car, and neglect them?

This was dangerous. People had been stoned to death in this town because they were suspected of being witches. It reminded me of my grandmother. They had failed to prove she was a witch, and now they were after me. They stopped talking to me. My greetings were met with silence. “Why do you allow a witch into your shop?” the people of the town would ask the shopkeepers, shopkeepers who were interested in making money. “She’s a witch, a witch,” people I had never met would shout as I walked out with my groceries.

I wanted to remind them of when I was Little Girl, and when they didn’t help with my grandmother and all of that. But I didn’t do this. Instead, I let our husband send his goons to beat up people who owed him money. That’s how he made sure he got paid. His bodyguards would either beat up the debtor until he produced cash or visit his family home. They’d turn up at the debtor’s house at dinner time, join him at the dining table, and set down their pistols. They wouldn’t say anything. They didn’t have to. The debtor would send a brown envelope full of cash the following day. Our husband also took several properties of those who failed to pay him. In the small town where news travelled like waves, everyone knew what our husband was capable of. I did talk to him about making too many enemies, begged him not to send the goons to the police commissioner. Nothing good would come out of becoming enemies with the police commissioner even though he owed him a lot of money. Our husband simply said business wasn’t for the thin-skinned.

*

Sunday started as it always did. My co-wives prepared breakfast. They had fried eggs, made tilapia stew, rice, matoke and chapattis. I came down to make sure everything was as it should be for our husband. It was my job to make sure everything was perfect for him. His toast had to be brown and crisp. The pineapples, mangoes, and papaya cut neatly into small squares and placed in fruit bowls. The tea had to be mixed with a lot of milk, sugar, ginger and lemon grass, and brewed in the clay pot to give it an earthy scent. I wore a white dress and tied my hair with a cloth the color of tomatoes. We were going to church after breakfast.

Our husband came down as I paced around the dining table, adding a pinch of salt, sugar, cinnamon, coriander or red chili to the different dishes. I thought he was handsome in his white sparkling kanzu that looked like a dress, with his head full of white and black tiny curls. The kanzu fell on his belly. The twins followed me around.

“My stomach hurts,” he said as he sat down, “and I’ve got a fever.”

I touched his forehead and noticed he was struggling to keep his eyes open. Just then, he vomited, struggled to breathe, and clutched his throat. His eyes bulged, and he fell off his chair.

“Oh oh oh oh no no no no no,” one of my co-wives cried. I fainted. When I opened my eyes, I lay on the floor in the dining room. His eyes stared at me from one of the portraits we had taken on our wedding day and I was told the words that I didn’t want to hear. After five years of marriage, he had left me.  I cried until there were no tears left.

*

As soon as he was deep in the soil, they started to look for his murderer.  The elders and the police commissioner were in and out of our home. They talked to my co-wives and stopped talking as soon as they saw me. I was the suspect. Can you believe it?  I couldn’t. I was going to be tried for killing the man who had saved me, the only person who had ever talked to me, who knew my name, the father of my children. Do you know what I was thinking as I sat before them? That I must have been cursed. First my parents, then grandma, my husband, and now this.

My trial was conducted by the same elders who had turned up at grandmother’s house.  This time, they had a white goat with them, having dispensed with roosters. After grandmother, they had declared them unreliable. The sun woke up very early in the morning, initially soft and pleasant, growing in intensity by the hour, and now it was intolerable. There were people everywhere; under the muvule trees and in the branches, at the town primary school compound, on the roofs, and in the classrooms. They had left their jobs and farms to watch.

Frail Little Elder cleared his throat to signal the commencement of the trial. All the murmuring stopped, hands fell on laps or at their sides, conversations halted mid-way, eyes shifted away from whoever they had been talking to and focused on the three elders, dressed in long white robes, sitting on the only furniture, three wooden chairs, in front of the crowd. Frail Little Elder explained that the trial would take a few hours. Everyone who wanted to say something would be allowed to do so. He spoke very slowly and regularly paused to breathe and replenish his energy. The act of talking seemed to deplete his limited reserve of strength.

There were only six witnesses; my co-wives, the doctor, the police commissioner, and my children.  It was supposed to be a straight-forward case. My husband had been poisoned. But the twins had told me they had seen the police commissioner give their father boiled maize that morning. With his large debt, the police commissioner had reason to want him dead.

*

My co-wives avoided looking at me as they testified. They said I was the one who had spent the night with him and served him breakfast. They said he was a healthy man, never fell sick, not even a headache. In the wildest accusation, they accused me of not caring about his death. Do you know why they said this? I will tell you why. Because I went back to the office a week after his death.

“His body isn’t even cold and she’s already back in the office,” said wife number one.

“She wants to steal his business,” said wife number two.

I hope you’re thinking this is crazy. This is what I certainly thought. I mourned our husband, did nothing except cry and pray, and most nights I lay awake because I wanted to be alert when he came back to me. You see, I was still hoping it was all a bad dream; he had gone to Dubai to conduct business and would return. But someone had to keep the business going and I was sure this is what he’d have wanted.

“She’s the only one who stood to gain from his death,” said wife number two.

“And her sons,” said wife number one.

This was true if all you thought about was money. Our husband had a will that left everything he owned to us. I hadn’t known about the will until his death, but no one believed me. There was no doubt in my mind what they were up to; they wanted me out of the way so they could take all the money, the property, the business.

The doctor who conducted the post mortem confirmed that our husband had been poisoned. This corroborated what the twins had told me. The police commissioner said he knew the deceased and the accused.  No, he didn’t know the cause of death.  No, he couldn’t prove I had killed him. No, he wasn’t investigating, he knew I had something to do with it. Of course I did. You remember her grandmother. We all knew she was a witch. You all know how many people she killed. The Witch had started early. Imagine how many people she’ll kill by the time she’s done. People are already reporting how she’s transformed them into ghosts and made them weed her husband’s plantations at night. No, he hadn’t seen this, but so many people in the town had told him.

I stared at the police commissioner. If eyes could kill, mine would have killed him. I tried to speak out, to tell the truth, but the elders wouldn’t let me. Accused people had no right to speak. And now the police commissioner was sowing the seeds that’d lead to my death.

The twins were the last to testify. It was Monkey Face who asked them to state their names, hold the Bible, and swear to tell the truth. Monkey Face talked to them slowly and explained what was going on. He told them they needed to find out who had killed their father. He asked them if there was anything they had seen or heard that could help to find his killer. Simon, the older twin, did the talking and his brother Michael, nodded in agreement. I knelt and held their hands.

“I can help,” Simon said. “I saw him,” he pointed at the police commissioner, “the morning father died. We were playing in the garden when he came by.  Father joined him. They talked. He was eating boiled maize. He shared it with Taata.”

Silence fell upon the town as he talked. Nothing moved. Not the houseflies, the birds, or the wind. No one blinked. It was as though people were glued to the red soil. They held their breath. It was the kind of silence pregnant with anticipation. The twins sat on my lap. I was relieved. It had all come to an end. The silence was broken by a gust of wind that covered us all in dust.

As soon as the air cleared, the police commissioner was up in a flash. He licked his index finger, rubbed it on the soil and swore on the grave of his mother that he hadn’t seen our husband that day, the twins were lying. He raised both his hands up into the air and declared that God was his witness, he hadn’t killed anyone, and if he was lying, may lightning strike him.

“Yes you did,” I shouted.

“Why would I kill your husband?”

“You owed him money.”

“Slaughter the goat,” he demanded, “it’ll die in front of the killer.”

“What do the people say?” Missing Front Teeth shouted.

“The goat. Kill the goat. The goat must be slaughtered. The goat will be the judge,” the people shouted back. All eyes turned towards the goat that immediately stood up and started going baa baa baa. It was untied from the muvule tree but it refused to move. Two men pulled the rope around its neck. The goat stood still until another group of men pushed it forward.

Our destiny had come down to this frightened goat that was fighting for its life. The men overpowered it, and held its head down. It must have known it was futile to fight, for it lay still. Our tear-fear filled eyes stared at each other. I wished it didn’t have to die so I could live. Missing Front Teeth’s cut was swift and clean. Blood gushed out. The goat squirmed and shook its whole body violently, fighting death as I willed it to die far away from me. They released it, and it ran around in small circles away from me, its head dangling from its neck. My eyes were glued to it as it gave up the will to live. I sat straight as it suddenly turned around and faced me. It collapsed and started to crawl towards me. It had changed its mind. A few minutes later the goat succumbed right in front of me. It did. Can you imagine my shock?

I was up on my feet immediately. “I didn’t kill him,” I shouted

“The goat has spoken,” the people shouted.

Straightaway, the sky darkened, puffs of winds started, and rain poured out of the skies in buckets. The sound of thunder and lightning petrified us all and we scrambled away in different directions.

*

Back at home, I moved into my children’s room, locked it, pushed their bed against the door and waited for them to come for us. No one came. I spent the night calling my grandmother’s spirit to protect us. In the morning, I told the twins to remain quiet and we huddled in a corner until there was a knock on the door. I jumped up, the twins screamed, and in a flash, I was back on the floor, my hands covering their mouths.

“Sh-sh-sh,” I put a finger on my mouth.

“It’s us,” wife number one said, “please open the door.”

“No,” I said. “Come in here and I will kill you.”

“Hope, please open the door. We need to talk to you,” wife number two said.

“Am not opening the door. Talk.”

“We just got news that the police commissioner and one of the elders died last night.”

“What? If you’re lying to me!”

“We’re not lying. It’s true. They found them dead, and no one can tell what caused their death,” wife number two said.

It had rained cats and dogs, trees fell and houses were swept away, and lightning struck people. The sky must have been angry and had decided to unleash its vengeance on the town.

*

The people of this town now believe I am a witch. “Like grandmother, like granddaughter,” they mumble. They mumble because they don’t want me to hear, afraid I’ll not help them out when they come to borrow money. I do not blame them though. Lightning striking people like that and the mysterious deaths of the police commissioner and the elder; surely I must have some powers. Every time I hear their mutters, I smile, knowing we’re safe with our money and properties. They will never dream of touching us again.

Do you know what else happened? My co-wives have become our zealous defenders, telling anyone who cares to listen that we’re not witches. Can you believe it? Truth be told, they’re more frightened of being thrown out of the family home. Even though my fortunes have changed, I could never do such a thing, however, I enjoy watching them cater to my needs when I return from work. But when I ponder the whole thing, I actually believe in this witchcraft business. Surely, someone must have made me the richest woman in the town, otherwise how do you explain that?

The first time I met you I fought your father in the driveway. He fisted a tire iron, but he’d been drinking and he only clipped my forearm with his looping swing. That’s really where my scar comes from. The afternoon had been nice, your mother made kabobs, but you wouldn’t touch the green peppers, and you wouldn’t speak to me, so your mom brought the soccer ball out and we kicked at it in the small backyard and I pretended to know something about Pelé, and she made you hug me before I left out the front door, running into your dad, who had spied our embrace.

You’re ten. You stood in front of our autumn oak, your white-casted right arm at your side above the rocky ground that shattered your elbow on your fall from the old tree. I warned you about climbing the dead branches, and still I ran to you when I heard your animal groan, your dangling lower arm, inverted, twisting, and I waited to take you to the hospital and belted you first because you never listened to me, a stepfather, and it felt good to whip that leather at your lower back, to hear sharpness in the air, and see your body quiet and stiffen.

Sometimes you’d crawl into our bed and curl into your mother. You looked just like her, and I’d imagine you seeping back into her womb, breathing her liquid, splitting into cells, into her egg, his sperm, but when I’d slip into half sleep I’d feel your fingers on my anchor-and-knife tattoo, tracing the shapes.

You tried me two times when you were sixteen, and each time I let you get the first jab in, just so you thought you had a chance. I remember the living room: the worn gray carpet, little bay window; I remember choosing where to land the next blow, then wrestling you down to the floor, lying on top of you, your mother pulling, yelping, pleading as I took your arms above your head and locked them with one of my hands, feeling your helpless slither underneath me, knowing none of it mattered because you weren’t mine.

You’re twenty. You lifted your sleeve at the dinner table, unveiling your mother’s name on your bicep after your first tour in Iraq. When she asked you if you’d killed anyone, your mouth was full of mashed potatoes and you said I’d go back. And when you volunteered to go your mother refused to see you off, but I was there, standing and cursing you in the midday heat, watching the C-17 take you away, staying until they began folding up the plastic chairs.

When you called before the battle at al-Qai’m you asked for your mother, and she sobbed and shoved the phone at me, so I took it, and you told me you loved me. You thanked me for the fishing trips on the Truckee River, for sitting in the stands at miserable band performances, for toughening you up for the Marines. And after the battle you told me you’d lied, that you didn’t love me, that my belt and fist still filled your dreams, and fearing death had made you say things you thought God wanted to hear.

Your mother and I were pulling weeds in the front yard when the chaplain’s clean blue sedan edged up to the curb. He asked us to step inside, but your mother wouldn’t budge; she took the news on the sidewalk with a fistful of crabgrass. I drove through a lightning storm to the green bridge we used to fish below. It’s where I taught you to smack trout heads against the large black rocks before slicing the guts out.

Once, we tried to catch them with our hands, and I showed you how to reach into the water and rub their soft bellies, lulling them for a moment before the surprise clench and lift. I told you I’d caught hundreds of trout this way, and that my scar was from wrestling a twenty-pounder on the rocks. For all I could tell you believed me.

Your mother fell apart. She locked herself in our darkened bedroom, taking small meals there. She didn’t talk to anyone, but on the third day she came to me: Tell his father, she said. I waited a couple of hours, and after cursing and circling town, I drove to his place by the lumber mill. My hand gripped the car door handle, but I couldn’t pull the damn thing, and I sat there for twenty minutes, his dog barking the whole time. Finally, your father emerged and slowly approached my rusting Ford. He carried a baseball bat in his strong hand. I didn’t fancy up the news. He’s dead, I said, and drove away. I drove until I ran out of gas on a dirt road out by where we shot at clay pigeons. I walked the eight miles back to town.

When I arrived home, your father’s truck rested in our driveway. As I passed the truck I looked inside the cab on the chance that he had just arrived, that maybe he was sitting in the driver’s seat, buying time, but it was empty. I walked up the steps you helped me build and stood at the threshold with an overwhelming urge to knock at my own door.

Excerpted from “Acceleration Hours: Stories” by Jesse Goolsby. Copyright © 2020 by University of Nevada Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Nevada Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

I got off the bus and a woman kept pace. Skinny black jeans with a fat silver belt of keys.

“I know how you feel.”

“I feel fine.” I was lost. I asked her for directions.

She took out a red inhaler, took a puff and told me where to go, in gulps.

It was not the way I would have taken. After a few blocks it only got less familiar and I went another wrong way that felt right.

Within seconds my old neighborhood was all harrowed mud. Creosote-black timber and dark machinery. I thought of my childhood puzzlement with the phrase “raze to the ground.” Raise to the ground?

I lurched across the field. The machines intrigued. Like booby-traps. Like some people.

A hand-painted sign said ZONE ROUGE.  I didn’t speak French, but everybody knew rouge was red. Not everybody knew the Red Zone. I knew it. About another one, Verdun, in the northeast of France, where a year-long WWI battle killed more than 900,000 German and French soldiers. So densely shelled with unexploded artillery and gas shells that it would be uninhabitable for four hundred years. I knew because of my father. He read to me about military history, we watched war movies, read to me war comics and he told me how he played war with his friends. Seeing war technology in ordinary things was in his bones: Krupp toasters, tank treads in earth movers, gun designs echoed in power drills and blowtorches, airplane plastics in radios, jet fins in chassis, airs scoops in car grills. Innocent seeming, now that real machine guns festooned many a man cave. Anyway, there’s always been a Nazi pedigree in everyone’s medicine cabinet, he said. In WWII American bombers were briefed on which German factories to bypass (the American-owned ones). Was there any point in fighting, (or not fighting) now that the peace prevailed? They said it prevailed.

Peace time. And everything was mined. For information. For market share. For death.

Ahead was a forested area I’d never seen before. The woman from the bus emerged from the dark. I walked on past her into the forest. It was silent and cool. Moss covered everything underfoot. She came up behind me and touched my shoulder. “Every step you take now.”

I stopped in mid-stride. Returned my foot to the spongy ground. Turned. “I need to make some money. I’m going to lose my apartment. I can’t lose my apartment.”

She said, “I know how you feel.”

“That’s what you said before. It’s not a feeling. I’m broke and not making enough to survive. I’ve got to make some money. If you can’t help me then move out of the way.”

“Don’t take another step. But maybe you won’t listen. Maybe I’ve got the wrong guy.”

I was pissed but did as she said. Nothing. “You don’t have anybody. Yet. What’s the proposition?”

“It’s dangerous, but a lot of money. Step where I step.”

I followed her back across the mud and sat in the cab of a dozer.

I tugged at dead levers. Tapped gauges. “No key. Not going anywhere.”

She pulled out the wad of keys and slid each around the ring, matching them to every machine in the field, keeping rhythm to a litany of functions. Her voice worked a spell, a comb tugged through thick, tangled dreams: “Earth mover, shaker, crusher, compactor, driller, blaster, incinerator, disintegrator, fracker, fracktaler, shifter, sifter, buster, eviscerater, pulverizer, driver, down-loader, switcher, coder, de-coder, up-loader, assembler, morpher, server, pubsmasher, browser, processor, ransomer, hackers, firewaller, coboler, encryptor, decryptor, infector, defector.”

I said, “Show me a war where we haven’t armed both sides.”

“You want money. Someone has to clear the Red Zone. Children wander in there. You’ll find pieces of them. But most are killed by the gas shells. Slow. Like emphysema. Or poisoned from lead, arsenic, mercury, zinc. Makes the dumb kids.”

“Dead or dumb, huh.” I looked over the punished instrument board.  Taped to cracked gauge was a photo of a little girl. I looked away. “Must be prime real estate here. Chernobyl pristine. What will you call it, Rouge Manor?”

She held up the last key in front of my eye. “This is a chance to make a difference. You want to do something good, don’t you?’

I didn’t answer and she squirted her inhaler again.

“What’s the shit in your inhaler? Albuterol? See that timber out there covered in creosote? It’s a medicinal plant that you might try. A bush of it out in the Mojave Desert is one of the oldest living things on earth. ‘King Clone.’ Surprised they haven’t plowed it over for a housing development.”

“Aren’t you the king of mansplainers.”

“I know about patterns. About codes. I can find mines. I don’t even need your damn keys.” I held up my Lishi Pick.

“Use that on my cab and you’re toast.”

“I’m already toast.”

“Then I don’t need you.” She reached over and opened the cab door. I got out.

She closed the door and started up the machine. It spun in the mud and rumbled into the woods. I waited until it was gone, then followed my footprints in the mud to the street. Twenty steps, there was an explosion.  I turned around and traced my footprints back to the woods. Then ran toward the smoke. Maybe I’d end up dead, but I was done with dumb.

The following short story is based on the myth “Ceyx and Alceone,” as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Cy busied himself with the by–now routine activities of a combat patrol: gathering his personal gear and stowing it in the truck, drawing the big .50 caliber machine gun and mounting it in the gun turret, setting the frequencies and security codes on the radio, helping out the other crew members and being helped by them in turn. As he waited for the mission commander to give the patrol brief, he thought about his wife for a few moments. Ali had not wanted him to go on this deployment; he had had options that would have kept him in the States, at least for a while longer, and she could not understand why he had been so eager to return to Afghanistan.

“I think you are crazy,” she had told him. Left unstated was the suspicion that he liked the idea of going to war more than he liked the idea of being with her. She loved him dearly, and though he professed his love for her, too, she couldn’t help but feel that he didn’t value their relationship as much as she did. Cy also wasn’t sure what to think, either then or now while he waited for the patrol brief to begin. Returning to Afghanistan had been important to him, but beyond his claims about needing to be with his unit and doing his duty, he sensed that there was a cold hard nugget of selfishness about his willingness to jeopardize his marriage—not to mention his life—for the sake of the deployment.

Rather than give Ali an excuse or an explanation, he had offered a compensation. “When I get back, I promise I’ll make it up to you,” he had said, “I’ll go back to school, or find some job where I won’t have to deploy again anytime soon.”

The offer seemed lame, even to Cy, like he had thought about it for two seconds, but Ali acceded to it anyway. She loved Cy in part because he was a soldier, but some things about being a military wife were really bad. Now she busied herself with her classes, her part-time job, and her friends and family. But she worried a lot, and had a premonition that things might not end well.

The day’s mission was nothing special: accompany an Afghan army unit while they resupplied three of their outlying outposts. The mission commander explained that the Americans’ role was to inspect the readiness of the Afghan outposts, and to provide artillery and medical support in case anything happened along the way. Cy’s job was gunner on the mission commander’s truck, which was to be third in the order of march behind two Afghan trucks. From the truck’s exposed turret he was to man the .50 cal while keeping an eye out for suicide bombers, IEDs, and ambushes. But nothing was expected to happen; “There has been no enemy activity on the planned route in the last 48 hours,” the mission commander informed them. They had traveled the day’s route many times before with nothing more serious occurring than a vehicle breakdown. Sure they planned well and rehearsed diligently, but that was all the more reason the actual mission was probably going to be not much.

Which is why what happened, at least at first, had an unreal feel. Three miles out, on Route Missouri, Cy saw the two lead Afghan trucks come to abrupt halts and their occupants pile out. The Afghan soldiers took up firing positions on the right side of the road and pointed their weapons back to the left side. Because he had headphones on and was chattering with the other truck occupants, Cy was unable to immediately distinguish the sound of gunshots, and it took him a moment to comprehend that the Afghans had stumbled into an ambush. Other Americans also soon gleaned what was going on and suddenly the radio net crackled with questions, reports, and commands.

“Action front…. Scan your sectors….. Anyone have positive ID?…. There they are…. 11:00 200 meters. Engage, engage!”

Cy identified three turbaned gunmen firing at the Afghan army trucks from behind a low wall. He charged his machine gun and began to shoot. He had fired the .50 cal dozens of times in training and thus was surprised by how far off target were his first two bursts. But very quickly he found the range, and was rewarded by seeing the big .50 caliber rounds chew up the wall behind which the insurgents were hiding. Dust and debris filled the air; Cy couldn’t tell if he had hit anyone, but surely the fire was effectively suppressing the enemy. By now, the other American trucks had identified the gunmen and were firing, too. Still, it was so hard to figure out exactly what was happening. That the three insurgents behind the wall were capable of resisting the torrent of fire unleashed on them by the American and Afghan soldiers seemed impossible, but no one could tell if there were other enemy shooting at them from somewhere else.

Soon, however, the sound of explosions began to fill the air. Again, it was not immediately clear that the Afghan army soldiers and the insurgents were now firing Rocket Propelled Grenades at each other. “What’s going on up there?” Cy heard the mission commander ask him through the intercom. Loud booms resounded everywhere from the impact of the rocket-fired grenades.  Cy next heard “RPG! RPG!” echo through his headphones as the Americans understood that they too were now under attack. A round exploded against the truck to his left and Cy felt the blast wave wash over him. How could the enemy engage them so accurately?

As the battle unfolded, Cy realized the situation was serious, no joke. The rest of the crew was protected inside the armored truck, but he was partially exposed in the machine gun turret. He continued to fire the .50 cal, doing his best to punish the insurgents who were trying to kill them. The noise was deafening, but in the midst of the roar of his own weapon and the other American guns, as well as the cacophony of human voices on the intercom, he discerned that enemy fire was pinging around him and sizzling overhead. Though he was not scared, he thought about his wife.

Ali had felt uneasy throughout the day. She had not been able to communicate with Cy, which in itself was not so unusual. She understood that sometimes missions made it impossible for him to call or write. Still, she sent him emails and texts and the lack of a response for some reason felt ominous. That night, she had had a terrible dream. Cy appeared, looming over her, silent and reproachful, and Ali had awoken with a start. Nothing like this had ever happened before, not even close. She didn’t know what to do, so she watched TV for a while and then began surfing the Internet. She thought about calling her husband’s unit rear-detachment commander, but decided not to. There was no one she could talk to who wouldn’t think she was overreacting, so she didn’t do anything except continue to worry.

*

The next morning two officers appeared at Ali’s door. “The Secretary of Defense regrets to inform you that your husband has died as a result of enemy fire in eastern Afghanistan,” one of them intoned. It was all too true, but for Ali the reality of the situation dissolved in a swirl of chaotic thoughts and physical sickness.

Ali waited on the tarmac at Dover Air Force Base with Cy’s parents. An honor guard was also present, as well as a contingent from her husband’s unit, and a general whom she had never seen before and whose name she didn’t catch. Everyone was very nice to her, but Ali was confused. She didn’t know if she was supposed to be strong and dignified or to collapse in a pool of tears. She also didn’t know if she was angry with her husband, angry toward the Army, or just some strange combination of sad and proud. As her husband’s casket emerged from the plane, Ali felt herself drawn toward it. First she was taking small tentative steps, as if she were nervous about breaking some kind of rule or protocol. Then she was running, moving quickly toward the casket while the others in attendance waited behind. She was barely aware of what she was doing, but her feet seemed to no longer be touching the ground. It was as if she were floating or flying, and her arms were beating like wings of a giant bird. “O, Cy, is this the homecoming you promised me?” she thought, or maybe said aloud. Then she remembered throwing her arms around the casket, but at the same time she also felt herself rising into the air, in unison with her husband, who now was alive again and also seemed a magnificent, noble bird. Together, Cy and Ali soared upward, and the plane and the honor guard and the onlookers whirled beneath them as they circled in the sky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded.

“My name is Bunny,” she said.

“I know.”

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

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

“Oh.”

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

“To the beach.”

“By yourself?”

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

“That’s all right,” I said.

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

“To your house?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Author photo by Nina Subin.

In high school, I was invisible–acne and braces, last year’s wardrobe. I didn’t have close friends. My grades weren’t going to win me any scholarships. The football coach offered me the equipment manager’s position after tryouts.

In the ninth grade, 9/11 happened. In tenth grade, I watched the Air Force drop daisy cutters on Tora Bora. In my junior year, I watched the Marines level Fallujah. There were yellow ribbon magnets on every car and American flags on every porch. The military was a way to be somebody.

So after I graduated, I ran to the recruiter’s office; shaved my head before I even shipped out. Some guys hated basic training. Not me. I couldn’t wait to get home in my dress uniform and strut through town, to show all those people who had looked over me or looked through me instead of looking at me. I’d be impossible to miss with a chest full of ribbons and medals.

I finished basic and shipped to Fort Bragg. My unit deployed to Iraq three weeks later, just in time for me to get some. But our area of operations was only peace and the endless desert. Nobody had died in almost a year. No Americans.

My platoon drove around Iraq in humvees, pointing our guns at the horizon, hoping to draw fire. We escorted supply convoys. We transported detainees. We set up checkpoints.

The recruiter never said shit about supply convoys. And he definitely didn’t mention sitting at a checkpoint, in a hundred and fifty degrees, in body armor, in a truck in the desert, just sitting. That lying prick told me about kicking in doors, calling in airstrikes, airborne infiltrations. Never checkpoints.

But, no shit, there we were.

When we arrived, the lieutenant radioed in our coordinates. Sergeant Schwartz and the other team leaders arranged orange cones and stretched out large, spiral coils of barbed wire creating a temporary barrier. Two soldiers positioned signs at either end of the checkpoint. In Arabic and English, they read, “Caution. Stop Here. U.S. Forces Checkpoint Ahead. Wait for Instructions. Deadly Force Authorized. Caution.” My job was to stand in the turret and man the .50 caliber machine gun, to provide security while the other guys set up.

Sergeant Schwartz pulled the heavy door shut as he got back into the truck.

“And now we wait,” he said.

Scwhartz took a pinch of snuff and tucked it in his bottom lip. He passed the can to Carpenter, the driver. I heard them spitting into empty bottles.  Out past the barrel of the .50, the dirt road shimmered like water. Two hours went by, then three. Farmers’ trucks kicked up dust as they drove from one rural village to the next.

So far, we had searched two vehicles and had found nothing.

“Hey Sergeant Schwartz,” I called down from the turret. “Is it always like this?”

“Like what?”

“This…” I said, “boring.”

“The last deployment wasn’t,” he said. “We were up near Baghdad. Urban environment.”

“What’s the craziest thing you ever found?”

“No shit,” he said. “This one time, we stopped a car full of midget hajjis.”

Schwartz told us that Bobby Barrow, one of the other team’s sergeants, had halted four lanes of traffic so he could take pictures. This was back when he and Schwartz were still privates. While Bobby was getting his picture taken, the search team found a wooden box full of Iraqi money hidden under a spare tire. So Bobby and Schwartz had to zip tie all these tiny little hands together while the lieutenant radioed headquarters. Turns out, all the money had Saddam’s face on it, so they let the driver keep it. Before they left, one of the Iraqis tried to get Barrow to marry his daughter and take her home to America.

“Bobby told him, I can’t take no hajji girl home to my mama!” Schwartz finished, laughing.

A truck approached.

“Punisher 7,” I called it in. “This is Punisher 4. Vehicle approaching from the south. Over.”

“Roger. Over.” The bored reply.

A door clunked open and the truck rocked as Sergeant Schwartz stepped out. I heard the team leaders from the other trucks doing the same. Out at the furthest clump of orange cones, the white pickup truck slowed, as if the driver was reading the sign. I stood in the gun turret and held my hands and arms straight out in front of me like a traffic cop, but he kept driving, rolling past the sign.

The team leaders, standing in the road beside my truck, raised their long guns and pulled the butt stocks tight into their shoulders.

I fired a signal flare, a warning. The flaming red ball arced past his windshield.

Still, the pickup didn’t stop; it accelerated toward the barbed wire, our position.

“Light him up!” Sergeant Schwartz nodded at me.

I aimed. I fired three rounds.

The pickup lurched and jerked and skidded to a halt. The passenger’s side sagged off the dirt road into an irrigation ditch. A door screeched open, and three female figures scrambled out, screaming and crying. The search team corralled them. Someone shouted, “Clear!”

There was nothing in the truck.

And then Doc sprinted up and pulled the driver out. She laid him on his back in the road, cut his pants apart, and stuffed handfuls of gauze into the gaping wound in his groin. And then she gave up. I heard the call for a body bag on the radio.

I clambered up out of the turret, pulled my headset off, and ignored Carpenter’s questions about what I was doing, his warnings that I would be in trouble for leaving. I marched down the road, around the serpentine of barbed wire to where the truck had stopped.

One round had passed through the windshield of the truck high on the passenger’s side, a cloudy spider web centered around a clean hole. Another hole in the grill, driver’s side. Fluids leaked from under the truck, oil and antifreeze. Blood soaked the driver’s seat, dripped out the door and puddled in the sand to form tiny lakes.

I caught glimpses of the driver, with all of the people crowded around: the platoon sergeant, the medic, the team leaders, too busy talking about the details of “the report” to notice his wispy moustache. They didn’t see the zits that dotted his face, because they were talking about proper escalation of force. They didn’t notice me either, standing outside of their huddle.

Two young girls wailed on the side of the road. Their mother, or grandmother, was ancient and dry. The lieutenant asked the interpreter why they didn’t stop at the sign, and the interpreter turned to the woman and said something in Arabic.

Her voice was papyrus. She held her hands out in front of her and patted her breast with her hand.

“She says they didn’t know what to do,” the interpreter said.

“Did they not read the sign?” the lieutenant asked.

“She says there is no school here,” said Nasir.

The old woman patted her chest again and again.

“There’s no school here,” the lieutenant said, almost to himself. And then, not so quietly, “JESUS! FUCK!”

Heads turned to look at him, including the platoon sergeant’s. I stood in the middle of the road. His eyes flicked to the empty turret 40 meters away.

“What are you worried about that for?” He jerked his head back over his shoulder. “You’re supposed to be worried about your fucking sector of fire, dumbass.” He shoved and pulled me to the truck and ordered me back up into the turret.

I watched my sector while the platoon packed up road cones and signs. They loaded everything into the trucks.

The platoon sergeant and interpreter spoke to the old woman, telling her how to file a claim. They gave her a piece of paper with the information printed on it. Before they left, Schwartz kneeled and offered the girls a package of M&Ms. The smaller girl burst into tears and clung to the woman’s burqa.

As they walked away, the old woman stopped and rasped at me, “Asif.”

“I don’t speak your language,” I told her. “I don’t understand.”

“She says she is sorry,” Nasir said.

*

On the ride back to base, Schwartz kept telling me not to worry. We did everything by the book.

“You’ll have to write a statement when we get back. Probably answer some questions, but just tell the truth,” he said. “We did it all by the book.”

It was annoying, the way he kept repeating himself.

I finished my tour of duty. The army gave me a medal. Later, they gave me my discharge papers. I grew out my hair and enrolled at a state university.

I didn’t strut around town in my dress uniform.

*

Two years later, Carpenter’s email arrived. It was short.

“Hey G,” he wrote. “I don’t know if you heard, but Schwartz died. Wanted you to know. Hope you’re doing good.”

The first email came a week after I left the army. Donahue died. Suicide attack in Baghdad. Last year it was Bethea. IED on some road in Afghanistan. He had gotten married the month before. Now Schwartz.

At the bottom of Carpenter’s email, there was a link to an obituary. “Staff Sergeant Michael A. Schwartzenberger, age 32, died on…”

I hadn’t talked to Schwartz, or practically anyone from the unit, since I left the army, but I felt like there ought to be more than just some dates and a list of people he left behind.

I read his name over and over. Schwartzenberger. The name tape on his uniform had the tiniest little letters so that they would all fit. We had just called him Schwartz.

I emailed my professors and left that morning.

*

The honor guard stood off to the side with their rifles. Some hairless kid in a baggy dress jacket held a bugle.

Standing behind the crowd, I searched the backs of heads for familiar faces. Bobby Barrow was conspicuous, his shoulders as broad as ever. He was the only person in a dress uniform who wasn’t part of the honor guard. Carpenter would be here somewhere.

The chaplain stood next to the coffin rambling through generic scripture– The righteous perish and no one takes it to heart. The devout are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil— I wanted to shout him down. I wanted to tell Schwartz’s real story.

Schwartz was 20 when he joined the Army.

His grandfather and his father worked in Youngstown, but Schwartz was born the year after the steel industry moved to China. There was no future at the plant.

The Volunteer Fire Department didn’t offer a pension. No benefits package either. Fourteen dollars an hour might have been enough for him and Melissa, just the two of them, but then the baby came.

Schwartz was an all-American kid: athlete, honors student, Eagle Scout. The recruiters had hounded him right after high school. Then, he had tucked their cards into his wallet and nodded and smiled. When things got tight, he dug through the drawer in the kitchen where old wallet clutter was archived with dead batteries and receipts of questionable importance.

Melissa’s belly was seven-months-fat when the recruiter came to pick up Schwartz for basic training. She sobbed on the porch while Schwartz rode away.

“Don’t worry,” the recruiter told him in the car. “You’ll be gone for a couple of months, and then you’ll move her and the kid down to Fort Bragg, and you’ll see her every night. Except for a training exercise every now and then.”

After basic training, he moved Melissa and Emily to Fort Bragg. He spent every night with them, except for the occasional training exercise.

After 9/11, the exercises came more often. The nights he spent at home, he lay awake, straining to sleep. He never explained it explicitly, but I understood. Some part of him needed to record the sound of his wife’s soft snores or the smell of her hair. He needed to absorb the blank hiss of the baby monitor.

On a tiny base in Khost Province, he earned an Army Commendation Medal and corporal’s stripes. He kept a picture of his daughter in his helmet. He wrote letters home every week. The letters never mentioned rockets or mortars or any kind of trouble. He told Melissa about his promotion. He wrote how much he missed her.

They had been in Afghanistan for six months and already there were murmurs about Iraq.

He received another medal and another promotion in Baghdad. He wrote letters. He kept a copy of his wife’s sonogram along with the pictures tucked in his helmet. The unit arranged it so that he could make a phone call home on the day that Ashley was born.

These are the stories he told us while we were overseas together–his third deployment, my first and only.

*

Schwartz’s unit was still in Afghanistan. The honor guard had been scraped together from the fuckups left at Fort Bragg. The rifle detail and the bugler were privates, fresh out of basic training or discipline cases. The detail’s leader was a fat, dumpy sergeant first class. All of the able bodies, and minds, were in Afghanistan.

The chaplain finished the service. The fat sergeant stepped up to the casket and raised his right arm in a slow salute. I watched to see who would jump at the first volley of shots. As the last volley’s echo rolled through the cemetery, the bugler started to play “Taps.”

It wasn’t even a real bugle. There were so many funerals, and so few trained buglers, that the army had to use fakes. The digital bugles played a perfect rendition every time, but anyone who ever played a brass instrument would be able to look at the kid in the baggy jacket and tell he wasn’t playing. He didn’t even know how to hold the fucking thing.

The fat sergeant handed the folded flag to Schwartz’s mom.

Some of the attendees walked back to their cars. Others waited to pay their respects to Schwartz’s parents, still seated, looking as if they’d be guarding his grave forever.

*

Bobby, Carpenter, and I met at a bar near my hotel.

Neither of them knew how Schwartz had died. Bobby said Schwartz’s unit had deployed eight or nine months ago, but like the rest of us, he’d lost track of Schwartz after leaving Fort Bragg. Carpenter hadn’t really talked to anyone since he’d been kicked out–cocaine.

Schwartz’s honor guard walked into the bar a little after sundown. They were in civilian clothes, but I recognized the fat sergeant who had handed the flag to Schwartz’s parents. Bobby asked about my hair: “So, when your girlfriend is pegging you, does she pull your hair? You know? And, do you have to put it back in a bun when you’re licking her balls…”

I nodded toward the door, distracting him.

“Hey bartender,” he yelled. “Get these boys some drinks!”

We sat at a table and told stories about Schwartz. Bobby had known him far longer than me; Carpenter too, so I let them do the talking. I was drunk. I smiled and nodded in the right places, chimed in with exclamations when I was expected to.

We kept waiting for the fat sergeant and the honor guard to open up. They were happy to drink on Bobby’s tab, but they stayed quiet, like we were still at the funeral. They seemed surprised by the way we described him. It was like they had never even met Schwartz.

We wanted to hear their stories about him, but what we really wanted was to know how he died. The obituary had said nothing, not even where he died. And it wasn’t like he was a spy, out doing something classified. He was in the fucking field artillery.

The jukebox died. Bobby was content to give it a rest. There was a lull in storytime.

“Tell ‘em about that kid you smoked at that checkpoint,” Carpenter said.

My stomach dropped. I focused on the beads of condensation running down a bottle of beer, but all I could see was that dusty, old woman. I could hear her voice, her rusty tongue dragging across the roof of her mouth. Asif.

She says she is sorry.

I struggled away from the memory and looked up, hoping for an interruption, an earthquake, a meteor strike, anything not to have to relive it.

The men from Schwartz’s honor guard stared at me hungrily, waiting for blood. Bobby wouldn’t meet my gaze. He understood that this was necessary. If I shared my story of bloodshed, then they would tell us what happened to Schwartz.

Blood calls for blood.

“So,” I said, “this kid, who it turned out couldn’t read, blew through a sign at our checkpoint, and I thought I was doing the right thing, but it turned out–.”

“Dude!” Carpenter interrupted me. “Tell it right, man!” He turned to the fat sergeant and the rifle detail. “So no shit, there we were, in the middle of this fucking dirt road …”

He told it all.

When Carpenter finished, the fat sergeant raised his bottle towards me, and then everyone at the table did the same. I waggled my bottle side to side. The label lay in shreds on the table.

“Sorry boys,” I said. “I’m empty.”

“Get me one too!” Carpenter called as I walked away from the table.

The parking lot was dark and cool. I pondered getting in my car and driving back to Asheville. The keys were in my hand.

Raised voices and breaking glass forced me to do an about face.

Inside, Bobby stood in front of his overturned chair, red-faced, cursing down at the fat sergeant. “You don’t fucking know. You weren’t there, you tubby shit!”

And now the fat man jerked to his feet knocking his chair to the ground too. “Listen, sergeant.” He pointed his sausage fingers in Bobby’s face. ”You need to tone it down. I don’t know who it is that you guys knew, but it wasn’t the guy that I knew. Schwartz was a fucking shit bag and a drunk. That’s why they left him in the rear.”

“What?” Bobby’s arms sagged.

When a unit deployed, they left people back in the States to take care of admin stuff– bitch work. They called it rear detachment. It was for broke-dicks, whiners, fuckups. Schwartz wasn’t any of those things. This was a mistake.

“They. Left. Him. In The. Rear,” the fat sergeant repeated, accentuating every word. “Schwartz got a DUI, and then he got busted for being drunk on duty. His ex took his daughters and got a restraining order. He was about to get busted down to sergeant.”

“Liar!” Bobby said. Angry tears brimmed from his blue eyes.

“That morning, when he didn’t show up to P.T. formation, no one blinked, because, like I said, Schwartz was a fuckup. When he missed 0900 formation too, we sent a couple guys to his quarters.”

Bobby made harsh cawing sounds and the tears spilled over.

The fat sergeant continued. “When they knocked, no one answered, but they knew something was wrong. So, they broke in. They found him in the garage, in his truck with the engine running.”

Bobby crumpled into a chair. Until now, I’d never seen him look deflated.

“Did he leave a note?” I asked.

“Sort of,” the fat sergeant said. “That’s how the guys knew something was wrong when they went to Schwartz’ place. He wrote Sorry in giant, spray paint letters across the garage door.”

Asif.

Reprinted with permission from Atria Books.

Mia Tucker woke before the alarm. She usually did on weekdays. She was a person of routine and that’s what routine did. Sleep whispered like a lullaby through the black morning but she pushed it away, sitting up in bed to put her mind in order. If she’d been dreaming, she’d already forgotten what about.

Monday, she thought. Cardio.

A storm had rolled through the city late in the night, leaving the brittle musk of rain. A coldness nipped at the top of Mia’s shoulder. How do they keep getting in here? she wondered, rubbing at the mosquito bite. I shut the screen last night.

Jesse hadn’t come home. He’d sent a few texts, first saying he wasn’t sure when he’d be leaving work, then saying he wouldn’t be. All-nighters during Bureau emergencies weren’t unprecedented. Mia knew the deal. All part of marrying a special agent. Even if waking up by herself in darkness brought on a loneliness she didn’t trust.

Mia ate a yogurt, then changed into light workout gear and fitted her running leg and sneakers. Downstairs, the summer air smelled of metal and moss. Dim streetlights lined the corners like sentries and the sidewalks had almost dried. A garbage truck on an adjacent block groaned through the still while monitor drones pulsed red in the sky. She stretched her left leg and then her core in front of her building, looking up to watch the flag whip around atop the Global Trade. Sixty stars and thirteen stripes, pale against the dark. It didn’t strike her as cluttered, anymore, all those rings and stars in the blue canton.

Mia finished stretching and tapped at her right knee. Her running prosthetic was hard and coiled, like a spring. She appreciated the city most during these early morning runs, because it was empty enough to seem welcoming, even hopeful. It reminded her of the city from her childhood. It reminded her of the America she’d grown up in.

Daybreak always ended the spell.

Cut the crap, Mia thought. These ten miles aren’t going to run themselves. Then she took a deep breath, set the digital green of her wristwatch to 00:00, hit start, and began, the joints of her leg cracking with the motion while the socket of her prosthetic did the same. She headed west, toward the harbor.

Mia had run most of her life, discovering as a girl that she was good at it and being good meant respect, and trophies, and approval. It made an object of her body, but it was a functional object, something that mattered to her even before she’d figured out why. She’d pushed herself to be very good at points in her life, competing in college for two seasons before it interfered with ROTC, and later running the city marathon her first year with the prosthetic to prove that she could. But she’d never crossed into greatness, and for that she’d come to be thankful. Mia lacked the masochism of true runners, the renegade fanatical gene to ignore and ignore all the warning blinkers thousands of years of evolution had instilled in the human brain. Bloody calluses and angry muscles were one thing. Tendons ripping from bone were another.

The baby, or not-baby, entered Mia’s mind. She focused on her breathing. Then came General Collins’s job offer. She focused on her breathing.

The first scratches of sun were tracing the water. Lady Liberty rose in the distance, droopy torch in her right hand. The whole statue needed repair, though how, and when, had become a political hot potato. Decades’ worth of money allotted for national monuments had gone to the Council of Victors, toward honoring the triumph of Vietnam. No one wanted to be the congressperson who redirected funds from that.

A lot of citizens had come to loathe the statue, considering it an eyesore. Mia’s father thought it a sentimental leftover. She sort of liked it, the way a person enjoys a musty childhood blanket found in storage. She remembered climbing to the torch on a field trip as a girl, through a staircase of graffiti and rickety metal, seeing the city from an entirely new angle. A snapshot of old American might, sealed in memory.

They’d closed the torch after the Palm Sunday attacks, then the entire island. Students like her adolescent cousins wouldn’t ever see Empire City as she had. No one could now. The sad, corroding statue was their normal. It was all they knew. In the meantime, Lady Liberty sank slowly into the island it rested on. Turned out it’d been set on sodden ground.

Mia adjusted her sports bra and glanced at her watch. A mile in, which meant her warm-up was over. She lengthened out her strides.

She turned north along a waterfront path, moving into the bike lane to dodge fallen tree branches and loose rocks. Other than the occasional taxi striking through the predawn and a man in rags watching the city from a bench, she was alone. The wharf across the river jutted out like a broken jawbone, suggesting a past when its docks did more than shuttle around office workers and tourists.

The city changed like a photo album, slowly and slowly and then all in a rush. Repair shops became delis. Parking garages became art studios. In the water a flotilla of coast guard barges that’d been restored as restaurants and pubs drifted to and fro. Steel and glass high-rises gave way to the architecture of the last century, rowhouses and squatty brick apartments. The streets narrowed, a few dotted by tidy cobblestone. The waterfront path leveled off, though Mia kept her strides long. She knew an incline awaited. She wanted to meet it in force.

Sunrise arrived somewhere between miles three and four, stained-glass clouds chipping the sky. Mia passed a vomiting young man in a sport jacket too large for him. Probably an intern for one of the banks, she thought, before turning around to make sure it wasn’t one of hers.

“Call in sick!” she shouted. He raised his fist and managed a weak “Defy!” before purging again. The motto of the old radicals’ caucus in Congress. Funny, Mia thought.

Another mile on, Mia ran into a short concrete tunnel. The tunnel lay underneath an abandoned railway line. Sunlight filled it with a fierce yellow shine. Around ten feet long, the sides and top of it had been covered in graffiti, dozens and dozens of circles of different colors and sizes. Just about every inch of available concrete had been tagged, leaving a sort of rainbow mosaic. Each of the circles contained three arrows pointing down and to the left. The job was fresh—Mia could tell by the tint to the spray paint. She came to a stop in the center of the tunnel, her breaths sharp but controlled. She rubbed a hand against a small purple circle. It smeared across her palm.

I know what this is, Mia thought, looking at her palm, then at the purple circle, sifting through her mind to place where. It took a few seconds, but she remembered a course in modern European history, and this shape and question from the final exam. The antifascist sign, she thought. From Nazi Germany.

A gust swept through the tunnel, and Mia smelled storm from the night before. She fought off the urge to shiver. It was going to be a cold summer day.

*

Most mornings Mia turned around and headed home on the same pathway, but the tunnel had spooked her. She pushed east and then south instead, running the sidewalks. The light and the city rose slow, together. A medley of urban noise was beginning to tune and it sounded mostly like construction din. There was order within the mayhem; one just needed to know the refrains. Mia did. She made it back to her apartment building on time, stopping only to remove her running leg before showering and dressing for work. She was back out her front door sixteen minutes later.

The air had turned and smelled of humid dew. Mia decided to walk through Vietnam Victory Square. Under the gaze of the Four Legionnaires sculpture, a couple of kids had waded into the fountain, laughing while splashing water at each other. Across from them, a tour group stood in front of the grand white marble wall with the simple words: “Praise to the Victors/In Honor of the Brave Men who went forth to Vietnam/1955–1981.” The guide was explaining why the inscription stopped there, despite the insurgency continuing after in parts of the north. He was stumbling through the history and Mia wanted to intervene. Because wars have to end, she thought. Just tell them that.

Coffee-charged angst and white-collar id crackled along the streets, bankers and lawyers and digital communications associates hustling to be at their desks before the workday siren sounded. As she turned onto Wall Street, Mia passed the brownstone Trinity Church she attended every month or so. She’d considered herself an atheist since her tour to Albania, but she still appreciated the ceremony of church and the sense of renewal it allowed for. Her family had fled to America in 1620 for that ceremony and sense of renewal. She wouldn’t give up that heritage for something as banal as not believing.

Then there was Jesse. “Jesus’s heroin needle,” he liked calling Trinity’s Gothic steeple. The church’s adjacent cemetery, where a slew of American founding fathers and Union generals from the Civil War rested? “A yard of goy bones.”

And he’s all mine, Mia thought. Trinity was an option for their wedding, though her family wanted it held in Connecticut. One more decision that she needed to make, and soon.

Mia’s bank was located in the Westmoreland Plaza, a mass of skyscrapers bundled together at the end of the island. As she neared it, a vast, bright fire engine came into view, its lights twirling and flashing like a hallucination. A row of police barricades separated the vehicle from the street, uniformed officers turning away confused citizens trying to get to work. Mia joined the crowd.

“No one’s allowed in the plaza today,” a cop was saying, not for the first time. “And yes, that includes you.” His eyes lingered on Mia’s blouse, and she stared at him flatly until he looked away. Her grandmother had taught her how to do that on her fourteenth birthday. It worked in Empire City boardrooms just as well as it had in aircraft hangars along the far edges of the world.

“Ms. Tucker.” A man shaped like a square wearing a rumpled dress shirt and overlong tie called to her from a corner of the barricades, close to a large bronze globe. It was the security director of her bank. He looked wired to Mia, even eager. “Ms. Tucker,” he repeated. “The office is closed today. Your father sent out a message to everyone—work from home, as you can.”

“Hadn’t checked my email yet.” This didn’t make any sense. The office, as far as Mia knew, had never closed. Finance didn’t “work from home.” That was for other people, other jobs. “What’s going on?”

“I shouldn’t say,” he said, in a tone that suggested he very much wanted to.

“Mum’s the word,” Mia promised. “I’ll be finding out, anyhow.”

“A threat,” the security director said, his voice low and hushed. “Whole plaza. Homeland marshals got it last night.”

“Oh.” There’d been a few lockdowns in Empire City over the years, for both real and false alarms, but Mia couldn’t recall any of them shutting down a main cog of the Finance District. “Must be some kind of threat.”

The security director looked out the corner of his eye to make sure no one else was listening, then pulled out his cell phone and read.

WITH FIRMNESS IN THE RIGHT AS GOD GIVES US TO SEE THE RIGHT, LET US STRIVE ON TO FINISH THE WORK WE ARE IN, TO BIND UP THE NATION’S WOUNDS, TO CARE FOR HIM WHO SHALL HAVE BORNE THE BATTLE.

MAYDAY, MAYDAY. FROM THE ASHES, HOLY REDEMPTION.

“Mean anything to you?”

Mia shook her head.

“The first part’s from a speech Abraham Lincoln gave. Used to be the motto of the old Veterans Administration. The second part . . . I don’t know. The distress signal or something.”

Mia contemplated that. “There’s a Council of Victors office down here. Some crazy’s angry about the colonies again?” She tried not to laugh but couldn’t help it. “It all needs to be taken seriously, of course. But shut down the plaza?”

The security director shrugged. “Federals think it means something. The Mayday thing, especially.”

“I see,” Mia said, wondering if this was the Bureau’s emergency, and if so, why Jesse hadn’t said anything to her. He worked intel analysis, not counterterrorism. Though he hadn’t always been behind a desk.

Gallagher, Matt. Empire City (Atria Books, 2020).

This is how the fight happened: earlier that morning, while waiting on reveille to bugle from the loudspeakers across the blacktop, Harvey forced it on the new kid, Private Gilmore, as the rest of us watched, some gruff comment about his curly, black ponytail—the barbers hadn’t shaved him yet. Only two days into OSUT, Ft. Benning’s one-stop infantry shop, and the poor kid couldn’t catch a break. I remember shaking my head as Harvey yelled out to all the knuckleheads huddled there in formation, “What the hell’s this faggot thinking enlisting without a haircut?” And right along with every other shivering private, he laughed and laughed.

Gilmore had arrived late the night before from Hortons Bay, up in Michigan, and right from the start of that cold January morning, Harvey Coates had it out for him.

“Bet that bitch has some nice pussy!” Harvey slapped his battle buddy, Wilkins, on the arm. “Hey, you think the Army issues jungle-green tampons?”

Gilmore muttered, “Shut the fuck up.”

Just what Harvey wanted. That Alabama redneck wasn’t exactly looking for a fair fight. He just needed a quick release, all pent-up from the barracks. “Boy better not mind me tugging on that cute little ponytail tonight,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “‘cause he’s gettin’ fucked up.”

And just then, Drill Sergeant Malone emerged from HQ and snapped the entire column to attention, stomping into the asphalt with the heel of his polished black boot. Two other drill sergeants followed close behind. When Malone spotted Gilmore, he let out a low whistle, advancing upon him slowly. “Well, ain’t you just the battalion beauty queen!”

Gilmore’s eyes glanced at Malone as he approached.

“Why your eyes flickering at me, private? You see something you like?” Then the drill sergeant leaned in to Gilmore’s left ear. “Oh, I think so, battle. I think this joker does see something he likes.” Malone’s voice got really low, then—I could only hear him because I was nearby. “Hey, private. Maybe, we can work something out, you and me. Maybe, I’ll slip in the barracks tonight, when everybody’s sleeping,” he whispered. “Maybe I’ll let you touch it. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, private?”

Sweating bullets, Gilmore said, “Drill sergeant, no, drill sergeant!”

“You don’t like my cock, private? What’s wrong with it?” Malone’s voice got louder and louder until he was screaming. “Why wouldn’t you want it in the palm of your hand? You think it’s ugly, private? Not big enough like you’re used to?”

That poor bastard didn’t know what to say. “No, I—uh, yes, drill sergeant?”

Malone threw his campaign hat at the ground and yelled down the rest of the line, “Hey, Bravo Company! Listen up!” Malone checked the kid’s name tag. “Private Gilmore here asked me to slip in the barracks tonight so he can rub my dick purple. That the kind of battle buddy ya’ll want in this Army? A special kind of ground pounder? Or is this joker just the typical slack-jawed fuck-face that makes up this training cycle?” He waited as the wind blew. “Answer me, faggots!”

Within five minutes, the drill sergeants forced Gilmore to wear his hair down around his shoulders. They dressed him up in a flamingo-striped civvy polo and then mix-matched it with a pair of regulation BDU bottoms. And that was just the beginning. By the end, Gilmore was bear crawling up and down the hallway, with his ass up in the air, yelling out, “I want a big, gay Viking to ride me! I want a big, gay Viking to ride me!” Their fun lasted over an hour, turning Gilmore into a rock star, a company legend.

I didn’t get to see it all. And honestly, I’m glad I didn’t. Although my hair was a lot shorter than Gilmore’s and I’d cut it before heading to Georgia, it stuck out like a thick mane even by the laxest military standards. That was the thing. You didn’t want to be different from anybody else. And mine was just long enough to be different—ten minutes before that, while headed to the latrine for a shit, I’d seen Harvey smirking and pointing at me with Wilkins, who pretended to toss his hair like some Vidal Sassoon model. That’s probably why I kept so close to the Michigan kid. It was pack animal mentality: I knew they’d go after the longest hair first.

*

Gilmore finally caught up to me a few hours later. “Lookit,” he mumbled with that Michigan accent. He nodded down the hallway at this other recruit who’d gotten singled out by the drill sergeants. “Elliott’s got the mannequin.” Probably out of his instinct to survive—by finding someone lower on the totem pole than he was in that moment—Gilmore’d pointed out another company pretender, Tommy Elliott, who’d already skipped PT for sick-call three times in a row. Well, now they had that fat fuck sliding his duffel bags along the cold vinyl flooring with this ridiculous dummy-soldier slung across his back. A traditional hawes carry.

Officially, the dummy was known as Private Emanuel Ken—the drill sergeants always called him out during roll-call—but they told us he liked to go by “Manny” on the block. The top-half of a faded CPR dummy from the 70’s, the mannequin had been dressed up in old BDU’s to look like one of us. They’d built the lower half of his body by stuffing flimsy pillows into the leggings of an Army uniform strapped to the dummy’s waist, using olive-green utility rope and a spare pistol belt. A camouflaged patrol cap topped off his head. One of the supply sergeants joked that they packed half a sand bag in his crotch to help Malone pick him apart from the rest of us.

“Private Ken!” Malone would yell across the barracks at the dummy, which was propped up against the wall to make him stand. “Sound off with your name, Manny Ken!” The drill sergeant charged past us right across the bay as if he were going to hit him. “Why don’t you ever sound the hell off?” Sometimes Malone yelled so loud at him, Manny’s legs would cave-in at the knees like a raptor, his entire body deflating under the drill sergeant’s shadow. “Since Private Ken ain’t enthusiastic today like the rest a-you dickheads, I’ll just have to make the whole company push!” And so, another smoke session would begin.

But the mannequin wasn’t just an excuse to regularly fuck us. The drill sergeants kept their eyes open for unattended TA-50. They said we were accountable for every last piece of our issued gear, so to hammer that home, when a private left a Kevlar at the water cooler and turned his back to crack a joke with his buddy, they’d swoop in, and God help you if Malone got his hands on your sensitive equipment before you did. It could be taken that quick.

The punishment was always the same: Private Manny Ken. You’d get 24 hours of light duty honing your fireman’s carry, that familiar dummy weighing across the length of your back, that sandbag pressing into it hard. Made a long day even longer. I remember Malone crooning over me the one time I earned it, “That’s good training, private!” hands on his hips like a proud parent. “Damn fine training.” The mannequin was heavy against my body, and a layer of sweat had started to form, but even so, I pulled it tighter.

*

That afternoon, Malone marched our entire company to the PX, the Walmart of the Army. We’d get to buy phone cards there, and buzz cuts. As our feet loped along, out of step and undisciplined, the pine trees loomed along the road like an old frontier fort’s paling. The January wind had died somewhat. Then the PX came into view—a low brick building with the words Post Exchange in thick, bold lettering. Our phone privileges lay inside. A gang of drill sergeants stood on the street corner across from there, shooting the shit, and after taking one good look at our marching column, they shook their heads.

Malone greeted them. “When I get these jokers down-range next week, ya’ll gonna be happier than fags at a hot dog stand!”

“You sure right about that,” one of the drill sergeants shouted back.

“It’s just too easy, battle—too easy!” Malone pulled his belt up a little higher as he passed them on by and grinned.

The entire cluster of campaign hats doubled over, and they began talking fast to each other, just low enough so that we couldn’t hear them. I swear, even though they were laughing the entire time, they glared at us like a pack of hungry wolves tethered by invisible leashes, growling through rabid teeth.

To avoid mixing us with the rush of Army wives and old retirees, Malone filed the company into the PX through a side entrance, warning us: “You will all shut the fuck up and act respectful inside, is that understood? And you’d better not be cat-callin’ any teenage girls or officers’ wives. If I see or hear any of that shit, it’s gonna be a long fucking night, privates—a long fucking night! I don’t give a flying titty if you’ve got a PT test tomorrow. I will smoke you retarded, trackin’?”

“Drill sergeant, yes, drill sergeant!”

“All your fancy handbags are locked up in storage, so the Army’s gonna give you a monetary advance.” The drill sergeant pulled out a stack of what looked like black debit cards from his pocket. “Each of you gets a 200-dollar money card. That’ll get ya’ll through reception until them first paychecks hit at the end of the month. Since Mother Army don’t put out nothin’ for free if she ain’t gettin’ something back, your earnings statement will show this amount deducted.”

Good ol’ Mother Army.

Shops lined the exchange’s main corridor inside—a women’s salon, vitamin store, uniform tailor, travel rep office, food court, and barber shop. The main department store had its own double-wide entrance, flagged with shoplifting detectors. After a quick glance inside, I could see designer clothing racks, a shoe department, grocery aisles, shelves lined with Harlequin romance novels, and even a big sign for home decorating and gardening. Everything a man needed to get by.

Malone snaked us around the entrance of the barber shop in long, orderly rectangles, packing us in elbow-to-elbow and nut-to-butt. When a few of us caught glimpses of the younger wives or the older daughters moving past, we kind of puffed up and all, being that we were dressed for the first time in our Army uniforms. “Move aside for them shoppers, privates. Eyes front. Mouths shut.” His inside voice was considerably lower than the one he used on the blacktop. The drill sergeant pointed at the main department store. “When ya’ll finished getting a haircut, head straight to them workers up front and buy a shaving kit.” He hesitated, then rolled his eyes. “You can get phone cards, too.”

“Holy shit,” Elliott cried.

“We’re really getting phone cards!” Gilmore said.

Our first chance to call back home. A collective sigh issued from the entire company as we grinned with excitement—all in agreement, for once.

Suddenly, Malone was up in Elliott and Gilmore’s face, whispering loud enough so we could all hear: “Have you two dirty dick-beaters lost your damn mind? If you two don’t shut the fuck up this instant, I’m gonna stick my foot up both your asses and wear you around like a pair of autistic flip-flops!” The drill sergeant looked the rest of us up and down, watching us squirm like kindergartners about to start recess as a pair of grannies shuffled by. He nodded his campaign hat at them politely. “Afternoon, ladies,” which made them blush. When they were far enough away, he added, “And no fucking candy, privates. It’s contraband. Makes your dick small.”

The first recruits rushed into the barber shop as soon as Malone gave the word, and the old men inside directed them to the row of black leather chairs on the righthand wall, reserving the left side for non-recruits. This portly grandma wearing thick glasses waved me over after ten minutes of waiting. She was the only lady barber. “Get over here, son.” My turn to get shaved and soldiered, I guessed.

I sat down and said, “A number one on the sides and a taper near the top—”

“Boy, you gettin’ a monkey cut!” She palmed my head with her hand and flicked the razor on. It buzzed like a wasp as she brought it close to my ears. I felt it press against my sideburn and shave up my temple, a rush of cool air on my open skin. Clumps of hair didn’t fall like I thought they would—the razor had this vacuuming device built into it that sucked the loose debris down a thick tube. As she mowed up and down the back of my neck and head, the barber yelled over the razor’s noise, “You got a lotta moles on your head, boy.” I watched her in the mirror as she ran her tongue across the front of her teeth. “That’s a sign of good luck.”

I felt special. Then I felt a sharp pain.

“Oh. Sorry about that.” She’d cut one of my lucky moles. A thin stream of blood ran down the smooth grooves on my scalp. “Just nicked you some. You’ll be all right.” She only slowed her handiwork to slop a hot, dripping wash cloth on my skin, rubbing it over the wound. “It’ll heal.” When she’d finished my hair, the barber spun me around to give me a good look in the mirror, holding a smaller one up behind me so I could see the back of my head’s reflection.

I looked like a leukemia patient. My eyebrows were longer than what was left atop my head. She might as well have shaved them off, too! If there was one thing I’d taken pride in as a civilian, it’d been my thick, dirty blonde hair, all styled and gelled. Ma always said I’d never go bald. Apparently, a sliver of Cherokee blood ran in her family.

The barber slapped a cotton ball against the cut and fastened it down with white electric tape. “That’s the only band aid I got, kid. Clean it tonight in the shower.”

Next, I had to get my Private E-2 rank sewn on my uniform at the tailor shop. Because I was a university drop-out with over thirty college credits, the Army decided to promote me to a higher starting rank than the kids out of high school, but that meant I needed the E-2 patch sewn onto my BDU collars and my field patrol cap. This Korean lady behind the shop counter steadily worked at the needle and thread with her lined and thin hands. She seemed to know that I was in a hurry, but took her sweet-assed time. There was a moment, when she was about halfway done with her delicate work, that the patch just hung there flimsy off my uniform as I watched. A single chevron rested on it. It made me wonder about the Asian ladies—swarms of them worked as grocery baggers, wives, and tailors on most military installations. They came from countries our soldiers had conquered. Now they labored to provide.

When she finished, I paid her the four-dollar fee and moved on to the main department store to get my shaving kit and phone cards, like Malone ordered.

Gilmore—still rubbing at his own landscaped head—nudged my arm when we’d finished shopping and formed back up outside. “Bro, you might wanna get back in there and buy some Selsun Blue,” he said. “Your head’s ate up with mad dandruff.”

Elliott laughed. “He’s right! Red patches all over your scalp.”

“Sons of bitches,” I muttered. That was the other reason I loved having a thick head of hair—they hid my skin flakes.

But there wasn’t any time for that. Malone had returned. “Fall in!” The company formed up too slowly, and it made our drill sergeant grit his teeth. But something kept his anger in check. “Hurry up,” he shouted at a few stragglers. When the company was ready, he looked us over. “I tell you what,” Malone said, before ordering column-right march. “A company of fresh-bald privates’ll make even the most grizzled old first sergeant weep. Goddamn beautiful.”

*

“Phone calls!” Malone came storming into the bay. “You shit-birds get fifteen minutes, the whole damn company!”

Our entire bay of recruits dropped what they were doing and scrambled for their phone cards, stashed away in wallets and duffle bags, even their shaving kits. We pressed out the bay doors to a series of metal booths with black pay phones under white artificial lights. We still wanted our mothers to save us. Each recruit jockeyed for position. “Every man gets three minutes!” Malone yelled. “That includes dialing time.” Then our fearless leader signaled the phone calls to begin, even as privates were already dialing home.

I was about halfway back in the third line. Gilmore stood in front of me, his face impatient and eager. “It’s pot roast night,” he said aloud to everybody and nobody. “Momma makes the best damn pot roast—I hope to God I can smell it.”

Elliott was huddled against his booth one line over, trying to hide the fact that he was crying. Some of the more respectful privates just turned away, pretending not to notice. It seemed the right thing to do. But a few made sure to rub it in good.

“Be gentle with her,” Harvey was saying to Wilkins. “She just needs a little something in the bay tonight to make her feel better.”

I hated that motherfucker.

“Twelve minutes!” Malone shouted.

Gilmore was up. I’ve never seen someone dial a phone number so fast. You woulda swore he called 911. That got me thinking about who I’d call on my turn so I could dial it just as quick. My girl needed a phone call, for sure, but I hadn’t told my parents that I’d enlisted yet. They still thought I was back home.

“Nine minutes!”

Gilmore’s back got animated. He was talking too low for me to hear, but I just knew he’d gotten his mom on the phone. Whatever he was saying sounded really happy. Family does that for you. No matter how many times you hurt each other, you can always push all that aside. Just be there for each other. I rubbed at the palm of my hand. The artificial lights hummed above, and for the first time, it dawned on me how quiet Ft. Benning was. Above the still pine trees and the freshly mowed grass, the American flag, towering above our complex and wider than several cars, hung limp from its metal post.

“Hurry, man. Time’s up.”

Gilmore turned and gave me a dirty look.

“Six minutes!”

“You’re done, Michigan.” I inched forward to the booth, trying to be as close to that damn phone as possible so I could get a dialing head start.

“Back the fuck up,” he mouthed to me, pissed. “I’m talking to my momma!”

“We all gotta momma.” I flashed him my phone card, as if to reason.

Gilmore shook his head and turned back into the booth. “I gotta go,” he said. “Tell Charley and Liz I miss and love them. You need any money, mom? I’m gonna send you my first check.” He listened for a few seconds. “Nah, I’ll be fine. It’s going straight into your account. Just keep your eyes open for it soon—I know, I know. But I gotta go.” He let out a deep breath. “Love you, too.”

I heard her tell him, “My big strong young man! I’m so proud of you.”

Then I pounced on that damn phone. Gilmore started throwing sass my way, but I was too busy reading the dang instructions on the phone card. It took me over a minute just to get through to the other side.

And then she picked up.

“Hello?” Her voice sharp and suspicious—it was after eight o’clock. I could hear the clanging of pots and pans in the kitchen sink.

“Ma.”

The sink faucet got quieter. “Danny? Is that you? Why are you calling from a strange number? You’re lucky I didn’t hang up.”

“Look Ma, I can’t talk long. There’s a line behind me.”

“A line? Did you drop your phone and break it again?”

“No, Ma. I didn’t drop it—”

“Well, no wonder you didn’t answer your phone last night. I tried calling but it went straight to voicemail. We can meet tomorrow at the mall and I can get you a new one—”

“Ma, listen. I’m a hundred miles away from there. Is Dad around?”

“You didn’t go on another one of those EMD road trips, did you?”

“It’s E-D-M, Ma: electronic dance music.”

“Oh, God, you’re at a pay phone and you’ve lost all your money again! Last time you lost your wallet I had to wire money into your account just to—”

“Jeez, it’s not that. I’ve got all my money, for cryin’ out loud!” My grip squeezed the edge of the phone booth. “I joined the Army.”

It sounded like a glass casserole dish struck the sides of her stainless-steel kitchen sink. “You did what?”

“They sent me to Ft. Benning.” I wrapped my finger around the telephone cord. “Same as Dad.” As I waited for her answer, I noticed that the metal phone booth had a clean look to it, like it had been wiped down recently by recruits that looked too bored when Malone waltzed by. Those little smear marks you always see after.

It reminded me of this one time, back in high school, when my mother had called my little brother into the driveway to help Dad carry this heavy couch she had ordered from La-Z-Boy. She came into my bedroom right before and told me to Windex the front bay window, so I took the paper towels and went into the living room like I was told, spraying that blue shit all over the glass panes. Wiping and wiping at them. When I started working the double-hung on each side, I saw my Dad and brother out there, struggling to heave that big-assed piece of furniture up the sidewalk and through the front door. Even though he was in his late fifties, Dad kept up his old PT routine, hitting the gym pretty regularly. My brother sometimes lifted weights with him, too. Ma stood outside watching them, hands on her hips, the three of them out there working. I guess I really never liked the gym anyways. As I finished my chore, I went to set the Windex bottle on the dining room table, but just then, Ma came inside and took it from me, tucking it into the shadows of a kitchen cabinet as I watched.

“Three minutes!”

“Look, I gotta go. We only get a few minutes to call.”

“But—wait, Danny! When did you—? What does this mean?”

“Hey, get off, rawhide. I need my phone call, too.” Wilkins behind me.

I raised my elbow at him to fuck off and give me another minute. “It means—” I uncoiled my finger from the cord. “It just means I ain’t got no choice, Ma.”

*

Later that night, Harvey finally hit him. It was about a minute or two into personal hygiene. Gilmore had walked up to his own bed and laid his uniforms on top of it, and as he adjusted the bags and tried to figure out how he’d store the things—maybe under his bunk, he’d said aloud—and as he talked with Elliott, who was sleeping on the mattress above him with that damned mannequin by his side, about how all the girls in the hick town he was from were easy to sleep with if you knew how to hunt or fish, Harvey rounded the aisle with a small, patriotic wall of eager recruits, their heads gleaming under the LED lights. Every last one of them savaging for a good fight. He locked eyes on poor Gilmore, that scarred eyebrow tightening on his skull as he picked up speed, and leaning forward, swung hard at the Michigan kid’s baldness. Harvey’s forearm bulged as Gilmore’s head snapped back. The poor bastard slid along the polished floor until his body stopped. Gilmore lay there a moment, a puffy redness around his right eye that immediately began swelling. He palmed blindly at the metal bunk rails nearby.

“Get up, muthafucker,” Harvey shouted. “You think I was playin’?” He reached down and grabbed Gilmore by the shirt and yanked him up, landing his rough, beefy knuckles on the Michigan boy’s nose. Blood slung through the warm barracks air. “I ain’t no liar—I said I’d fuck you up this morning, that’s what I meant!” Harvey hit him again and Gilmore’s skull whipped up and down like a fishing bob in the water. The poor bastard’s mouth hung open in shock, his eyes wide with fear.

“Please—stop, Harvey!” he begged, panting heavy. “I don’t want to—”

“The fuck you don’t.” He hit him one more time and Gilmore crumpled to the floor. Then Harvey hocked up a huge wad of spit. The phlegm shot from the roughneck’s lips onto the naked scalp at his feet, and then, his face red and his blood pumping, he stomped on the poor kid’s stomach. Gilmore heaved and whimpered and fell again to the floor. After finishing, Harvey shook his head with disgust and barreled through the crowd, storming away to his side of the barracks.

The Michigan boy just laid there, crying.

We all stood around and looked at him for a while, waiting for him to get up. I went over finally and put my hand on his shoulder, rolling him onto his back. Someone muttered man, he fucked him up and then the crowd began to disperse, in ones and threes, until only me and Elliott stood around him. He helped me pull Gilmore off the ground and we tucked him in bed. I wrapped the sheets over his shivering form. Turning away to my own bunk one aisle over, I stripped off my uniform, piece by piece, covering myself in a thin towel. Then the shower heads in the latrine fired up, and listening to them, like a faraway rain, I drifted through the barracks until I stood underneath one, its hot lines of water tracing my exposed body and face. The thick steam roiled across the checkered tile flooring, and as the other privates lined the showers—saying little—their collective sigh rose above the running water. It came up heavy and joined the showers’ mists.

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Taylor Brown’s newest novel, Pride of Eden, out March 17th, 2020. Reprinted with permission from St. Martin’s Press.

Lope knelt before the fire engine, rag in hand, polishing the silver platters of the wheels. An old song rose in his throat. Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf, begging his baby not to go, not to be her dog. Lope let the words hum against his lips, unvoiced. There was heat in the blues, he knew, as if the singer’s heart were held over the blue hiss of a gas flame.

Lope started to part his lips, to sing to the sleeping engine, when a whistle rose in accompaniment, like the train songs of old. A turbocharged diesel came whining up the drive, a black Ford dually with smokestacks risen over the cab like a pair of chrome horns. The truck skidded to a halt before the firehouse bays, rocking on its wheels, as if summoned here.

Little Anse Caulfield jumped down from the cab, his backcut cowboy heels clacking in the gravel. He was a square-jawed bantam, built like a postage stamp, bowlegged like the old jockey he was. He wore a bush hat, the brim pinned on one side, and the small round eyeglasses of a small-town clerk, his nose smashed broad and flat against his cheeks, as if by God’s thumbs. His eyes were iron-gray. In one hand he held a double rifle, like for shooting elephant. He stood before the open bay, squinting at Lope.

“You ain’t seen a lion, have you?”

Lope stood from the wheel. He snapped the rag at the end of one long, dark arm. “Lord,” he said. “Not again.”

*

Her name was Henrietta. She was a golden lioness, born on the grasslands of Africa, sired by a black-maned king of the savannah. She was still a cub when poachers decimated her pride, killing the lions for their teeth and claws and bones. The cubs were rounded up and sold on the black market. She became the pet of an Emirati sheikh, who later sold her to a Miami cocaine lord who enjoyed walking her on a leash amid the topiary beasts of his estate, ribbons of smoke curling from his Cuban cigar.

After a team of DEA agents raided the place, she found herself under the care of Anse Caulfield. His high-fence compound on the Georgia coast was a sanctuary for big cats and exotics of various breeds. It was located an hour south of Savannah, where the dark scrawl of the Satilla River passed beneath the old coastal highway—known as the Ocean Highway in the days before the interstate was built. On this two-lane blacktop, laden with tar-snakes, tourists had hurtled south for the beaches of Florida while semis loaded with citrus and pulpwood howled north. Sometimes they’d collided. There had been incredible wrecks, fiery and debris-strewn, like the work of airstrikes.

Now traffic was scarce. Log trucks and dusty sedans rattled past the compound, which was set back under the mossy oaks and pines. Behind the corrugated steel fence, there lived a whole ambush of tigers, many inbred or arthritic, saved from roadside zoos or private menageries or backyard pens. Some surrendered, some seized, some found wandering highways or neighborhood streets. There lived a duo of former circus tigers, a rescued ocelot, and a three-toed sloth once fenced in a family’s backyard jungle gym. A range of smaller big cats—servals and caracals popular in the exotic pet trade. An elephant that once performed circus handstands, a troop of monkeys, and a lioness.

Anse called the place Little Eden.

No one knew why he kept the property, exactly. His history was vague, rife with rumor and myth. Some people said he’d been with an elite unit in Vietnam—a snake-eater, operating far behind enemy lines. Others said a soldier of fortune in Africa. Some claimed he was a famous jockey who’d fallen one too many times on his head. But Henrietta was his favorite—everyone knew that. He’d built a chain-link enclosure for her, sized like a batting cage for Paul Bunyan, and people said his big dually truck cruised the night roads, rounding up strays to feed her. Others said it was Henrietta herself who stalked the country dark, loosed nightly to feed. Why she would return in the morning, no one knew.

“You reported it yet?” asked Lope.

“What you think I’m doing now?”

Lope got on the radio. The schools would be locked down, the word put out. The county cruisers would begin prowling the backroads along the river, looking for tracks. The firefighters would take their own personal trucks. When he emerged from the radio room, the firemen had paired off into two-man search teams. Anse stood bouncing on his bootheels, grinding histeeth. The odd man out.

“I’ll ride with you,” said Lope.

They aimed up the old coastal highway at speed. Lope had one long arm extended, his hand braced against the dashboard.

“This fast, ain’t you afraid you could hit her crossing the
road?”

Anse was hunched over the wheel, his chin pushed out like a hood ornament.

“Serve her right, running out on me again.”

Lope eyed the elephant gun rattling on the rack behind their
heads.

“Where’s your tranquilizer gun?”

Anse sucked his lips into his mouth, then popped them out.
“Forgot it.”

They passed the old zombie neighborhoods built just before the market crashed. Satilla Shores, Camden Bluffs, King’s Retreat. Whole housing developments killed mid-construction, abandoned when the housing bubble burst. Their wrought iron gates stood twisted with vines, their guard shacks dusty and overgrown, vacant but for snakes and possums and the odd hitchhiker needing shelter for the night. Their empty streets snaked through the pines, curling into cul-de-sacs, skating along bare river frontage. They turned in to one called Plantation Pointe, the sign weedy and discolored. The community was neatly paved, with greening curbs and sidewalks, periodic fire hydrants standing before overgrown lots. There were four or five houses built, pre-recession dreams that petered out. They were empty, their windows shining dumbly in the morning sun, their pipes dry, their circuits dead. Squatters had been found in some of them, vagrant families with their old vans or station wagons parked in the garages, the flotsam of Dumpsters and thrift stores strapped to the vehicles’ roofs. The vagrants cooked only at night, in fireplaces of brick or stone, like people of another age. They kept the curtains drawn.

The dually rolled through the neighborhood, the tires crackling around empty cul-de-sacs. The windows were up. Lope had his ballcap turned backward to press his face closer to the glass, scanning for a flash of golden fur in the trees. “How’d she get loose?”

Anse frowned. “Same’s last time.”

“And how was that, exactly? I never got it straight.”

Anse chewed on his bottom lip. “Look,” he said, pointing over the wheel. “A kill.”

*

They stood in the overgrown yard. It was a whitetail doe, or used to be. It had been torn inside out, the guts strung through the grass. The rib cage was visible, clutching an eaten heart.

“Lord,” said Lope. “You been starving that thing or something?”

Anse spat beneath his bush hat and looked up. A white clot bubbled in the grass. “She’s born for this. What do you expect?”

Lope looked out at the tree line. Fragments of the Satilla River shone through the trunks and vines and moss. The lioness must have stalked the doe from the woods, bursting forth to catch her across this man-made veld. Anse had the elephant gun cradled against his chest, still staring at the mess in the yard. “Used to be lions all across this country, hunting three-toed horses and ground sloths, woolly mammoths.”

“You mean saber-toothed tigers?”

“They ain’t tigers. They’re saber cats. Smilodons. Then you had the American lion, too—Panthera leo atrox—four foot tall at the shoulder. Them cats owned the night. ’Course they disappeared at the same time as the rest of the megafauna, ten thousand years ago.”

Lope shivered. “Thank the Lord,” he said.

Anse’s upper lip curled in sneer. “They would of ate your Lord off his cross and shat him out in the woods.”

Lope stiffened. He thought of the hymns sung in the small whitewashed church of his youth, where his father, a deacon, had often preached on Sundays, his face bright with sweat. Songs of chariots and lion dens and flying away home. He looked at Anse. “Not Daniel they didn’t. ‘God hath sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths.’”

Anse smiled at the killed deer. “Hath he now?”

Lope could remember his first structure fire more clearly than his first kiss, than his first fumblings for buttons and zippers in the dark of movie theaters and backseats. The stable fire peeled back the darkness of the world, so bright it seared him.

He was ten at the time. He’d already developed a fascination with fire. Under his bed, he kept a cardboard box filled with cigarette lighters he’d collected. He had a vintage Zippo, a butane jet lighter that hissed like a miniature blowtorch, even a stormproof trench lighter made from an antique bullet casing. He would sit cross-legged on his bed and thumb the wheel of a Zippo or Bic, relishing the secret fire in the house. Sometimes, after school, he would erect small temples of kindling and tinder in the backyard, then set them alight, watching rapt at the transformation—the twist and glow of their dying architecture, the chemical brightness.

The day of the fire, he followed a black pillar of smoke home from school, weaving down the shoulder of the road on his BMX bike as the fire engines roared past. His heart raced faster and faster as he realized what was burning.

The stables where his father worked.

The man had grown up on one of the sea islands, riding bareback on marsh ponies while other children were still hopping around on hobbyhorses. A hard man among his family, but strangely tender with animals. He spoke to horses in Gullah—a tongue Lope never heard him use among men. His loose-jointed body seemed built for horseback, his seat and shoulders bobbing in time to their trots. With his long limbs, he could trick-ride with gusto, swinging low from the saddle like an Apache or standing high atop their spines, his arms spread like wings. He worked as the barn manager and groom for a local equine community.

Lope straddled his bicycle before the blaze, his face licked with firelight. Antlers of flame roared from every window, like the blazing crown of a demon, and the smoke looked thick enough to climb. An evil hiss pervaded the scene, pierced now and again by the scream of a frightened animal. Only later did Lope learn that his father had been inside trying to save the last of the horses when the roof beams collapsed.

Ten years old, Lope could not help but feel there was some connection, that his secret fascination had sparked this awful happening. His secret desires or jealousies. So many times, he’d wrapped his arms around himself and wished for the gentle touch and cooing voice his father gave only to his horses—never his son. So many times, Lope had huddled over his yard-built temples and pyres, watching them burn.

Back at Anse’s truck, Lope called his wife. He told her to stay inside with the baby until she heard from him.

“Larell Pope,” she said, using his full name. “I got a cut-and-color at ten. One of my best clients. I’m not canceling on her because some zoo animal is on the loose. I already have a girl coming to watch Lavonne.”

Lope turned toward the truck, gripping the side mirror. “Please,” he said.

“That new dryer ain’t going to pay itself off, Larell.”

“It’ll get paid.”

Lope could sense Anse waiting behind him, his boot heel grinding into the pavement. “Just cancel it,” he said, hanging up.

When he turned around, the old man was sliding a giant,double-barreled pistol into a holster slung under one arm. The gun looked like something the captain of a pirate ship would carry, with twin rabbit-ear hammers and double triggers.

“The hell is that thing?”

“Howdah pistol,” said Anse.

“Howdah?”

“An elephant carriage. Back in the colonial days, hunters carried these pistols on shikars—tiger hunts—in case a pissed-off tiger tried to climb the elephant they were riding.”

Lope swallowed. “Hell,” he said.

The old man took the double rifle from the backseat and held it out. “Can you shoot?”

Lope looked at the old safari gun. The twin barrels were huge, the stock scarred from years in hard country. He sniffed. “I can shoot,” he said.

Brown, Taylor. Pride of Eden (St. Martin’s, 2020).

Look for the novel on March 17th wherever books are sold. It is also Wrath-Bearing Tree’s giveaway book for the month–a comment anywhere on the site enters you to win.

An excerpt from Brown’s novel Gods of Howl Mountain as well as an interview with Taylor appeared in the February 2018 issue of Wrath-Bearing Tree.

An hour before the drive, Bubs finds himself sucking down an edible. A big blowout blowtorched dab of a brownie. He could feel it stonerizing his insides the second the swallow went down, that ashy grass-stained aftertaste staking a claim on his tongue

Been doing a lot of things like that, lately. Ill-advised things. Bubs’ best guess pins the start of it back to February. March at the latest. And he didn’t know where the hell this getting out of bed problem came from. The brownie was the prize he’d promised himself for completing the task this morning. Bubs has even stopped spying both ways when crossing the street. He just kind of steps out off the curb.

The weed thing’s, like, not a big deal? is the argument he tries to make to Omar, his driver’s licenseless trip mate and his best friend, hopefully, still.

‘Why the whole thing?’ Omar asks. His jaw is doing that thing it does when he’s not happy. ‘Why not just a bite?’

Bubs sags his shoulders in a sort of shrug. He does, however, feel Omar’s disappointment as if it’s parental in origin, a weathered, rock-like thing, barely shining in the clear bluish glimmer of this dazzling late-May morning, a steely cold shamewave of the someone-expected-better-from-you variety.

Omar says, ‘You do remember what we’re doing here, yeah? Let’s try not to forget.’

Bubs does remember what they’re doing, thank you very much, but he gets to thinking about the purpose of the trip, about how Germ might feel when he understands that Omar and Bubs are not just saying hello, are not just passing through with their sights trained on simple catch-up, that their actual mission is to complete a very serious and sober welfare check.

‘No snacks in that bag by chance?’ Bubs says in his best McConaughey.

‘Seriously?’

‘There’s this side effect of THC called the munchies. Familiar?’

Omar’s face says he isn’t having it, isn’t going to have it, today. Head to toe, Omar is one smooth motherfucker. A good six inches taller than Bubs, he’s got that chill studied coolness of a hipster high school teacher, the dark haired young socialist you could probably call for a lift after getting blind on UV Blue. It’s a first impression thing, impossible to miss.

Bubs can still remember when he had the experience. Fresh off zero hours of sleep, Bubs was getting his face melted off by the acid rain spittle of a Ft. Benning drill sergeant, a walking little napoleon complex who still shows up in nightmares from time to time. For taking too long to get his ass off the bus, Bubs was sentenced to a viscous fucking tongue lashing and a hip toss up the aisle. When he finally made it down the rubber-ribbed steps up front, he saw the formation of new recruits caught in a chokehold of screams and he went to join them in the full nelson, this new clan, his first tribe. Some were doing pushups and it was hot, hot as Bubs could ever remember feeling, and mainly his brain told him, Might have messed up here, Might have made the wrong choice. Then he saw what would turn out to be Omar, front and center, not a drop of sweat even thinking about trying him, not a screaming campaign hat anywhere near, as if a memo had made the rounds before the shark attack, indicating one young soldier in particular it would probably be better not to mess with.

‘Okay then,’ Bubs says, ‘coffee it is. Java. Brain fuel.’ The high still hasn’t hit fully. He is looking forward to its blanketing caress, the slow juicy haymaker of it.

Strapped in, tunes on, shades perched smooth on the oily bridge of his bony nose, Bubs pulls out of the dashed-off fire lane in front of Omar’s building. Bubs wouldn’t call himself handsome, exactly. Especially not next to Omar. Adequate, maybe. Passable. His lips are on the thin side, pincer-like where they curve into each other. On his head an orchestra of dark black hair sits crazy and unbrushed, the texture of very fine straw. A spiraling tattoo of ones and zeros on his left forearm spells out BINARY CODE in binary. There is an efficiency to his composition. His dad used to say, It’s like you were made on an assembly line except with the brains God gave a dog. Ignoring that last part, Bubs is thankful for the proportionality, though if anything he feels it makes him look calculated, indifferent, lame.

That said, Bubs comes alive behind the wheel. The inside-out knowledge he has of his machine, a stock Impreza with more miles than he’d care to admit, makes him proud as an honor roll dad. It takes some foreplay to shift from second to third, but timed properly the latent torque is enough to shove his heart against his ribcage. It’s two make-and-models away from being a full-on rally car, and Bubs loves to remind himself of this fact. He basks in it, the low-level ladder rung of his vehicle, its impossible potential.

‘Can I get one of those?’ Bubs says. Omar has a cigarette rappelling from his mouth. He smokes a snooty, hard-to-find Turkish brand. It’s the kind of thing that’d drive Bubs up the wall with anybody else.

Omar says, ‘Always hanging with the smokers, never has any smokes.’

‘Come on,’ Bubs says, and Omar lights one up for him.

Bubs rolls down the windows in reply.

A rush of air and motion.

Before long they’re gaining speed.

The wind blasts a racket through the nicotined interior. Sunlight is just absolutely pouring down, swallowing them up, threatening to swallow them whole.

Bubs says, ‘What I didn’t expect is that it’d be Germ.’

‘Not really about how someone looks or acts, you know? Germ’s been through a lot.’

‘I mean who hasn’t?

‘I think the divorce puts him in a higher tax bracket.’

‘I get that,’ Bubs says.

‘And his mom’s cancer stuff.’

‘I really get it. But sometimes it is the biggest fuck up––right? It’s the king of the fuck ups, who, you know.’

‘Fucks up?’

‘Nailed it.’

‘Sometimes,’ Omar says. ‘Maybe sometimes.’

‘Not that Germ is one of those guys.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Just generally speaking. You see my water bottle anywhere?’

Omar says, ‘What happens when that shit hits you too hard and we have to pull over?’

‘Not even on my radar. I like driving high anyway. There’s this thing about it, yeah? There’s this way it makes you feel.’

Omar had wanted to hit the road at ten-thirty, introduce themselves to Chicago traffic no later than one in the afternoon. Bubs makes no bones about the delay being his fault. Rolling from his sheets today, phone flashing a harsh nine thirty, it was about the earliest he’d mustered all year.

Omar, on the other hand, has really got his shit sorted. Bubs thinks he should run one of those schemey self-help seminars. Only with Omar it wouldn’t be sleaze. It would be blue-suited and cologned, sharp, deathly fucking sharp. When Omar was enrolled on the GI Bill, he did some day trading on the side. He came out of college well in the black, psych degree in hand. Bubs had signed up for a few certificate courses at the technical college in Janesville, decided not to go.

There is a possibility, Bubs sometimes thinks, that his closeness with Omar finds its bedrock on their uneven terrain of accomplishment. That it’s a necessary condition for their continued buddy status, a cornerstone from the start. He supposes there are worse foundations for a friendship, although it seems to him like a fuel source that’ll eventually burn itself out. Bubs prays it does not. While it collapses his heart to imagine life without his best friend, Bubs is pleased that he struggles to picture the full bleak immensity of it. It is a good sign. Like checking your own pulse, surprised to feel the beating.

***

Bubs curves the car through the interchange and hauls them onto I90. He asks Omar to remind him about the plan. ‘The plan,’ Omar says, ‘is to just see how he’s doing. Snag a beer. Check out where he’s living. Face to face stuff.’

Bubs is glad about the beer. He is also glad his eyes are on the road, preventing Omar from seeing how bright they flare at the sound. That’s another thing about Omar. He’s never tapping on his phone during a conversation. He’ll even say, like, One sec, let me just pop this off, don’t want it interrupting us, and leave it clear in the other room.

‘I’m excited to see him,’ Bubs says.

‘Yeah.’

‘Honestly I am.’

‘Okay,’ Omar says.

Unsure of what Omar’s deal is today, Bubs keeps focused on the southbound highway. The straightness of the road. Its continued reappearance on the far edge of his sightline leads Bubs to think that it wasn’t so much built as dreamed, less engineered than imagined, plopped right into place from way up above, signage and all, aligned just so. If there’s a single cloud in the sky Bubs cannot for the life of him find it.

‘Germ is a good guy,’ Omar says, apropos of nothing Bubs can gather. ‘He’ll be glad you came with.’

He asks Omar, ‘How many guys we lose this last year?’

‘I think it’s three. Three or six. I can’t remember which. But it’s one of those.’

‘How come we didn’t go to any of the funerals?’

‘I don’t know,’ Omar says. ‘How am I supposed to know?’

‘The war back home.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what it’s getting called,’ Bubs says. ‘The war back home.’

Omar rockets around, real intense with the motion. His dark eyes are little discs of deep set stormclouds. ‘Why does everything have to have a name? Why can’t it just be people trying to figure stuff out?’

‘I mean it wasn’t me that came up with it.’

‘Sure,’ Omar says, slinking his head back, turning it to look out on the sectioned squares of farmland around the road. It’s the only thing a person could look at on this stretch of federal street. Bulky portions of agriculture and landmass, barbed and divided, flat yet somehow still rolling, rippling, flowing. Cows out to pasture whiz by in the distance, lifeless specs against the green.

It’s no surprise to Bubs that Omar took the reins in planning the check-up on Germ. What he can’t figure out is why he himself was enlisted for duty. Bubs doesn’t think of himself as a great instiller of confidence. Not really a compelling life-affirmer. But he is happy Omar asked him to come along, and he is happy he’d said yes since it would have been so much easier to say no. It’s gotten so simple––and Bubs isn’t sure why––to do nothing, nothing at all.

Germ is still an hour and a half away, but Bubs is getting the brunt of it now, getting socked by a storm of monster waves. A high tide of heady realizations. He has stepped up and done the right thing by coming along. This much he knows. He is doing what he is supposed to do: you help when you’re able, you do what you can to endure; you carve out as much space as the world allows and if the world doesn’t budge you gotta get yourself real low and push back, push hard, knowing it might not come to much. Bubs feels swaddled in something bright and endlessly comforting, wrapped and entwined, tight as granite, in the grand silky fabric of it. With a kind of worldwide tenderness moving through his body, the mot juste of existence takes shape on his tongue. For the first time in his life, Bubs sees the answers to his questions dead ahead. He’s got them dead to rights. And it’s just as he reaches out to grab them, to give them a healthy once-over, that a sweet lemony haze washes over the frontside of his horizon.

***

Bubs, higher than he has been in his entire life, sits in a patch of tall grass near the picnic area of a rest stop south of Rockford. Omar is on the phone.

Here, knees tight to chest, Bubs recalls with a good bit of nostalgia the appearance of Germ in his life. Jeremey Heck Jr., known as Germ, got his sticky nickname due to the astounding biohazard dirtiness of his Ft. Bragg barracks room. More than the room itself was the way Germ managed to clean it up on inspection day. Bubs couldn’t dismiss the possibility of little animated birds swooping through the window to help tidy up the filth. Bubs and Omar, bunkmates through basic training and airborne school, kept their lucky streak alive when orders came down sending them to the same platoon. The two of them learned early on that they had both grown up in Madison, had lived on opposite sides of the isthmus and attended opposing high schools, had both frenched Anna Cloverman and gotten the same tight slap of rejection when they’d tried to slither a hand down her jeans. And though they’d never directly met before boot camp, they sort of got the picture that this strange lifelong proximity meant they had most likely been at the same place at the same time––Eric Daniel’s historic Halloween banger, most likely––and that this was as close to a sign from the universe as anybody was going to get. Unscrambling the source code, they figured it meant they oughta have each other’s backs, ensure the other’s safe return to the selfsame home. Germ and his petri dish lived straight across the hall from Bubs and Omar, and, according to Germ’s account, got snatched up orbit-like in the pair’s friendship. Bubs’ nickname has an origin story, too. His last name is Bubsmiester. People just chopped off the suffix.

Bubs sees Omar standing above him. The grass is barely wet against his pants, coolly warm, smattered with leftover dew. Straight to his twelve o’clock, making a rug of shade for which Bubs is super grateful, Omar says something kind and reassuring.

‘I’m really sorry, man,’ Bubs says.

‘It’s all right.’

‘I am really high.’

‘You said that already.’

‘I really am, though.’

Omar says, ‘It’s all good. Don’t worry.’

Bubs likes the phrase, recommits it to memory. How many times has he told someone not to worry? Not enough.

A spray of shade over Omar’s collar. It passes quick. Bubs sees, understands, makes note of and comes to realize that he is happy where he is. Soothed. His best friend is a stone’s throw. The weather is stupid calm. Exposed out here, sun on his skin, Bubs wonders if he might be able to undo all the damage he’s done, unwind his own hurt into a manageable enough thread. He imagines constructing a kind of personal murder board for his own personal fuck ups. With enough hard work, he thinks he can do it. Because here’s the thing: It’s all bullshit anyway. So why not try. Failing that, he would settle for a glass of water. Sometimes he worries about having an unsuitable brain.

***

Sunlight. Slow breeze. Lulling hum of the interstate. Omar is out of sight now. Bubs knows he is arraigning things, talking with Germ, fixing what Bubs has broken. Impaired, definitely still impaired, Bubs stands up, wobbling, and goes towards the main a-frame building.

He passes the huge towering map of the state and the free-standing little dusty cubicle of waterpark brochures. The bubbler inside is broken; the vending machine doesn’t take debits; the sink in the bathroom is automatic, and Bubs waves and waves his hand at the sensor but nothing comes. He is as thirsty as he can ever remember being, and fucking saying something, that is.

He decides to make himself stay with the discomfort, lets it ride through him like a train or a skateboard or some other thing that rolls and glides and breezes.

Inside the building, he slips out a side door. He makes his way over a field of mown grass into a thicket of sick-looking trees. Bubs keeps the trucker’s parking lot on his right when he moves into the bramble. When he heads back, he’s just gotta keep the blacktop on his left.

Now he is here, alone, standing at the mud-slathered edge of some kind of retaining pond. A nasty spot, about the size of an above ground pool. The water is dark, murky. A kind of loose film of grime covers its surface. The water buzzes with tiny bugs, the swirling gray leftovers of vehicular exhaust. A few branches hang over the water at uncertain angles. Bubs pulls out his phone, sees a missed call from Omar.

He feels the sun on his back, feels it lowering against his spine. His surroundings are summer and sky. He stares at the pond, dirty and calm, the color of old dryer lint. He watches its surface do things with the light. Bubs bends down, brushes away a layer of dirt and gristle, cups his hands, fills them with water, and drinks.

***

When he makes his way back from the water, a silvery trembling thrashing in his stomach, he tells Omar what he’s done. Omar, without a change on his face or a clue in his eyes, balls his left hand and hits Bubs on the side of the head and Bubs hears the tinnitus in his right ear, always present, spike like a line on a chart and he is on the ground; the pain is hot and tender, but its heat is concentrated, boxed, not overwhelming him, and he groans a little mainly from the shock of it, the power of the strike and the unforgivingness of the ground.

Omar offers down a hand. Bubs takes it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

‘It’s all right,’ he answers.

‘I shouldn’t have done that.’

‘I shouldn’t have, either.’

The silence in a way becomes to Bubs like a kind of song, rhythmic and brassy and tempo-heavy. A few birds fly sorties along vapor trails in the sky. Part of Bubs’ gut feel like it’s at a rolling boil.

‘You know what you have to do, yeah?’ Omar says.

Bubs does know, thank you very much. He stares a patch of prickly grass, mainly at the space between blades. He says to Omar, ‘Alright, alright. You know I’m a real retcher so plug your ears.’ Bubs bends down and aims his middle finger to the back of his mouth.

***

They move to a different piece of real estate after Bubs’ hurl. He flips his middle finger, the slimy one, at the mess he made. This makes Omar laugh. With the last of the high still dribbling out of him, Bubs recalls with a fondness bordering on sorrow when the three of them––himself, Omar, and Germ––timed their terminal leave and Army departures for the same day. Piled into a younger version of Bubs’ beloved whip, together they drove off Ft. Bragg for the final time, flipping the bird to the gate guards on their way out, sticky pre-rolled already sparked, two or three extras stinking up the center console. For Bubs it’s a source of serious regret. What good does it do to give your past the middle finger? Talk about a waste of time. It’s the only thing that remains, sure as the resin on the inside of a bong––nothing is forever except your past. But Bubs knows they were different then, on the far shore of that four year lapse of time: Germ, down half a finger from a faulty .50 caliber spring, marriage on the rocks but hopeful for a rescue operation; Omar, newly purple-hearted, lost in a lagoon of survivor’s guilt, dreamily hearing at all hours the deep metallic click of the pressure cooker bomb whose fuse tripped but ordinance didn’t; and Bubs––bias as he might be for knowing more about himself than his friends––coming off a less than honorable discharge for pissing hot, testing positive for an amphetamine they didn’t mind him taking down range, driving too fast towards middle America with his two best buds, ripping huge and unholy tokes from the joint and feeling more than anything like he was alone, cheated out of some promised purpose and belonging, a sort of cancerous growth of dejection sprouting tendrilly in his guts, as lonely leaving the Army as he was going in.

‘You can’t worry about that stuff anymore,’ Bubs hears Omar saying, either somewhere in his head or right there in front of him. He isn’t entirely sure. ‘The stuff you wish you did different? I think that’ll eat you a-fucking-live.’

***

Back at home, three days later, Bubs snoozes his alarm only four times. It is Friday, and through the slats in his blinds the day broadcasts a teaser trailer: cloudless, bright, disturbingly blue. It’s been like that for a stretch now. Bubs knows the rain will come, is coming soon, but it isn’t here yet. Before leaving to pick up Omar, Bubs decides to call his father, himself a veteran. ‘It’s not so much the bad stuff staying with you,’ his father tells him, ‘as it is the good stuff that you miss.’

Germ is driving up for lunch. After the rest stop, Omar said it might be better if Germ made the jump north to Madison. Bubs agreed.

When Bubs sees Germ outside the restaurant, he is surprised to see a person that looks exactly like someone who does not need help. Healthy skin, clipped nails, sweater crisp like hospital cornering. A damn near pregnancy glow.

‘This is the place you picked?’ Germ says. He has a small nose, short sandy hair. The smile might burst off his face. ‘Nah, no way, this won’t work. You know what we need? Tall boys and a secret spot. You guys know a secret spot?’

‘This fucking guy,’ Omar says.

‘I know one,’ Bubs offers. ‘I know where to go.’

Doubled up on six-packs, Bubs leads the way. It served as his go-to toke location in high school. They weave down the downtown one-ways and steam towards the lake. The stocky city skyline is a jagged EKG in the rearview. They park near the bike path trailhead. Exercisers stretch their calves against car tires, dressed in tight cycling attire. The air is warm and still, a breathy room-temperature bubble. It isn’t a long walk to the clearing. Bubs hears Germ pop a preliminary can.

The spot hasn’t changed. Set into a downslope, peeling towards the water, it’s a dewy little outcrop shaded by oaks and maples and shrubs, a few logs and damp boulders for sitting. There is even a metal folding chair, a new addition. The memories Bubs has of the place come back in a clattering stampede. Starlight. Music. Older-brother-bought booze.

‘This,’ Germ says. ‘Much more like it.’ The water is so still Bubs can barely believe it. Doorway-cracks of light drip down through the trees. Beers are passed around.

Omar says, ‘You know what I was thinking about the other day? Adkins and his fucking trains. In the arms room, remember?’

‘Jesus,’ Germ says. ‘The trainset. He had the fucking little trees and conductors and everything. The whole floor, covered with his trainset.’

Bubs goes, ‘And then the suits came in to inspect the arms room? You remember that guys’ face? Like he had to control-alt-delete himself because he had no idea what he was seeing.’

‘And the chickens,’ says Germ. ‘You remember the chickens? We show up one morning, and it’s pretty early, we were going to a range or something, and what’s-his-name had a fucking kennel full of chickens.’

‘What was it that he said again?’ Bubs asks. The lapping of the lake fills the gaps between his words. Omar hands each of them a cigarette.

‘I said to him, like, basically, What the fuck? And he goes, Well, I couldn’t keep them outside. As if that fucking answers my questions?’

‘Man,’ Omar says. ‘What the hell was that guys’ name? Apple-something. Something with fruit.’

‘Something with fruit,’ Bubs says. ‘Helpful.’

‘It’s good to be here with you guys,’ Germ says. ‘We live pretty close, you know, relatively speaking, but we don’t see each other enough. That’s my fault.’

‘Shut up. Nobody’s fault,’ says Omar. ‘We all have stuff going on.’

Bubs, feeling like now is the time, says, ‘It wasn’t Germ we were going to check on, was it? If you wanted to do a little intervention or whatever, you didn’t have to drag me down to Chicago.’

‘You didn’t actually make it,’ Germ says. ‘Just to be clear.’

‘You guys could have just told me though.’

‘Probably true,’ Omar says. ‘Guess I was worried you wouldn’t come, you know?’

‘I get it.’

Germ goes, ‘How often would you say you’re getting blitzed and driving, though?’

‘Follow up,’ Omar jumps in. ‘How often would you say you’re drinking, like, industrial runoff?’

‘Choke on it. That was a one-time thing.’

Germ now, ‘Doesn’t seem like it.’

‘I’m figuring things out,’ Bubs goes.

Omar, his eyes jumping from the lake and back to Bubs, asks, ‘Should we head out?’

‘Not sure. What do you think?’ Bubs says.

Germ says, ‘What, nobody wants to ask me?

Bubs takes a drink, then a drag. Sitting there with his friends, Bubs sees the moment as pound-for-pound one of the better ones he’s had in some time. He is also proud of himself for noticing this––the pleasantness, the ambient joy––while still in the middle of it. Not much feels like it’s changed, except for maybe everything. His stomach still gives him a pang or two, the side of his face faintly red.

They toss a few smiles back and forth. The summer daylight shows no signs of retreat. Omar, stubbing out his cigarette, looks over to Germ and says, ‘Okay then, what now?’

‘No idea.’

But Bubs has one. He polishes off his beer and slips his feet from his shoes. He aims his body at the shoreline. Moving towards it, he sheds his belt and his pants and his shirt. There are only a few yards left before the land gives way. He crashes into the water and strokes out into the blue. A chill comes over him in layers but before long it’s gone and he feels himself floating, sinking, floating again, drifting, and the silence surrounding him is broken by the sound of two splashes somewhere behind him.

Captain Alex Athens had been the undisputed master of PowerPoint storyboards within the brigade headquarters since the unit’s arrival in Afghanistan. No order was disseminated until he had compressed it into a carefully orchestrated one-slide tapestry of photos, maps, graphic symbols, and textual data that prescribed every detail of an upcoming mission from intelligence to logistics to actions-on-the-objective. No mission was complete until he had compiled a perfectly manicured one-page/one-screen garden of text and images representing information, data, assessment, and analysis that thereafter would comprise the enduring record of whatever had happened, no matter what anyone said later on, and each storyboard he created was eminently ready to be submitted up the chain-of-command, if the event or mission recorded was important enough, to “the highest levels” and consequently shape understanding of what was happening on the battlefields and drive policy and strategy decisions.

Nominally objective, his storyboards were in reality a representation meticulously constructed by Captain Athens’ highly organized, supremely artistic processing of what really realer-than-real soldiers had encountered outside the wire, reported in terse radio reports, scribbled about on notepads, photographed on pocket cameras, and committed to memory as best they possibly could under confusing, stressful circumstances. Though far from the senior officer on the brigade staff, Captain Athens had made himself its most valuable member in the brigade commander’s eyes. No one could tell the story of what was supposed to happen as well as Captain Athens, and no one could better tell the story of what supposedly had happened.

Captain Athens’ success had imbued him with an autocratic, aloof air that made him respected, though more feared than well-liked, among his peers on the brigade staff. In that claustrophobic and deeply unhappy cauldron of furious military endeavor, lots of people grumbled, could be prickly to deal with, and periodically descend into funks, but a spirit of shared servitude, black humor, and forced good cheer generally prevailed, so it was notable that Captain Athens had few friends among the many other staff officers, nor did he seem to bond with the other officers scattered throughout the base. But whether he was liked or not was really beside the point.  Since no one worked for him directly, he couldn’t really make anyone miserable personally, so as long as he kept creating storyboards that were better than anyone else’s and were loved by the brigade commander, then that was enough, more than enough, really.

But when Captain Athens went on mid-tour leave, the problem arose of who would replace him as the brigade’s designated storyboard creator. Captain Jones tried, but his storyboards were full of errors and oddly un-synchronized typefaces and needed dozens of revisions before they were ready to be disseminated. Captain Smith’s were okay, but just okay, and he couldn’t complete them in a timely manner, let alone work on two or three simultaneously as could Captain Athens. With Captain Athens gone, both morale and effectiveness within the brigade headquarters plummeted. Without his storyboards suturing gaps between concept and plan and plan and action, uniting the headquarters across all staff sections and up-and-down the chain-of-command, it felt like the brigade was fighting the enemy one-handed. Orders were understood incoherently and execution turned to mush. Storyboards sent higher generated questions and skepticism, or even derision. The brigade commander’s mood turned more horrible than usual and he pilloried his deputy and senior staff members, accusing them of sabotaging the success of his command.

Desperate for help, the brigade ransacked their subordinate units for an officer or staff NCO who might replace Captain Athens. Of course none of the subordinate units wanted to give up their own best storyboard artist, so now they engaged in subterfuges to avoid complying with brigade’s tasking. That’s how Technical Sergeant Arrack’s name got sent up to brigade. In his battalion, he’d been a night shift Tactical Operations Center NCO whose potential as a storyboard artist was unrecognized. An Air Force augmentee to an infantry unit, he had never been outside the wire, much less in combat. Nothing much was expected of him by the infantry bubbas with whom he worked, thus the night shift TOC duty answering routine radio transmissions and compiling the morning weather report. The battalion submitted his name to brigade confident that it would be summarily rejected and they wouldn’t have to replace Sergeant Arrack on the night shift. But Sergeant Arrack’s trial storyboard for brigade had been magnificent. Created to support the brigade’s new plan to engage the local populace on every level of the political-economic-cultural-military spectrum over the next six months, it was a masterful blend of bullet points, text boxes, maps, charts, images, graphics, borders, highlights, and different type faces and fonts, totally first-class in every way and obviously presentable without correction even at “the highest levels.” The brigade operations officer’s heart leaped when he saw it, because he recognized how good it was and was confident that it, and Sergeant Arrack, too, would make the brigade commander very happy.

And so he was, and so for the remaining three weeks of Captain Athens’ leave Sergeant Arrack was the brigade go-to storyboard creator. In twenty-five days he generated thirty-seven unique storyboards in addition to the routine ones that accompanied daily briefings and needed only to be adjusted for recent developments. The entire life of the brigade during that period passed through Sergeant Arrack’s fingertips and into his computer’s keyboard and then to reappear in magically animated form on his workstation screen: raids, key leader meetings, unit rotation plans, IED and suicide bomber attacks, VIP visits, regional assessments, intelligence analyses, and every other operation and event that took place in the brigade’s area of operations was nothing until it was transformed by Sergeant Arrack’s storyboard artistry.

Captain Athens heard-tell of some of this while on leave and didn’t like it.  Though overworked as the primary brigade storyboard artist, he liked the status and the attention it brought to him.  Truth to tell, he was glad when his leave ended and he made his way back to the brigade headquarters. But his first meeting with Sergeant Arrack did not go well. Sergeant Arrack was seated at his workstation, busy on an important project. Engrossed in what he was doing, he had barely looked up. “Hm, good to meet you, sir, I’ve heard a lot about you,” he murmured, and turned his eyes back to his computer screen and began tapping away again at the keyboard. Captain Athens hated him immediately, and he could tell his place within the brigade HQ had now changed. Among other things, people just seemed to like Sergeant Arrack more than they liked Captain Athens, and were eager to work with him, eat with him, and hang out with him, while they approached Captain Athens gingerly. And when the brigade operations officer assigned Captain Athens a new storyboard project, it was obvious that it wasn’t a priority mission, what with the operations officer making a lame excuse about easing Captain Athens back in slowly.

Over the next five weeks, the tension between Captain Athens and Sergeant Arrack bubbled. Captain Athens was now Sergeant Arrack’s superior, and though Captain Athens didn’t do anything totally unprofessional, he didn’t make things easy for his subordinate, either. He assigned him menial tasks such as inspecting guard posts around the FOB walls in the middle of the night and inventorying the headquarters supply vans, all ploys designed to get Sergeant Arrack out of the brigade headquarters while reminding him of his place in things. Rarely did Captain Athens let Sergeant Arrack near a computer and he never complimented him or made small talk of any kind with him. Everyone on the staff saw what was going on, and gossiped about it endlessly, but no one said anything officially, and the atmosphere within the brigade headquarters roiled as a result of the unconfronted animosity. For his part, Sergeant Arrack spoke about the matter only in guarded terms with some of the other staff NCOs. He didn’t want to make trouble, but it wasn’t long before he hated Captain Athens just as much Captain Athens hated him. The brigade commander pretended not to notice anything was wrong, but neither did he tell anyone that he had come to like Sergeant Arrack’s storyboards more than Captain Athens’. The captain’s were good, but Sergeant Arrack’s were better.

The tension between Captain Athens and Sergeant Arrack boiled over when Captain Athens told Sergeant Arrack he was detailing him to the dining facility to conduct headcounts. Sergeant Arrack determined not to take the sleights any longer and complained to the senior Air Force NCO on post who spoke to the brigade command sergeant major who then spoke to the brigade commander. The conversation between the commander and the command sergeant major took place at an auspicious moment, however. The night previously a raid to capture a high value target had gone very wrong. The intended target had not been at the objective and the military age male who had responded to the noise outside the family kalat walls with an AK-47 in his hand and subsequently shot by the Americans had been a nephew of the provincial governor. That’s not to say he couldn’t have been Taliban, too, but there was no proof that he was, and his death would certainly demand explanation. Next, a woman in the kalat, distraught and angry, had charged the American soldiers, and she too had been shot. As the unit had waited for extraction from the already botched mission, the helicopters coming to get them had identified a group of gunmen a klick away from the landing zone. Not taking any chances, the helicopter pilots had opened fire on the shadowy shapes in their night vision goggles, but the gunmen turned out to be a platoon of Afghan army infantrymen on patrol with their American advisor team. Even worse than worse, the advisors had done most things right—they had had their mission plan approved, called in all their checkpoints, and marked themselves and the Afghans appropriately with glint tape and infrared chem lights that should have made them recognizable to the helicopter pilots–but once buried deep in the mountain valleys their comms had gone tits-up and they couldn’t talk to anyone quickly enough to forestall the attack from above.  So now the airstrike was a cock-up of the highest order and six Afghan soldiers, along with the two civilians, plus one American soldier, were dead, and higher headquarters was screaming for information and the Afghan provincial governor was outside the door demanding to know what the brigade commander was going to do about it.

If any event was going to be briefed at “the highest levels,” it was this one for sure, and the brigade would need the best damn storyboard anyone had ever created to make sure the right narrative and message were conveyed or the mess would even grow bigger. It wasn’t just that the facts had to be right, the tone had to be perfect, or even more than perfect, if that was possible. The storyboard had to signify that the mishap in the dark night was just an unfortunate blip in a continuum of fantastically positive things that were happening and that everything was under control, that the brigade had this, would get to the bottom of things, learn the appropriate lessons, take the right actions, punish appropriately who needed to be punished, and just generally get on with it without any help from higher and especially without the basic competence of the unit, which meant the reputation of the brigade commander, being put up for discussion.

The brigade command sergeant major, oblivious to the events of the night before, walked into the brigade commander’s office at 0730 to discuss the Sergeant Arrack situation. Normally the brigade commander would have cut him off, but the mention of Sergeant Arrack’s name gave him an idea.  He would have both Captain Athens and Sergeant Arrack build storyboards describing the events of the previous night. It would be the ultimate test, he thought, to build the best storyboard possible under the most trying conditions imaginable, and whichever storyboard was best would go a long way to forestalling tidal waves of scrutiny from above. The brigade commander issued directions to the operations officer and the operations officer passed the word to Captain Athens and Sergeant Arrack. Each commandeered a workstation with an array of secure and non-secure laptops spread out in front of them and multiple oversized screens on which to project their designs. They gathered records of radio message traffic and patrol debriefs, both hard-copy and digital, pertinent to the botched mission and opened up all the necessary applications on their computers. Each was told they had full access to anyone they needed to gather information and reconcile conflicting reports, but they had only two hours to complete their work and send their storyboards to the brigade commander, who of course would pick the one to be sent to higher.  Captain Athens and Sergeant Arrack fueled themselves with energy drinks, snacks, and dip, and got to work. After two hours of furious endeavor, each pushed save one last time and sent their storyboards forward.

Captain Athens’ storyboard was good, real good. The brigade commander gazed at it on his computer screen and admired its very organized and aesthetically pleasing appearance. In the upper left corner was the required administrative information—unit name, date-time group, security classification, etc. Down the left border was a timeline, in great detail, of all the events that had taken place on the mission. In the upper-half-center was a map that showed the locations of the night’s major events. Each was marked with a succinct, well-turned description of what had occurred in each location. Below the map were four pictures, each dedicated to showing a different aspect of the night’s events. On the right were a series of summarizing statements that prudently listed complicating factors, actions already completed in response to the disaster, and actions planned to be taken in the name of damage control. Everything was done extremely competently, perfectly positioned, not a thing out of place. Borders, background, font and font-size were all to standard. It exuded the professionalism of a unit that had its shit together in every way and as such would undoubtedly forestall questions and offers of unwanted help. The brigade commander was pleasantly surprised; Captain Athens had come through in spades.

Then the brigade commander opened the email attachment sent by Sergeant Arrack. The PowerPoint slide clicked into focus and the brigade commander gasped, for what appeared was not what he expected and could hardly even be said to be a storyboard. Unbeknownst to the brigade commander, Sergeant Arrack had been up all night trying to resolve a problem with his daughter’s childcare plan back home in New Mexico. The situation still wasn’t right when he had gone to chow in the morning. At the dining facility, he sat with a group of soldiers from his old infantry battalion who filled him with stories of how shitty things had gone down on last night’s raid. When Sergeant Arrack arrived at brigade, a scorching email from his ex-wife greeted him accusing him of not fulfilling the requirements of their divorce decree. Then the operations officer gave him the mission to make a storyboard that would cover the brigade’s ass about the fucked-up raid, and do it in so-called “friendly” competition with an officer whose guts he hated, and vice-versa. “Fuckin’ fuck this fuckin’ horseshit,” he had muttered as he settled into his workstation.

Sergeant Arrack’s creation was immediately arresting, no doubt, but it had little obviously to do with the mission the night before. Instead, Sergeant Arrack had created a gruesome montage of horrific war-related images, snippets of military operations orders and Persian script, along with smears of colors, mostly red and black. The most striking image was that of an Afghan man with a knife sunk to the hilt in the side of his head.  Somehow the man’s countenance teetered between that of an extremely gaunt but handsome young Afghan and a skullish death-head whose vacant eye-holes bore into the viewer like the gaze of doom. It was as if Sergeant Arrack, an extremely talented artist, had perceived the assignment as a chance to portray the hellishness of war as effectively as possible, without a touch of romantic idealization of its dark side, and had done so in way that manifested both supreme imaginative power and technical skill. The whole thing, beautiful and terrifying at the same time, constituted a huge FU to the Army mission in Afghanistan generally and to a brigade he no longer cared about personally.

The brigade commander expressed mild concern about Sergeant Arrack’s state-of-mind—“Holy shit, Sergeant Arrack has lost it!”—but he was too busy to either take offense or worry much about Sergeant Arrack now. He of course selected Captain Athens’ storyboard as the competition winner and with no changes immediately forwarded it to his boss accompanied by a note explaining that he was in full control of the response to the calamities of the previous night. He then told Captain Athens to look out for Sergeant Arrack but under no circumstances did he want to see him in the brigade headquarters again. Captain Athens didn’t have any problems with the order and even gloated a little that his competitor had cracked up under the pressure of the tough assignment. Sergeant Arrack’s perverted storyboard might be museum quality but that’s not what mattered now. Working with the command sergeant major and the Air Force liaison NCO, Captain Athens placed Sergeant Arrack on 24/7 suicide watch for a week and then reassigned him to the FOB fuel point in the motor pool.  Now, instead of building slides in the air-conditioned brigade operations center for review at “the highest levels,” Sergeant Arrack pulls twelve-hour shifts in a plywood shack annotating fuel delivery and distribution on a crumpled, coffee-stained spreadsheet secured to a dusty clipboard. To kill time during the hours when absolutely nothing is happening, he sweeps spider webs from the corners of the office.

“The Brigade Storyboard Artist” originally appeared in Time Now, October 7, 2016.

Excerpted from A DOOR IN THE EARTH Copyright © 2019 by Amy Waldman. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York. All rights reserved.

From Chapter Four: The Distant Fire

On her third night, Parveen stayed in the main room with Waheed and Jamshid after dinner while the women and girls went to clean up. The radio was on, tuned to the BBC Persian service, as it was each evening, radio being the sole medium by which news of the outside world regularly came to the village. An Air France flight with two hundred and twenty-eight people aboard had vanished; a South African woman claiming to be one hundred and thirty-four, and thus the world’s oldest person, had died; General Motors had filed for bankruptcy—the family solemnly took it all in . . .

Most of the news they received, however, was about Afghanistan, its politics and its war, reports of which drifted in through the radio like ash from a distant fire. In every other way the war felt remote, as if it were happening in another country. This was a relief to Parveen, for in Kabul it had seemed uncomfortably close, like metal woven through the fabric of the city—a hard, cold presence you kept butting up against in the course of normal life. Her relatives, as they took her to museums and palaces, a Mughal garden, the British cemetery, and the zoo, not to mention internet cafés, kebab joints, and the homes of many distant relatives, often had to pull over for the military convoys that bulled their way through the streets. They pointed out the blast craters left by insurgents’ bombs, and navigated around the barricades and walls meant to guard against them. Western embassies and Afghan government offices had all clawed out so much territory for their own self-protection that to Parveen, the city read like an aggregation of security fiefdoms. A reprieve her cousins had planned—a picnic in Istalif, a famously beautiful spot north of Kabul—was canceled after a suicide bomber attacked a NATO convoy on the road they would have taken. Such disruptions were not routine, for they could not be predicted, but neither were they surprising. To Kabul’s residents, the war was like a giant pothole that you kept swerving around until you fell into it.

Each night she and her relatives gathered in the living room to watch television, where a more disturbing face of the war was playing out. A few weeks before Parveen arrived in Afghanistan, an air strike in the western province of Farah, some five hundred and fifty miles away from Kabul, had killed more civilians, it was said, than any similar incident since 2001. It made the news in America, but Parveen, preoccupied by preparing for graduation and her journey, had barely noted it at the time. Now she couldn’t escape it. It was believed that a hundred or more people had been killed, and most of them were children, mainly girls. Their bodies had been so badly shredded that not all of the pieces could be recovered, leaving Parveen with a new and chilling understanding of the word remains. Then there were the wounded children in their hospital beds, including three sisters she couldn’t forget. They had singed hair and charred skin that had been smeared with yellow ointment. The youngest, just five, clutched a glass of milk.

“Why is your new president escalating the war?” her aunt asked. “We hoped he would find a way to end it.”

The politeness of her voice hid her emotions. Pessimism? Resignation? Suppressed rage? As the sole American in her relatives’ house, Parveen felt culpable. She remembered her Berkeley friends savaging the military. How could she argue with them now? She’d expected to find clarity about the war by coming to Afghanistan. Instead, the blur had worsened.

Now, on the radio that Waheed had taken off the shelf and set, like a small pet, to his right, came a discussion of the Farah air strike, in which the U.S. government had at last conceded significant errors. Unable to help herself, Parveen began to speak about it, to describe, as best she could in Dari, the images she had seen on television in Kabul. The girls in the hospital. The men pawing through rubble looking for family members. A mass grave.

The females had rejoined the men and Parveen saw the twins, Adeila and Aakila, staring at her in shock and clutching each other’s hands. She could have been describing them, she realized with horror, when she talked about the sisters. She’d given the twins, perhaps the whole family, a new sense of their fragility, their vulnerability, and she wished she could undo that. Although, unlike the radio reporters, she’d witnessed nothing other than what she’d seen on television and the internet, the family reacted as if she were the one offering a firsthand account of the air strike, maybe because this was a place with no screens, to where images didn’t travel. Or maybe the family was rapt because of the guilt she confessed to—an admission that embarrassed her. It seemed so American, to act as if everything was about her own emotions and be so shocked by the barbarism of war in a country whose past three decades had been consumed by it. And yet she wanted to insist, but didn’t for fear of sounding condescending, that it wasn’t silly to expect that your government would act decently and to be crushed when it didn’t.

The family looked to Waheed, the patriarch, to say something. He turned down the radio and began to speak, occasionally stroking his beard as a much older man might. The village had a great commander, he said, who’d fought with the mujahideen against the Soviets. This man, Amanullah, had gone into the mountains for years, eluding the Russians who were hunting him, surviving on roots, nuts, mulberries. He’d lost a hand in battle and he’d gained great fame. Because of his valor, Waheed added, almost as an aside, the village forgave him his sins.

Parveen knew about the commander, for he’d figured prominently in Crane’s book. She also knew his sins. In the late 1990s, he’d lent his courage to the Taliban, becoming a commander for them and terrifying the region for a time. Amanullah had whipped women, beheaded men, and run a private dungeon. And he’d kidnapped Crane during his stay in the village.

Waheed didn’t speak of any of this. How painful it must have been for the villagers when their hero joined the Taliban, Parveen thought; too painful to be spoken of. No, Waheed talked only of Commander Amanullah’s exploits against the Russians until he reached his point, which was that if Amanullah decided the Americans were an enemy, he’d take up arms to fight them, and many villagers would follow him. Not that anyone wanted that, he added. They wanted to stay here and farm. For the villagers, too, this war felt like another country. No one here had even gone to fight for the government, although that was mostly because they couldn’t meet the literacy requirement for soldiers.

“But the Americans should be aware,” Waheed said, “that this soil has never been hospitable to foreigners.”

It was all Parveen could do not to roll her eyes. This was the one cliché about Afghanistan that every American seemed to know.

* * *

The next afternoon Waheed came back from the fields and announced, without explanation, that they were going to the clinic that Gideon Crane had built in the village, and where Parveen was planning to volunteer. Parveen wondered if she’d passed some test. From a hook near the door, he lifted a ring with a pair of heavy, ornate keys. Nearby hung a row of emerald-green chadris, what Americans called burqas: the head-to-toe coverings, with netting over the eyes, that the women wore when they left the house. Parveen did not take one—her Kabul relatives had told her that, not being from the village, she should feel no obligation to wear one—yet their mere presence shadowed her into the yard. She chafed at the cloister she’d been living in. The women and girls watched her go.

When she stepped out of the compound she felt free. This was her first clear view of her surroundings, unobscured by walls. The village lay in a long, verdant valley that spilled out from between the feet of the mountains. The valley floor, flat and rich in river silt, had been given over to fields shaped into neat squares or sweeping crescents. Wheat and corn, rye and barley, rice—each claimed its own shade of green. The land had been terraced, and on higher levels there were orchards: almond, apricot, mulberry, peach, many trees enveloped in clouds of pale pink blossoms. The houses, built from tawny mud bricks, stepped up a low stony ridge, their intricate patterning guarding the privacy of each family. And ringing it all, the mountains.

As Parveen was getting her first view of the valley, the villagers were getting their first view of her. When she was just steps from the compound, a passel of boys and a few men gathered around, as if they’d been waiting these past days for her to emerge. Her hair was covered but not her face, and it was her face they stared at, their gazes pinning her in place. Her seconds of freedom vanished.

“Have you never seen a woman’s face?” Waheed shouted. “Don’t you have mothers?”

His assertiveness on her behalf surprised her, although she sensed that some of his irritation was directed at her for putting him in this situation. The boys didn’t move until Waheed took a step toward them and clinked the large keys. Then they scattered, continuing to spy on Parveen from behind walls and around corners. Once she and Waheed reached the bazaar, the boys didn’t bother to hide. They stood a few feet away and gawked.

The bazaar was a simple place: two rows of facing stalls, about fifteen all told, propped up by stripped tree limbs, with corrugated tin roofs overhead. The main path was mucky from the buckets of water merchants tossed on it to keep down the dust. Waheed gave one-word self-evident descriptions for each stall they passed: butcher (a skinned sheep hung on a hook, its bare pink flesh flecked with black flies), baker (loaves were stacked for those too poor to buy ovens), and tinsmith, a maker of pots and pans. There was a shop with a desultory hodgepodge of stale biscuits, cigarettes, expired medicines, and pirated DVDs (although no one in the village had a DVD player) of 2 Fast 2 Furious and Bollywood films, merchandise that had probably been bought and sold a hundred times between Kabul and here, where it had washed up, as an ocean deposits plastic far from its source, to gather dust.

“Some of those things have been here since I was a child,” Waheed joked.

The shopkeeper laughed a little too hard. People greeted Waheed deferentially, as if he were someone important, and Parveen wondered if this was because she was with him. He bantered with them but did not introduce her.

The blacksmith worked outdoors, next to his forge, which was made from mud. The coals within it glowed orange, and a large kettle sat atop it. The blacksmith was an inquisitive graybeard with sweat trickling down his face, but it was the man next to him who caught Parveen’s attention. He was as big in the belly as he was in the shoulders and had a hennaed beard, a gray turban wrapped expertly around his head, and in place of one hand a metal hook. With his intact hand he was popping pistachios into his mouth, then loudly biting them with a sound like knuckles being cracked. The shells he ejected with a buffoonish pfft. This was Commander Amanullah.

She looked in vain for signs of the terror he had inflicted on so many or of his famed courage. What she saw was a grizzled aging man, hardly in fighting shape. Waheed’s suggestion that he could lead an army against the Americans seemed comical, a pantomime of threat. But when someone changes slowly before your eyes, Parveen thought, the change can be hard to see.

“You are the American doctor,” the commander said after Waheed had introduced Parveen.

She was not a doctor, she clarified.

“Then who are you? We need a doctor here.”

“The clinic doesn’t have one?”

“The lady doctor comes once a week. We’ve instructed our wives to get sick or give birth only on Wednesday, but they don’t always listen.”

The small crowd of men who had gathered laughed; Parveen didn’t find it funny. She was about to tell the commander so but Waheed had disappeared, so she held her tongue and instead asked, “Didn’t Gideon Crane hire a full-time doctor?”

“I don’t know what Dr. Gideon has done.” Like Issa, the villagers called Crane Dr. Gideon, she noticed.

Parveen said that she would report the situation with the doctor to Crane’s foundation.

“You work for Dr. Gideon?”

“I’ve come to be helpful to him,” she said, uncomfortable with this elision but uncertain what to say instead.

The commander asked if Parveen spoke English. The question struck her as hilarious until she remembered that of course they had no way to know what language, other than Dari, she spoke. Yes, she said and smiled.

“Let’s hear some,” the commander said in Dari.

She stuttered, “H-hello, how are you?” and was surprised to hear how strange English sounded to her.

“Yes, she speaks English,” he confirmed in Dari to his minions, who laughed because the commander himself didn’t speak the language and had no idea what Parveen had said. He asked her if she’d learned Dari in school.

No, she told him. Her family was from Afghanistan, from Kabul, where she’d been born. Her parents had left in 1988.

“So they left with the Russians. Were they Communists, your parents?”

“No! That’s just when their visa came through. They were trying to escape the Soviets. No one knew they would with- draw—”

“The little bird has quite a sharp beak,” he said, amused by Parveen’s outrage.

They’d left everything behind, she went on. They’d started over in America with nothing. Her father, for several years, had driven an ice-cream truck. That this was humiliating for Ashraf didn’t register on the villagers’ faces. An ice-cream truck was as mythical here as a unicorn. Truck drivers earned good money.

“The suffering of those who left can’t compare with that of those who stayed,” Amanullah said, and Parveen fell silent. “I’ve lost two sons to war. And this.” He waved his hook.

“I’m sorry about your sons,” she said, unsure whether to offer condolences for his hand.

“It’s a blessing to lose sons fighting for God,” he said.

“Of course.” She rebuked herself. She should have known that was how he would see it.

There was an awkward silence. The blacksmith picked up his hammer and began to bang on his anvil. Commander Amanullah looked away, as if to say he was done with Parveen.

She could see the clinic from the bazaar. She couldn’t not see it, since it was two stories high and painted a white so bright that it looked primed for sunburn. It was completely out of scale and character to the rest of the village. If she hadn’t known better, Parveen would have figured the building for a wedding hall planted by some entrepreneurial provincial. It looked like the photo in Crane’s TED Talk, but it was much grander than the photo in the book, which she had recently perused.

She mentioned this to Waheed, who laughed; the clinic looked smaller in the book because it had been smaller. Originally the structure had been just one story with a few rooms, he said. But after the book was published and donations poured in, that clinic was torn down and a new one built at three or four times the original size.

From what Issa had told him, there were three warehouses in Dubai full of unused equipment, Waheed said. “The donations kept coming; the clinic had to keep growing.” He sounded almost sad, but his eyes were creased with amusement, as if he understood his own illogic. Supplies were brought in, sometimes by helicopters, he continued. A high wall, also white, surrounded the clinic. Both wall and clinic were repainted at least twice a year, because of the dust, Waheed said, then added: “It can never be defeated.”

“Dr. Gideon wants the clinic to look sanitary,” Parveen said, feeling obliged to explain for him.

With one of the large keys Waheed unlocked the metal door that led into the clinic’s courtyard. Among the children who had tailed Parveen and him, only Waheed’s were permitted inside. The rest were harried off. The courtyard was large and dusty, unadorned except for a single shade tree that stood slightly off-center. In the late-afternoon light, its shadow stretched diagonally across the empty space.

“So the doctor comes once a week? Isn’t the clinic open any other time?”

Waheed was using the other large key to unlock the building door. “If there’s no doctor, it stays locked,” he said. “The equipment here is more valuable than all the fields in this village. And what good’s a clinic without a doctor?”

His question struck Parveen as unintentionally profound, more profound than anything in Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic, which they’d read in Professor Banerjee’s class. Parveen had been taken with the idea of the “medical gaze,” which was how Foucault described the way doctors, even as they were elevated to sages, reduced patients to bodies alone. She’d been curious to see how that would play out here, in the developing world. That there might not be a doctor to bestow a medical gaze had never occurred to her.

The clinic facility itself was good, staggeringly so, Parveen thought. The interior walls were a soothing white and there was a reception desk and several rows of sturdy metal chairs screwed to the floor in a waiting area. The chemical smells— ammonia, bleach, paint—were acute, almost painful. She hadn’t smelled chemicals anywhere else in the village except for the diesel that fed Waheed’s generator. There were skylights and— this seemed almost miraculous—a light switch, which Parveen flipped. Nothing happened.

The fuel was saved for when the doctor came, Waheed explained. They couldn’t run the generator all the time. After sparking a lantern, he walked Parveen from room to room, beginning upstairs with the ten-bed maternity ward and the adjacent nursery, which held three empty incubators. Downstairs he slung the beam of the lantern into windowless rooms labeled, in both English and Dari, examination, labor, delivery, surgery, and recovery. The equipment looked state-of-the-art. That this pristinely kept temple to health—to modernity—should be in this village, of all places, moved Parveen. If, approaching the clinic, she’d questioned the abandon with which Crane flouted the village context, now she celebrated his refusal to let the village’s history or isolation limit its possibilities. The clinic’s seeming excess proclaimed these humble villagers to be worthy of the same medical care that Americans were, a message almost as meaningful as the treatment itself.

“Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

-The Gospel of John

One day you’re a teenage girl in the arms of Fidel Castro and you’re carrying the Christ child of the Christless revolution and you’re thinking this man needs a filling between his front teeth and then he will be perfect. The next you’re a lonely New Yorker taking a long walk just so you can sleep. It’s getting late. You clutch the American’s letter in your hand and stall by the summer stoop under the lightning on a night warm and wet like a mouth, the flashes revealing skyscraper spires and a proud trumpeting pig in the passing racks of silver nimbus. Most people don’t have enough imagination for reality. They find their only paints in the office and the TV and the two or three streets of their Saturday nights. You are not one of these people, though tonight you wish you were.

The American lawyer wants you to tell your story. You hear thunder like the echo of a shot. You hear a click. You look over your shoulder at the door to your Queens apartment but it is only the old Italian with the brittle papery hands and the tomato garden where he seems to spend every hour of his summers.

You wave. You walk inside to a warm laundry smell that reminds you of candy, black and white subway tiles checkered beneath your feet except that one bare spot beneath the chandelier. This missing tile—this is you.

And the American wants to return you to your place.

Dallas.

Dallas. Dallas. Dallas. You imagine old American Indian women saying it around a fire while poking a pale doll with a needle. Dallas. Dallas. Dallas.

The American has organized his entire life around this one city and this one day and this one man named Eduardo and the American sees you as his key, his missing piece. He seems like some kind of lonely figure obsessed with a jigsaw puzzle: the body of John F. Kennedy. Who is the one woman who can fill in the holes? How many others are there like the American, lost men in small rooms staring into holes, waiting for the black jewel of your tale.

_____

You stand against the window holding the American’s letter between your thumb and your forefinger, hoping for another flash of lightning. The top of the Empire State building needles into the sky as if in bequest of the same strike, the start of the storm. You could turn on the TV, what you sometimes call “the boob tube,” but you don’t care about the Olympics or the talk shows or the news. Instead you stand for a moment waiting for the rain, trying to make out the words of your Soviet neighbor next door with his grouchy wife and sick daughter. You listen to the Russian, the music of the dying revolution, the squabbling over the heat and the TV. You read the letter out loud:

“There will be no telephone service in the room,” the American says.

You almost trust his assurance. You have always been a fool for a strong voice, all these men like Eduardo and Fidel who want to protect you and feel they know the story of the future.

_____

A small woman with chestnut hair and a turtle brooch sits silent in the corner, prepared to record your story. This is the best most women can hope for: a place in the room. Like the blacks who mop the floors and the Mexicans who clean the sheets, most women in America move silently around the white men with the booming voices. Silence is survival. You know this. To come from Germany is to know a story that dwarves the evil of all others, but it is also to know that you do not tell that tale while the beast is still alive if you wish to survive.

“Come to Miami,” the American says.

“You are lucky to have me here,” you say.

You are lucky to be alive. You have been on the edge of death your entire life. Your mother was born in America. Like you, she fell in love with a foreigner and tried to help the laborers in Bremen escape the wrath of the Fuhrer and this is how a child ends up in the camp at Bergen-Belsen. This—this American blood—is how you end up daring enough—foolish enough—to fall in love with Fidel and because of your ties of love to this one man you now have ties to the men who hate him and so here you are in this beige room across the street from Madison Square Garden with the American. You are the daughter of a German sailor and an American actress and now here you are standing in a black dress in a hotel next to the biggest stage in New York City with one more chance to sing your song.

The American keeps pressing you about coming to Miami for the trial. He wears the black Buddy Holly glasses you used to see everywhere in New York. Like you, he is not as young as he once was. You dye your hair. He does not. He takes off his glasses for a moment and taps the temples against his forehead. This is the man Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother chose to represent her son. But the Warren Commission refused to accept him as the assassin’s advocate. Dick Gregory, the famous black comedian, made this white man his vice-presidential candidate in 1968 for the Freedom and Peace Party, but now this American, like you, is largely forgotten. You are his last chance at a second act. And perhaps he is yours.

“If you don’t come to Miami, I’m going to have to hire an actress to read your testimony in court,” he says.

“How perfect,” you say.

“Could be,” he says. “But it might also ring hollow and contrived. People want the real thing.”

“There you are wrong,” you say. “People want the performance, not the facts. Look at the president. Why am I telling you this? You know this.”

“I know a courtroom,” he says.

“You don’t know these people,” you say. “They have killed and would not hesitate to kill again.”

You know these people. FBI. CIA. Army Intelligence. Whenever they get caught they change names like the corporations. The American returns his glasses to his face. He stares at you, as if seeing you for the first time—as if still trying to grasp the strangeness of your life, the incredible fact of your survival. Who else can build the bridge from Hitler to Havana to Dallas? Can the American see what Fidel saw—the ghostly glint of the eighteen-year old girl you once were? If beauty blinds men and ruins revolutions, you also know that it opens their eyes and fuels their fires and prepares them to die for an ideal rather than merely survive in the name of retiring to some small white home on a golf course in Florida. You were once the one who lit the fire. You were the one with the entire world wrapped around her finger. You were the one the young lider wanted and the one the old white men needed to kill him when he grew too big. But somehow, you and Fidel are still alive, and so is your son, Andre, who has has your eyes and your mouth and Fidel’s nose, and maybe you are here because you want to give him a better world and maybe you are here because some part of you will always be faithful to Fidel.

“Let’s talk about Eduardo,” the American says.

_____

The American looks you in the eye and asks you about your present employment, but you just smile. You cannot tell him the truth. The closest you can come is telling him that you cannot tell him the truth. That is the truth. You refuse to give your home address. But when he finally asks if you have been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, you answer, “Yes,” and even the stenographer with the turtle brooch looks up, and outside a car honks its horn twice like they do every day in New York, but the sound makes you sick today because you know their ears are everywhere.

The American continues to question. You cannot believe Eduardo is foolish enough to bring this lawsuit against this tiny magazine—The Spotlight. It is like there is some sick part of him that wants to give the left exactly what they want. Like he, too, wants to tell the truth before he dies. Or maybe Eduardo has become just another tired throwaway governed by the terrible truth at the black scoured bottom of America: money.

“During and prior to November 1963, did you live in Miami, Florida?” the American asks.

“Yes,” you say. “I did.”

“During and before November of 1963, did you work on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Miami area?”

“Yes.”

“Did you work with a man named Frank Sturgis, while you were working for the CIA?”

The American removes his glasses and skims the temples against his forehead. The motto of the CIA is from the Bible: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” If by free they mean dead, sure. Fine. You imagine the actress who will perform your lines in Miami with her chest thrust out and her lipstick bright red and her eyes dark and defiant like you when you were young and the world seemed a tree full of ripe low-hanging fruit. And you were not the only one who was once young. You know the American lawyer thought he could do what will never be done. You know he thinks CIA stands for “Capitalism’s Invisible Army.” You know he thinks you have served the devil and that the devil can be killed, somehow separated from God.

The American still believes. And maybe you do, too. It feels good not to lie for once. You admit to knowing and working with “Frank Sturgis.” You go further and tell the American that you knew him as “Fiorini” and “Hamiliton” and when the American asks you if you ever witnessed anyone give money to Fiorini for the work both of you were doing on behalf of the CIA, you say:

“Yes.”

And with this one word you know you have just shot a hole into Eduardo’s story. Fiorini is the bridge. Eduardo claims The Spotlight ruined his life and convinced his children that he is Kennedy’s killer. He testified in the first trial that Fiorini—Frank Sturgis—never worked for the CIA and Eduardo won, but the magazine has appealed with the American as their new attorney and the only way now that they can strip Eduardo of his precious money is if they catch him in a fiction.

You imagine Eduardo played by Paul Newman but you know Paul Newman would never play a man everyone knows to be a murderer, a thief, and a swinger, so you imagine Gene Hackman instead. The Lex Luthor villain character from the Superman movie. You see Sally Field as the actress who plays the actress who plays you. You see Eduardo’s shiny bald head and those predatory eagle eyes and that Florida tan and that thin glint of a smile that was so cool and calm in November of 1963 before Capitalism’s Invisible Army killed their president, killed his killer, and then threw Eduardo into prison for the Watergate burglary like a common criminal. Today is not the first time that Eduardo’s last name—Hunt—has struck you as the perfect description for the life he has chosen.

“Who,” the American asks, “did you witness make payments to Mr. Sturgis?”

You see Sally Field bite her lip the way she does when she’s nervous. You see Anjelica Huston and Sonia Braga. You see Hackman smile next to a greasy lawyer played by the nephew of a director who is funded by the mob, the famous smile a wink to that one viewer who waits around in the theater after everyone else has left to study the maps of lies and compromise and money anyone can read in the credits, all those fake names and those lawyers and editors who make sure nobody says anything too dangerous.

You bite your lip. You glance at the stenographer whom you imagine as Sissy Spacek. When the American asks you the name of the one with the money, you say:

“A man by the name of Eduardo.”

For the first time the American smiles. And his grin is not so different from all the others. Fidel, Kennedy, Hunt—they were all hungry young men on a mission and
you were always running their errands, wearing the costumes, the shawls and sunglasses. You see those days in Miami like a black and white movie in your mind: strangers passing through a square, a man looking like a banker, a woman like a housewife on her way to pick up the laundry. Eduardo was the moneyman and Francisco handled the guns and contacts. A live drop meant Eduardo put the cash in your hand like a husband giving his wife a bit of spending money before a business trip. A dead drop meant a briefcase or a brown bag left at a bench or an envelope stuffed in a mailbox marked with chalk or soap.

“Did you go on a trip with Mr. Sturgis from Miami during November of 1963?” the American asks.

You remember it like it was yesterday. You remember the wind from the open window as you drove north, the laughter of the men at the gas station with the old bald tires sitting flaccid in the weeds. There were seven of you before you arrived in Dallas. You see the sky over the gas station again: the grasping racks of clouds over the barren land, the brown mangy hound tied by a chain to a phone booth, the way it rose up on its hind legs to try to capture a fly in its mouth. Eduardo had not yet joined the party. He was on his way from DC.

“Was there one or more cars?” the American asks.

“There was a follow-up car,” you say.

“Does that mean two cars?”

“Backup,” you say. “Yes.”

“What was in the follow-up car, if you know?”

“Weapons.”

This was what the men liked to talk about more than anything: their weapons. The new guns and the new bullets. The scopes and the range. The angles and the number of shots it would take and you kept asking yourself, “What am I doing?” as you passed normal Americans driving south with men looking at maps and children looking out the windows and billboards for Coca-Cola with women in bikinis smiling to a single hand coming out of nowhere with a Coke and the single word, “Yes,” on the sign, but you were thinking, “No.”

“Did Mr. Sturgis tell you where you would be going from Miami, Florida, during November of 1963, prior to the time that you traveled with him in the car?”

“Dallas, Texas,” you say.

There’s that name again. The needle in the neck of the pale doll.

“He told you that?” the American says.

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you the purpose of the trip to Dallas, Texas?”

“No,” you say. “He said it was confidential.”

You almost betray more, but you have been trained well. There is a fine line between the obedient housewife and the intelligent operative. You take orders and you get taken care of. You speak when spoken to. Fidel was the same way with you. Most men are. They don’t really want to know what a woman thinks or remembers, but you remember everything and anyone with half a brain remembers what everyone was talking about in Miami in 1963: Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy. They called him a pantywaist and a nigger-lover. They called him a communist and the anti-christ and a sonofabitch and they called him a traitor for letting all of those men die on the beach—the bahia de cochinos—and they—Francisco and Eduardo—they were always talking about “the fall” and “the beach,” and you were no idiot. You knew exactly what the talk was all about. What you weren’t exactly sure of was why Eduardo wanted you involved, but the more cigarettes you smoked on the road to Dallas the more you believed Eduardo knew that you still loved Fidel because you did and if Eduardo knew what was in your heart—and Eduardo knew everything—he would use you like he did everyone else and would throw you away to get exactly what he wanted and you knew exactly what Eduardo wanted. Eduardo wanted Fidel dead. He wanted World War III. Eduardo wanted to return to the beach.

_____

You want to know what the actress will look like. Sally Field is too fragile, not enough bite. You imagine some stock raven-haired refugee the American finds in a Miami theater troupe for a couple bucks, a little thing sticking out her chest as she places her right hand on the Bible and raises her left like a robot. You can hear her heaving her whispers at the obese jury. You see the scattered silhouetted heads of show-goers watching you scowl at Gene Hackman as you tell your story in a movie you know the Americans will never have the balls to make.

The American flips the page of his legal pad. For a moment, you remember that there are two Americas, two hundred and fifty million Americas, and this one has risked his life for the truth. You see him played by Gregory Peck. Atticus Finch suddenly in color, his hair going salt and pepper as he tells the obese amnesiacs in the jury the story they don’t want to hear.

“After you arrived in Dallas,” the American asks, “did you stay at any accommodations there?”

“Motel,” you say.

This one word tells the tale. Motel. Not a hotel where families laugh and husbands toast wives in a bright-lit lobby. No. You stayed at a motel, a small anonymous roadside hive of strangers plotting sex and death.

“While you were at that motel, did you meet anyone other than those who were in the party traveling with you from Miami to Dallas?”

“Yes.”

“Who did you meet?’

“E. Howard Hunt.”

You cough a laugh as you imagine Gene Hackman wincing and Eduardo wincing at the fact of Hackman wincing on screen. You see yourself walking into your apartment tonight as the actual Hunt, clad in a black turtleneck, waits for you behind your door and whispers “bitch” into your ear as he crushes your hyoid bone with his black gloved hands before tossing you down to the street where the lazy police and the lazy reporters from the tabloids will, of course, call your death a suicide.

“Did you see Mr. Hunt actually deliver money to anyone in the motel room which you were present in?”

“Yes,” you say.

“To whom did you see him deliver the money?”

“He gave an envelope of cash to Frank Fiorini.”

“Did anyone else enter the room other than you, Mr. Fiorini, Mr. Hunt, and others who may have been there before Mr. Hunt arrived?”

“No.”

“Where did you see the person you identified as Jack Ruby?”

This will be the moment the camera pans back to the obese amnesiacs in the American jury. Here will be the moment where the movie’s musical montage breaks and silence plays its seven-second role in the American mind. See the septuagenarian schoolteacher with the nervous sniffle and the octagonal glasses and the varicose veins. See the pale carbuncled walrus-faced machinist as the name “Jack Ruby” dawns in his pouchy eyes, the black and white television memories of his youth struggling to latch onto the colored drama of hazy middle age, the tragedy that so badly wants to remain a comedy.

If one day an actress will perform the actress who performed you, who will perform the killer who killed the killer to hide the identities of the true killers? You will never forget Jack Ruby. There he was: the mob guy who asked, “What’s the goddamn broad doing here?” Fiorini told him to be quiet, that you were part of the team, but Ruby said, “I don’t do business with broads,” and you couldn’t stand his macho bullshit. You stared at this squat, egg-shaped man with his stubby fingers and sebaceous skin and his adenoidal voice and his sick furtive smile, this man who would later bark Ozzie’s name before killing him on national television. There you were, the only “broad” in that smoky little motel room. You tell the American that Ruby arrived forty-five minutes to an hour after Eduardo left.

“When you say Eduardo, who are you referring to?”

“E. Howard Hunt,” you say.

You repeat the name with mock irritation. You know it is important that the American and his actress repeat the name E. Howard Hunt, like a chorus, as many times as possible. Hunt. Hunt. Hunt. America’s amnesia is fueled by names like Eduardo, Francisco, and Marita. Names like pills. White pills they remember. Dark pills they forget. The “E” stands for Everette. Everette Howard Hunt, unlike most of his countrymen, could speak both Spanish and English. If you were a member of Operation 40, as you were, you spoke at least two tongues and had at least two names. You were all actors playing parts your entire lives. That was the great thrill of the CIA. It was all a performance. The name for the Dallas movie was The Big Event. Everyone in America, it turns out, bought a ticket to the show. Except you and the American and all the others who are now dead.

“Screw this mission,” you told the team that night.

You left that Dallas motel room the day before they murdered Kennedy in the streets and you returned to Miami where you saw it all on TV. Eduardo never imagined a Russian immigrant with a handheld camera could ruin his plan. The man with the home movie of the killing was named Abraham. Abraham Zapruder. He was a dress-maker and he captured the president’s head exploding and he captured the president’s wife in her pink dress and her pink hat crawling all over the brain-spattered back of the black convertible as it drove through Dallas. This is the movie that shows the shots. This is the movie that changed America forever.

_____

On a cold February night, your handler calls you to tell you that Leslie Armstrong, the foreperson of the Miami jury, has spoken to the local cameras, claiming that the evidence in the trial clearly revealed that President Kennedy had been murdered by his own government with the assistance of the plaintiff, E. Howard Hunt. Armstrong asked for the government to take responsibility and bring the killers to justice.

“This is not going to end well,” your handler says.

You say nothing.

“If this goes national, you’re in big trouble,” you are told. “Big big trouble.”

You smile and hang up. You pour yourself a glass of wine and wait for the nightly news, a break from the daily numbing charade of Reagan and the Russians. But Tom Brokaw, Walter Cronkite’s dashing but slightly effeminate young successor, doesn’t mention the trial. He doesn’t say a word about Miami or Eduardo. Sometimes NBC needs to wait for the CIA to know what they can say. So, with the rest of America, you wait. You turn up the heat. You mute the game show, but keep the picture on the screen in case the news breaks through.

You listen to the Russians through the walls, the horns of the cabs. You rifle through your bills. You throw away a summons for jury duty. You take off your shoes and sip on your Cabernet with your feet up on the couch and you now turn on the sound and watch the new show about the black family in Brooklyn with the doctor-father played by the famous comedian, Bill Cosby.

“Heathcliff Huxtable!” says the doctor’s wife in a mock-scolding tone.

They call the black doctor Heathcliff on the show, like the orange cartoon cat. Doctor Heathcliff Huxtable. The alliterative name, coupled with Huxtable’s nostalgia for jazz and his sweaters that seem both a tribute and an insult to Jackson Pollock—they all combine to suggest—no—you don’t want to say it. You are glad the blacks have their show. After what happened to King and the Kennedys the least they can do is give them this show with a good father.

You wait for the urgent horns, the symphonic interruption, the return of Tom Brokaw. As you finish your glass of wine and the laugh track triggers a smile at a line you don’t even hear, you wonder how the American pulled it off. You see Gregory Peck thundering and this woman named Armstrong actually listening to the argument and you see Gene Hackman wincing and you wonder: Did Eduardo get too cocky? Did he explode in front of the obese amnesiacs and shake them out of their trance with his entitled anger? Who was this Leslie Armstrong who dared to dress down the American government on camera? Years later at a party, just after Eduardo dies, you will talk with an Israeli who was also sworn to secrecy for her entire life, and the two of you, the German and the Jew, will laugh about Fidel and Eduardo and their appetites and how America has no stomach for the truth.

“The truth in America,” the woman will say, “is like constipation. You know the business has to come out. You know you will die if it does not. But it surprises you how long a body can last.”

But that is the future. For now, before the constipation and the inflammations and Hollywood coming to you for the rights to your life, you drink your Cabernet and laugh along with America at the black family in Brooklyn. The show is so good there is a small part of you that prays that the news break will wait until Cheers, the show about the bar in Boston tended by the retired baseball player with the saddest name in the world: Sam (M)alone. You are like this Sam Alone. And you have a little crush on Ted Danson, the actor who plays Sam. You wish him well. You don’t want Sam to end up with Diane. You want him to wait, because admit it: if he does not the show will end, and when it finally does begin and the fat jolly Norm sits down with the erudite mustachioed postal worker named Cliff and the two men begin to drink away their day, you pour another glass of wine and you join them. You fall asleep years before the news finally breaks.

“So, you feel the earth rotating under your feet?”

As Specialist Torres grasped tightly to the doorframe of the CO’s office, a litany of questions flashed before Captain Savalas’ mind, least of which involved the earth’s gravitational pull.

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s why you’re holding onto my doorframe?”

Torres struggled to keep his feet from slipping out from under him, “It’s gravity, sir. I think I’m losing touch with it.”

Torres’s gravitational issues manifested shortly after the Fiasco at Bunker Hill.  Squad Leader Vogel opted to destroy the pillars holding up the roof of a bunker filled from floor to ceiling with artillery shells and propellant, effectively walling up the munitions in a concrete sarcophagus.

“Losing touch with gravity?”

“It’s causing me balance issues, sir.”

“Try adding weight to your IBA,” Savalas said as he pointed at Torres’s ballistic vest. “Increase your mass and you increase the force of gravity.”

As fate would have it, Torres had been selected to pop the five-minute time fuse on the bunker. Perhaps because of a faulty initiator, static electricity, even operator error, the charges detonated early, hurling Torres twenty feet into the air. Within seconds dozens of 122 mm rockets—initiated by the heat of the artillery propellant—soared through the sky, garnering the Fiasco title. His ears still ringing from the blast wave, Torres lay prone as the Grad’s high explosive warheads pulverized the earth around him. Blaming himself, Vogel threw Torres over his back and ran half a Klick through hell, carrying him to safety.

Once back at Charlie Base the medics checked out Torres, confused about his inability to stand upright. With no visible injuries present, they recommended he inform the Company CO of his bizarre ailment.

After Savalas informed Sergeant Vogel of Torres’s strained relationship with gravity, he radioed the combat stress team, requesting that an Army psychiatrist be sent out to Charlie Base. In the meantime, Vogel took preventative measures, adding as much weight as possible to increase his mass.

Vogel double checked Torres’s IBA as he held fast to the bumper of a Humvee, “Two drums of 7.62 ammunition?”

“Check.”

“Two drums of 5.56 ammunition?”

“Check.”

“Eight M-16 magazines of twenty rounds?”

“Check.”

With over one hundred pounds of weight added to his vest, Torres was little more than anthropomorphic armory. After taking a deep breath, Torres let go of the bumper and cautiously stepped toward Vogel. Unencumbered by a vest that would cause even an airborne ranger to stoop, Torres’s steps slowly turned into leaps. Then the leaps turned into jumps. Within moments Torres was bounding around the motor pool, mimicking the movements of a lunar spacewalk. Vogel’s jaw dropped. He couldn’t believe his eyes.

*

The psychiatrist arrived the next day. He took a seat across from Torres who clung tightly to the chair’s arm rests. The psychiatrist stared at his laptop computer screen and ruled out every known ailment: post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, schizo-affective, obsessive compulsive disorder, even gender dysphoria. Torres was perfectly sane.

“Perfectly sane?” said a perplexed Savalas.

“That’s right, Captain, but I’ll need a second opinion.”

“You declared him perfectly sane. Why do you need a second opinion?”

“Good question,” the psychiatrist said, zipping up his laptop. “In the meantime, I’m requesting a physiatrist check for brain or spinal injuries.”

The physiatrist was stationed miles away in the Green Zone. He informed Savalas that he’d arrive in two days. In the interim, Torres’s gravitational condition took a turn for the worse. His bounds became increasingly difficult to control, and he was often seen jumping over the TOC and the derelict two-story building they slept in. Vogel added even more weight to his vest: two 50 Cal barrels, a pouch of satchel charges, and several bandoliers of 7.62 ammunition.

*

The physiatrist arrived as scheduled. He checked for everything: traumatic brain injury, herniated disks, stroke, muscle and joint pain, even Skier’s thumb. After a lengthy examination, the physiatrist informed Savalas that Torres’s body was completely normal.

“Completely normal?” Savalas said, his brow furrowed into a perfect v.

“That’s correct, Captain. However, I’ll need a second opinion.

“You said his body is normal. Why do you need a second opinion?”

“Good question,” said the physiatrist as he flipped through Torres’s file. “In the meantime, I’ve requested that a physicist investigate his gravitational issues.”

The Air Force physicist was stationed miles away in Doha. He stressed that the earliest he could fly out to Charlie Base was the following week. This minor detail troubled Savalas; he’d noticed a decline not only in Torres’s gravitational issues, but in his mental health as well. After tying sandbags to his feet to keep him grounded—Torres became increasingly manic. He spent hours on the internet studying gravitational lensing, observational reference frames, and inertia. His mania became singularly focused on a planet named Gliese 876 d, a mere fifteen light years away.

Torres turned to Vogel as he escorted him out of the internet café. “Do you know that there are no wars on Gliese 876 d?”

The day before the physicist was due to arrive, Vogel burst into the CO’s office. “Sir, it’s Torres!” he said, struggling to catch his breath. “His gravitational condition is getting worse!”

Savalas followed Vogel to the motor pool where he was rendered speechless. Torres – with his four drums of ammunition, eight magazines, two 50 Cal barrels, satchel charges, four bandoliers, and several sand bags attached to his feet – was bounding across Charlie Base at a height of 200 meters.

“Get a rope,” Savalas said pointing to a nearby post. “We’ll tie his feet to the ground to keep him from floating away!”

*

With Torres’s feet firmly secured to a post, the physicist arrived a day later. Standing beside a white board in Savalas’s office, he derived all of Newton’s Laws, including Lorentz transformations. With a board full of subscripts, superscripts, letters, brackets, parenthesis, and commas he concluded that Torres’s condition was mathematically unworkable, and therefore, impossible.

“Impossible?” Savalas said as he stared at the board full of equations. “Lemme guess, you need a second opinion?”

“Not at all,” said the physicist as he erased the white board. “Newton’s Laws are infallible.”

“So how you do explain him bounding 200 feet in the air?”

“Parlor tricks. But I must admit, his skills as an illusionist are superlative.”

Prior to leaving, the physicist agreed to ask an astronomer about Torres’s obsession with Gliese 876 d, a planet that – as far as the astrophysics were concerned—didn’t exist.

Vogel escorted Torres out of the TOC, his eyes focused on a large question mark Torres had shaved onto the top of his head.

“Why’d you shave a question mark onto your head?”

“Because I’ve found the answer to the greatest question of them all.”

“And that is?”

“Are we alone in the universe,” Torres said with a placid smile.

*

The following morning Savalas received a radio call from the psychiatrist informing him he had overlooked Torres’s flat affect—unusual given his gravitation condition. His conclusion was that Torres was suffering from schizophrenia.

“Schizophrenia?” Savalas said into the phone. “You said he was sane!”

“That’s why I asked for a second opinion Captain.”

Immediately after hanging up with the psychiatrist the physiatrist called him on the radio. Struggling to form a coherent sentence, the physiatrist briefed Savalas that he had misread his brain injury examination

“Traumatic brain injury!” said a frustrated Savalas. “You said his body was normal!”

“That’s why I asked for a second opinion, Captain.”

After hanging up on the physiatrist, Savalas received a call from the physicist. Unlike the previous two conversations, the physicist reiterated that Torres’s gravitation condition was mathematically impossible. But his obsession with Gliese 876 d was most confounding.

“There is in fact a planet that goes by that name in the Aquarius constellation, but…”

“But what?”

“It was discovered less than ten hours ago.”

Savalas dropped the hand mic as the color drained from his face. He ran out of the TOC and noticed that Torres’s rope, previously taut, was lying slack.

Standing motionless at the end of the rope, Savalas stopped beside Vogel. Both men stared at the four drums of ammunition, eight magazines, two 50 Cal barrels, satchel charges, bandoliers, and four sand bags lying on the ground. Torres had cut the rope fasted around his ankle.

Vogel stared upward, straining his eyes. “Torres… he’s gone, sir.”

“Gone? Where?”

“Space, I guess. Gliese 876 d.”

Savalas sighed as he ran his hand over his closely cropped hair, “You think he’s coming back?”

“Coming back?” said a bewildered Vogel. “Why?”

“If he’s coming back I can write him up AWOL. Otherwise, it’s desertion.”

Brian Barry Turner’s short story, “Gravity of War” originally appeared in So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library (Issue No. 7) and appears here with the writer’s permission.

Excerpted from the collection Black Coffee by Daniel Ford, September Sky Press, June 2019.

“Are we ever going to leave this bed?”

“God, I hope not.”

“We have to at least attempt to do something today.”

“I’d argue that we’ve done plenty already.”

“I mean real things.”

“That all seemed pretty real to me. Seriously, what could you possibly want to do out there when you could keep making love to me in here?”

“You’re insatiable. Aren’t you hungry? I’m hungry.”

“One of us can go get food and the other could stay here and hold down the love fort.”

“Don’t say ‘love fort’ ever again.”

“Roger that.”

“Trying to get used to the lingo already? Can you believe the draft went that high?”

“With our luck, yes.”

“The news says things are improving, but now we need more muscle over there?”

“I’ll give you a full briefing when I get back.”

“I prefer you give it to me right now.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ugh. ‘Ma’am’ doesn’t sound good on me.”

“Everything sounds good on you.”

“He bedded the girl and is still in hot pursuit. You’re not going to use those lines on other women over there are you?”

“Come on, give me some credit. I’d never reuse old material.”

“Bastard.”

“We’re not going anywhere, so get back under the covers.”

“Fine, but only because I’m chilly.”

“Pretty sure all my heat is gravitating to one place at the moment.”

“Well, I’ll just have to go where the heat is, I guess. Consider this your incentive to come home.”

 “Yes, ma’am.”

“Now I’m using teeth.”

*

Mike’s fifth therapy session didn’t go well.

He didn’t mind talking about things, which made his panic attacks even more arbitrary. If he were anyone else, every session would feature a breakthrough. For him, it was chatting with a therapist who seemed just as disappointed that they hadn’t found anything close to a root cause.

Damn my parents for being loving and supportive, Mike thought. Would have been easy to pin all this on an abusive mother or absent father.

“Are the attacks happening more or less frequently?” Ernest asked.

“Same amount. More powerful.”

“Takes time.”

“I’ve been back a while.”

This room reminded Mike of most of the accommodations over there—federally mandated gray walls and IKEA-like furniture built by the lowest bidder. Ernest didn’t have a beard, which unnerved him a little bit. The guy could probably go a month or two without shaving.

How much knowledge and life experience could he actually have without the ability to grow facial hair? Mike thought.

Ernest paused his questioning to write a few more illegible lines in his notebook. He did a lot of writing during these sessions, which also caused Mike anxiety. His pen movements were swift, especially when he was crossing out full paragraphs. Mike was impressed that someone could think out loud and on the page simultaneously—even if that person was wrong most of the time.

“Do you feel like killing anyone during these episodes?”

“No. Feels more like high school heartbreak.”

“Did someone break your heart in high school?”

“Of course. Feels like we’re fishing here.”

“We are. Could you possibly have anything else to reveal?”

“I was an altar boy as a kid.”

“Did you get molested?”

“No.”

“Too bad. You’d be rich.”

Mike had told him about the killing. The fear, the sweating, the loneliness, the firefights, the bullets he took, the blood, her death, the crying. The ability to open up about it all only provided more questions.

Ernest rubbed his cheek where his therapist beard should have been.

“Can you still get it up?” he asked.

“You’re pretty old. Can you get it up?”

“Nothing wrong with your sense of humor. So you didn’t think of any fresh ideas?”

“It’s pretty random.”

“Like the duck?”

“Like the duck.”

“Thinking about her doesn’t necessarily trigger an episode then?”

“If it did, I’d be in an asylum by now.”

“You think about the good and the bad?”

“Everything. I cry about it. I have a drink. I usually don’t have to flee the premises or check myself into the emergency room.”

“You don’t remember going?”

“Not until I regained consciousness. Woke up to a pretty hot nurse. Wish I hadn’t soiled myself when I walked in.”

“What were you doing before?”

“Can’t remember. In line for a movie maybe? I vaguely remember a woman screaming into a phone.”

“How many of your buddies died over there?”

“We lost guys too fast. I didn’t have time to make friends. I can’t picture faces. I only have snippets of a couple of guys. How he was shot. What info was on his dog tags. A hometown or two.”

“Ever feel guilty you survived?”

More old territory, Mike thought. Spinning in circles.

“Yeah, but I’ve always had bad luck. I guess I was saving up all my good luck to make it back. Living and carrying on seemed the best way to honor those guys who didn’t make it. Certainly better than being angry all the time.”

“Damn.”

“What?”

“You’re well-adjusted.”

“I know. Pisses me off, too.”

I.

Under a ceiling topped by swirling fans and surrounded by walls whose windows had no glass, the Private lay on the bed like a slab of stone as hands went about the routine tasks that evidenced that, despite all probability, he was still alive, even if no longer whole. The hands stuck a thermometer in the Private’s mouth, which opened instinctively, and fastened a cuff around his bicep, then inflated it with a whoosh, whoosh. The hands searched his wrist for a pulse, and paused a while when it found one. They patted and tugged at the bandages that covered his pelvis and thighs, not in an intruding manner but with inquiry, before retrieving the thermometer from between his lips. 

The hands were soft and delicate with smooth short fingers and nails that occasionally scraped the Private’s skin. Sometimes, before leaving him, one of the hands would rest gently for a few minutes on the mound of bandages that encased the Private’s face. Then the soft hand would seek out that small square of his cheek that had been left uncovered like a forlorn orphan. The fingers  would stroke the Private’s cheek as if to convey to him that they knew he still existed, that he still was there, somewhere under the mountain of gauze and adhesive and plaster. 

Several times a week there were other hands, meaty and calloused, that would grasp the Private and roll and lift him  on and off a bedpan. Other times they would lift him onto a gurney and set him aside while they changed the bedsheets stained with the blood and slime that oozed from his wounds or and with urine and shit when he had gone without the pan being under him. The strong hands would wipe along the exposed parts of his body with deliberation and efficiency, but with no more tenderness than if he was a  tub that needed scrubbing. While he was set aside, they would change the sheets and then lift him roughly and return him, like an item being restocked, to his place in the middle of a bed smelling of bleach. 

These things were happening to the Private in the dark silent space that he had come to inhabit ever since the day he had been on a hill in Kaesong with Randall. One minute they were trudging up the slope same as any other day, then there was a click⎯just a low barely audible sound, like snapping with butter on your fingers⎯and he had been thrown into the dark silent void. 

Sleep came and went for the Private in the dark space, but there was no rest. Sometimes in the void, the Private smelled his Momma’s buttermilk biscuits baking in the oven or his Pops’ corncob pipe rich with his special blend of tobacco that he made from the first leaves of the harvest, which he reserved for himself and cured with slices of apple or pear until it had a sweet intoxicating aroma. And when the void seemed too deep and so dark that the Private was sure he might never leave, the musky scent of sweat that rose from Marren’s cleavage just after she came held him from the abyss. All through basic training at Fort Jackson, all during the long trip to Kaesong, and the stops at places with names he could hardly pronounce or remember, and then, even into the darkness, he had remembered lying beside Marren after they’d gone at it like a couple of rabbits in heat. He  would close his eyes and suddenly he would be beside her watching her ample chest heave and inhaling her special scent. 

The Private hoped that maybe one day he would have enough strength to leave the dark void.  He was willing to go to Hell and back just so he could bury his soul in Marren’s plump soft breasts until the light came again.

*

One day the Private heard a woman’s voice singing “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,” and it was like the voice of an angel because it had been a very long time since he had heard anything at all. 

And then there were other voices⎯the fast, accented repartee that went along with the meaty calloused hands that lifted the Private on and off a pan several times a day and instructed him to piss or shit, which the Private sometimes did, and sometimes didn’t. When he didn’t, the meaty calloused hands were accompanied by foreign curses. 

Most of the time what filtered through the Private’s dark void was a general chattering and a low dirge of constant moaning. But from time to time, he would hear a car horn or a scratchy radio station, and all too often a nightmarish wail. Nighttime in the ward brought the low hum of the man who mopped down the floors with a strong ammonia odor that whipped across the Private’s nose when the man splashed the mop under his bed. Then, the man’s melodic self-serenade floated over to the Private like a jazz riff demanding to be heard. 

Less frequently, other voices came; deep and authoritative, they invariably sounded irritated as big words flowed out. These voices were accompanied by the ruffle of papers, unanswered inquiries put to the Private, hurried questions to the singing voice, a few pokes and prods and occasionally the splat of a dropped metal chart. 

“Now keep your eyes closed,” one of the deep voices said one day as it unwound the bandage that had been tight around the Private’s head and eyes. “The glare may hurt at first, but you will get used to it. You won’t notice at first that the one is not there but eventually you will realize that you have a restricted view.”  

The Private struggled to open his eye lids against the crusty muck that had built up across them and the tears that flowed without effort. He finally succeeded with the help of a warm cloth pressed to his face. After a minute, he saw a midget of a man with very hairy eyebrows looking back at him.  The doctor stretched to shine a small flashlight into Private’s remaining eye and squinted through another instrument causing his eyebrows to move like fuzzy caterpillars.  

“How’s it look, Private?” said the doctor. “Looks pretty good to me.”

The Private didn’t say anything because he didn’t know what to say. Didn’t the doctor know that at that moment anything, everything, looked good to him?

“There’s some shrapnel in your eye, but it’s too risky to try and remove it. You’re lucky that it’s not worse. Over time your vision may worsen as it moves around. Can’t say how long before you notice a difference. Could be years, could be a decade. But it’s just too risky to try and get at it.” 

The midget doctor continued with his detailed explanation. He was an animated fellow and his face and caterpillar eyebrows bounced up and down as he looked at the chart then back at the Private throwing out words that pained the Private’s still recovering ears.

In response, the Private looked all around the ward trying to figure out just what he could see, and what he could no longer see, now that he was a one-eyed jack. The room’s lights cast an irritating glare that stung like a lightning bolt. It caused him to keep closing his eye even though that was the last thing he wanted to do. 

The Private heard the singing voice approach and turned to face a petite woman the color of toast, not Negro Colored like him, but different with a generous length of wavy black hair that fell down her back like a fine mule’s tail and almond shaped eyes, very pretty. 

“Good to have you back among the seeing, Private,” the singing nurse said patting him gently on the arm. The Private looked down and saw the smooth delicate fingers that he had previously only felt. 

“Maybe now, we can get you to say something too?” the nurse teased.

The Private watched the nurse with the singing voice as she cleaned up the spent bandages and scissors and returned the metal chart to the foot of his bed. She arranged his sheets and fluffed his pillows. Pausing by the head of the Private’s bed when she’d finished, she smiled down at him. The smooth square of his cheek that had not been covered by bandages now lay in what would have passed more for a plate of raw hamburger than a face; red and craterous. 

“I guess you’ll just talk when you’re good and ready, and not before,” she said squeezing gently his hand that swallowed hers. 

Once the singing nurse had left, the Private raised himself up the little bit he could; and saw what he had before only felt, the bulkiness of a cast that started under his armpits and ran down the length of his torso. He gingerly lifted the sheet and saw other bandages, great white mounds that were fitted uncomfortably around him like a diaper (but open in the middle), and which spread down his right leg, devouring his knee but not his calf. His breath quickened at the sight and he hurriedly dropped the sheet letting it hide the mess he had become.

Later, when the Private felt that he had to pee, he wasn’t on the pan and the men with the calloused hands were long gone. They had told him someone would come if he called. But he didn’t. Maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly. Maybe he was so messed up from the torrent of drugs that they were giving him to dull the incessant pain that he didn’t know what he was doing. But some part of his brain told him that a man did not piss lying down flat on his back. So, he was determined to try. 

The Private struggled out of the bed and onto his feet. It was rough going because the body cast did not allow him to bend. But he  managed to get his feet to the floor and to grab hold of a chair that they had planted beside his bed. Placing all his weight on to it, he proceeded slowly like a bruised leviathan, stopping every few feet as he crept towards the light that signaled the bathroom. 

At the bathroom door the Private stopped to heave breath into his lungs, exhausted. His atrophied muscles were overwhelmed by the effort and the weight of the cast. He almost hadn’t made it the twenty feet. He backed into the bathroom pushing the door with his ample body weight. He reeled and almost lost his footing from the harsh storm of whiteness that assaulted him. Glare from the fluorescent lights bounced off the white tile that covered the floor and crawled up the walls, where it met white paint. Along one wall were a long porcelain trough and a row of sinks, all white and shiny. The Private turned the other way, towards the stalls, barely seeing through his half closed eye. It was not the manliest approach, but he needed to sit. Suddenly, a  blurry image in one of the mirrors above the sinks caught his attention. He had thought he was alone. Out of instinct, despite the pressure in his bladder, he shuffled closer to it and as he did, the image multiplied into the neighboring mirrors. He rested a hand on the sink below him and leaned into meet the image, trying to make sense of it, and gasped. Then he lost his grip on the sink, and then the chair started to slide away from him. In the next instant, just as he lost his footing, and right before the floor became stained with his urine, his consciousness also fled as he realized that the horrific one-eyed monstrosity squinting back at him from the mirrors was, of course, him. 

II.

It had been a crisp sunny day when the Private and Randall had started on the recon mission shoulder to shoulder, slowly winding their way up a craggily path on the side of a foothill that had been used by local farmers and their goats for centuries.  The hill ringed their main target, the Hook, the bigger mountain in the distance outside Kaesong where the Communists were taking a stand even though they had heard solid rumors that a ceasefire would happen any day. where Movement on the backside of the hillock had been reported and the Private and Randall were just going up to scout the area. It was to be just a quick reconnoiter mission and back down to report. They hadn’t even been told to expect mines. 

About half-way up the path narrowed, and Randall took the lead. A few minutes later, the Private bent to tie his boot and Randall got ahead of him. When the Private heard the click, he instinctively looked up and reached out to Randall, but only grabbed air. Randall turn towards him as if in slow motion and mouthed the words, “Oh Shit!” Then, the Private saw Randall explode, his arms and legs flying in different directions, a bloody burnt hole where his chest used to be. In the next instant he saw that Randall had no more mouth, no more head; there was no more Randall. There was just a mass of bloody slime where he had been and then the Private felt that bloody slime all over his face and body and felt it choking him, and felt a thousand pieces of shrapnel and rocks cut into him like a storm of bees. He flailed about and screamed trying to escape but it propelled him to the ground and then into the dark space where he couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, and couldn’t think or move. 

*

The Private had liked Kirby Randall, a gangly white boy from Minneapolis, Minnesota with enough height, at six foot five, to look him in the eye when most other men of any age or persuasion couldn’t . Randall would hang out with the Colored soldiers, drinking beers and listening to their special brand of foolishness that was so new to him. None of the other white boys hung out with them in Mr. Truman’s newly-integrated army.

Before Randall, no white boy had ever walked right up to the Private and offered him his hand like he too was white as rice, not in his whole seventeen years of living. But that’s just what Randall had done when he had first entered the barracks in Fort Jackson and saw the Private rearranging his army-issued supplies in his footlocker next to the only open bunk on account that there was sure to be an inspection that afternoon. Even though they were in South Carolina where folks just didn’t do that kind of thing, Randall had done so like he didn’t know no better. Right then, the Private had said to himself⎯ maybe this army gig was going to be all right after all, if he could just manage to stay alive. 

After a few weeks,  the Private had come to believe that the real reason Randall acted like no other white man he had ever met was that Randall just didn’t much care for the south’s special brand of divisiveness. He hadn’t known any Colored folk in Minneapolis, but his parents had been committed Lutherans who taught him to honor the dignity of all men since they were all God’s creatures. So, much to the chagrin of most of the other white soldiers, Randall treated the Private and the other Colored soldiers like they too were human and like he might one day soon need to rely on one of them to save his neck. 

III.

The Army patched the Private up. The eye doctor returned bearing a replacement made of glass that filled the caved-in socket on the right side of the Private’s face. They sent another doctor for his hearing who shouted that there was not much that could be done there. Likewise, for the discolored blur resembling raw hamburger that now was the right side of his face. They said that it would just take time. Shrapnel was like a million little red hot daggers; it makes a mess. In time they would know how much more they might be able to do for him.

The next doctor was the one who carved patches of skin from the Private’s buttocks and thighs and grafted them onto his torso to close up deep rips in his skin the exploding mine had left. He chatted away at the Private like he was a tailor who routinely applying patches to the elbow of a coat. 

And then the Army sent a doctor who removed the Private’s diaper bandage and pronounced that he was still a man after all.

“It could’ve been worse”, said the doctor while casually tapping the Private’s thigh with the little metal instrument that he had used to lift his penis and examine the underside while straddling a small wheeled stool in front of the examination table. The room was cold and the Private felt colder down there without the bandage diaper. 

“You’re a lucky boy. You are,” the doctor went on. “We’ve seen much worse.” 

The Private didn’t respond as the doctor lifted his Johnson, moved him about, and then scribbled notes on his chart. Instead, he ignored this doctor whose teeth flared out like a mule’s and were way too close to where they were never supposed to be.  He focused his one eye on the rows of bottles filled with colorful pills inside the cabinet on the wall behind the doctor. The doctor scooted back his wheeled stool and stood up, checking his notes and nodding in that way that indicated that he was satisfied with the job he had done. 

“Here’s the deal, Private,” he said while loudly snapping off his rubber gloves. “You took a bad hit down there, lucky to still have it, you are. But there was  lots of shrapnel. We did the best we could. Had to take one of your testicles; it was just shredded, a damned mess. But we managed to save the other one. The swelling and discoloration you see, that should go away over time.”

The doctor paused and waited for the Private’s response but the Private was trying to ignore the chill on his Johnson and was desperately taking inventory of how many bottles in the cabinet on the far wall held the all green capsules and how many held the half-orange, half-blue ones. He wondered what they were for and just how many of each, separately, or in combination, he would have to take to die. 

“Private, I know this is hard,” the doctor continued. He moved closer and laid a  hand on the Private’s shoulder and the Private realized that the mule teeth came with sour breath.  “But you need to understand what’s what, so I’m going to give it to you straight,” the doctor continued “It could’ve been a lot worse.” 

Maybe, the Private thought, if he just swallowed a handful of each color, that would be enough. It would be a coward’s way to die, the way a woman would take her life. He wished he had his pistol. One shot to the head and all this talk about whether he was or was not a man would end. But they must have taken his pistol so here he was contemplating the pussy way out. He’d just take the whole bottle, that should be enough to do the job.

“Once the swelling goes away, you should be able to go at it. Even with just one testicle, you should be able to get an erection and ejaculate,” the mule teeth and sour breath droned on. “It might take a while for you to get your confidence back, that happens, the body has to remember. But physically you should be OK. Remember that… I gotta be honest though, son, your sperm count, it’s just not there. . .  But you never know, Private, these things sometimes work themselves out. You have fun trying. With your luck, you just might be OK. It could’ve been a lot worse.”

*

They said the same thing again and again at every hospital over the next two years. The Private came to believe that it was something doctors were taught to say no matter how bad the injury─Tell the patient it could have been worse. The Private wondered─How? Lose two eyes. Have half his face blown completely away instead of being roasted and riddled by a storm of red hot shrapnel? Lose a leg? An arm? One of each? Loose both testicles and end up a total freak? How could it have mattered anymore?

They said it to him in Guam, Hawaii, San Francisco, Kentucky and Virginia⎯“You’re a lucky boy. You are. We’ve seen much worse.” 

The Private had never believed them. Their words had never held one ounce of comfort for him. He had never reconciled to this luck that everyone spoke of. He was nineteen. He’d been in the Army just eight months and in country only thirty three days, and just days before the whole damned shebang was over, his life had been torn apart. Some fucking luck!

IV.

The Army sent him home, back to the tobacco farm he loved and loathed because it was home and because his family had worked it for a white man for generations, something he’d vowed never to do, which was why he had enlisted in the damned Army in the first place. His ten younger brothers and sisters acted skittish around him, even though his mother, who had given him his stature,  kept telling everyone to stop being foolish. She insisted that he was the same boy who had gone away; the same giant manchild who could wring a chicken’s neck by the time he was seven, hand as many rows of tobacco as she by thirteen, and consume half a dozen of her buttermilk biscuits nonstop. She would not admit the truth to herself , even as she slathered fatback on his mottled patched skin and calmed her littlest ones when his screams in the night woke them.

But his father did. And this small man, from whom the Private got his redbone coloring and his fierce wanting for more, this man with a frame made smaller from years of bending to the tobacco plants and hands grizzled from tussling with the red earth and wrenching a life from pure adversity, he knew immediately that his first-born had left a great deal on that hill in Ko-re-a. He would load his giant of a son onto a wagon hitched to a tractor or a mule and drive him out to the backfield where the constant acres of cash crop finally broke and a kitchen garden bloomed. 

In these alone moments, the Private’s father would roll cigarettes with his special tobacco and they’d take long drags  as the cicadas sang their forlorn song and the bees violated one flower after another with impunity. In the shade provided by the full leafy crowns of the clustered trees, with the air swathed in the sweet aroma of the tobacco, the father would go to work.

“Son,” his pops would say, “ You got to talk about it sometime. You got to get it out of you.” He’d pull a long drag on his cigarette before continuing. “I’m not saying you can make the memories go away. Cain’t no amount of talking make something like that go away. But you needs to talk about it, to get some of it out, or it will just become a big pile of rot inside of you. It will rot you if you don’t get it out.”

The father would  let his words sit with his son as he wandered back among the garden rows to find the perfect melon.  He would quarter the cantaloupe, scoop out the web of seeds and hand the fleshy orange quarter-moon to his son. Under the cool of the elms, away from the blazing sun and everyone, they would slurp mouthfuls of the delicate fruit with gusto, wiping their mouths with the back of their hands. And eventually, the father would listen while the Private poured out some of the horror that was inside him. Then the father would hold his son as he shook with the dry crying that men do only when they can no longer stand the pain. It was his father who convinced the Private that life, though different, could still be worth living.

*

V.

The first time the Private rode to town with his father, children started to cry at the sight of him and even adults shrank away. It didn’t matter one bit that he was a war hero who’d been awarded a  Purple Heart, that he had been injured fighting back the Communist hordes, protecting the American way of life and keeping the world, their world, safe for Democracy. After that, the Private shrank into himself a little more and when his Momma hid his pills that kept the pain at bay, he tried to drown out the world with bourbon. 

He waited for Marren to come see about him.

She was the only girl that the Private had stayed with for more than a couple of months after she’d let him go all the way. Even at sixteen she had a way of making a man believe that Heaven lay right between her size 38D breasts and plump but sturdy legs. 

The Private had hooked up with her at the beginning of his junior year of high school and spent the Fall driving her around in his pick-up truck, which was a hideous green color and rusted around both front fenders. But that didn’t matter to the Private. He had bought it for only one hundred dollars with the money that he made the prior summer washing dishes at a beachfront hotel in New Jersey with his cousin Ray-Ray. The Private had brought Marren RC Colas for months before she finally gave up her stuff after the Christmas social at the Shiloh Free Will Baptist Church.  

By the next summer, when he left for the Army, the Private had made up his mind (but had not told Marren) that he would marry her when he got back. He thought that maybe they’d move north where his cousin Ray-Ray said he could get them even better jobs working indoors wearing  uniforms and waiting tables; they could make tips in addition to a wage. But he’d grown impatient waiting for Ray-Ray to send word to him and joined the Army instead.

Marren didn’t write to the Private while he was away. She wasn’t good at words or writing, but that he forgave. The other stuff he could not. 

He knew that Marren knew he was back as soon as he arrived. Everyone knew; it was a small, tight, community that prided itself on caring for (and gossiping about) one another fervently. About a week after his return she had sent word to his house that she was sick, then, that she had to tend to her sick mother, and then, that she had to watch over her sick brother. Well over a month passed before the Private had his brother Odell, who was just fourteen months younger and whom folk often mistook for his twin, drove him over to her place because he just couldn’t believe what he already knew to be true. 

By then, the Private’s face no longer looked like raw hamburger, but it didn’t exactly look like a face either. The chickens scattered as Odell brought the truck to a stop under a crooked old oak tree whose long branches spread majestically to overhang the front porch  thankfully shading most of the dusty yard. It had been scorching hot for the past few days and everybody was craving any little piece of shade.

Odell climbed down first and went around to help his brother out of the truck, but the Private gently pushed him off even though he had to stop every few minutes to steady himself, holding tightly to and leaning on the Moses-like staff his father had fashioned for him. He hobbled to the house and made the Herculean effort of climbing the two squat steps onto the porch, pausing to catch his breath before moving to the screen door that had seen better days and which was clearly losing the battle to the flies and mosquitoes that snuck through its many rips. He banged on the screen door, too loudly and too urgently because of the tremor in this hand, which he fought to control even as he desperately grasped his staff in the other.

 “What y’all banging on my door like that for?” Marren said sashaying towards the door full on like he remembered her. She was wiping her hands on a dish towel head down as she came but paused midsentence when she looked up and saw  him. She finished wiping her hands deliberately before tossing the towel aside and closing the distance between them. 

“Heyyyy TJ, I heard you was back, “ she cooed smiling brashly from behind the screen door. She didn’t rush to give her big teddy bear baby a welcome back hug and kiss and press her soft body into his as had been their usual greeting when they’d spent any time apart. 

“Been back over a month,” he mumbled. “Thought I’d a seen you before now.”

“Oh, you know how it is, folks getting sick. I’ve got to take care of them, she protested. “I didn’t want to come over there and bring all kinda germs on top of all that you got going on.” She narrowed her gaze and took a step backwards before looking him up and down, as if she could see just by looking at him all that he had going on.  Satisfied, or unable to reach a conclusion, she started to fan herself with her hand. “Sure is hot today.”

“All that I got going on,” he replied with a half-hearted chuckle, “ain’t none of your  germs going to make a difference.” He shifted his weight from one side to the other trying to keep the staff out of her view.

He saw that she’d put on a few pounds, which only made her curves more curvy. She wore a thin cotton dress, a slight, sleeveless number in a muted yellow with tiny red flowers all over. The dress had a deep “V” held together by four small white buttons that looked totally inadequate to the task of containing her glistening cleavage. It fell over her body perfectly, across her flat stomach and broad hips, ending at her calves.

“You look good Marren,” he said with as much of a smile as he could muster considering the scarred skin of his face, which at that moment felt  like there were maggots crawling all over it. “How you been?”

“You know, been fine. I’m fine, about the same. This my last year; graduating in the spring. Class of 19-55!” She did a quick twirl and raised her arms in celebration, before coming back to face him full of giggles.

“Yeah, that’s great. I knew you’d make it,” he said with a sigh. “Kind of wished I’d stayed and graduated.”

“Don’t you tell that lie, TJ,” she said sucking her teeth. “You been places, done things. You always wanted to go somewhere, and you did. TJ You’ve seen the world! Not many folks round here been to New Jersey and Ko-rea.”

She fanned her face and let out a few deep breaths. Then she rested her arms on top of her head. “It sure is hot as hell today.”

It was a habit of hers, unusual for a colored girl. They were usually so finicky about their hair, especially after pressing it with a hot comb. But Marren had just enough Cherokee on her father’s side, and enough gumption of her own, to make her auburn hair loose enough so that she didn’t bother with that.  She stood winding her fingers in her thick braids and shifting her weight from one trunk-like leg to the other. The Private couldn’t help noticing that her arms had been bronzed a deep chestnut color by the sun and now gleamed with perspiration. He loved how the sun just kissed her all over glorifying her even more.

Each of her armpits sprouted a tuft of curly auburn hair and every time she lifted her arms they flashed a torturous musky scent at the Private. Every time she took a breath, her glistening cleavage threatened to pop the tiny buttons that barely contained it. Her nipples pushed at the thin cotton as if desperate to escape. 

Without warning, she lowered her arms and leaned against the door-jamb. For the first time, she looked him full in the face and in the eye, “What was it like?”

He  looked down at her and tried  not to be too obvious about sucking the sweltering air. For a long minute he couldn’t bring himself to answer as the sweat ran down his temples and beaded up in his crotch and armpits. A bee buzzed at the screen door agitated that it couldn’t find one of the tears to enter through and finally moved away.

As he stood there, the Private admitted to himself that he had never looked at Marren’s eyes much before, but now he did. They were a warm brown, large and doe-like, surrounded by thick lashes and set deep in her beautiful dark face with its slightly broad nose and full lips. He saw genuine curiosity there in her eyes, but he was hoping for so much more. 

He shifted his weight from one side to the other and then back again, and opened and closed his right hand to calm the tremor before speaking. 

“It was war,” he finally responded flatly, not wanting for a minute to sully her with even the slightest hint of what he had  done and witnessed. “War is hell. Don’t let nobody tell you different.” He inhaled deeply, stopping himself from saying more and fighting the ache that was beginning to burn in his right side.

Marren crunched up her nose at his confession and twisted her mouth around as if tasting his words and considering what to make of them. “That’s all?”

“I thought about you every day, every minute of the day,” he blurted out. “I just wanted to stay alive to get back here to you. You kept me alive, Marren.” 

He poured out his heart to her, blabbering on through the screen. He stood  there like an idiot and clutched his staff as if for dear life, no longer able to obscure its presence. He tried not to show how badly he hurt just standing there mustering every ounce of muscle strength to stay on his feet and still the tremor, so he didn’t appear a spastic moron. 

He knew he was losing the battle as he  reached up with his trembling hand to wipe the sweat from his face. “I came back for you, I did.” Spent, he lowered his head and took a few deep breaths inhaling her scent as she fidgeted and played in her hair. She bit her lip and started to speak a couple of times but managed nothing but fidgeting.

He waited, wishing for the courage to reach out, yank open the door and pull her towards him. He so wanted to sink to his knees and bury his face, scarred and mutilated as it was, in the sweat of her cleavage for one last time for one fresh memory of the feel of her to go along with the memories that had sustained him through those cold wet mountains in Korea and then the dark silent void of a dozen hospital beds. 

But the strength eluded him as did the courage. What if he toppled over when he went to reach for the door? What if the door was latched? Which almost nobody did, but he couldn’t be sure what all had changed in the three years that he’d been away. If he reached for the door he could miss and punch through the flimsy screen. And even if he did open the unlocked door and reach for her, would she recoil from him as so many did?

 “I’m sorry,” Marren said finally. She peeled herself from the door jamb with an audible sigh and began shifting her weight from one leg to the other, which he saw  were just as bronzed as her arms, and which ended in bare feet whose stubby toes were painted a harlot’s red. 

“I missed you too, TJ. I really did, “ she purred benevolently. “You was my first and some of the best loving I ever had.” She closed her eyes for just a moment, and he saw her tongue slide absently across her full lips before she looked at him again.  “Not that I got whorish since you left,” she quickly added. “But I’ve grown up. I’m graduating. I’m a woman now, and I got to think of my future. . . .I just needs me a whole man.” 

The words, coming out of her succulent lips, out of that beautiful dark face that he knew so well and loved with all his being, cut into him like the storm of shrapnel that had attacked him on that hill in Kaesong. For a minute, he stopped breathing. Then he started coughing and  he desperately, jerkily, fought to regain his breath while fighting not to lose his footing. After a moment that seemed like an eternity, some instinct of self-preservation gave him back his breath and compelled him to retreat. The color of auburn and the smell of seduction painfully blended into one and chased after him like a taunting demon. 

The Private lumbered down the stairs like the rejected, defective soul that he was, tilting heavily.  Odell rescued him as he started to shuffle across the dirt yard. He had waited just five minutes as their momma had instructed him before getting out of the truck and standing at the ready. Equal in stature, he caught his older brother’s weight, and this time the Private did not resist as he bore him the remaining yards to the truck. As Odell reached for the truck’s door handle, they heard the screen door screech open and slam shut. Looking back, they saw that Marren had now dared to venture beyond her threshold and was standing at the edge of the porch.

“You lucky, you know,” she called after him, as if tossing a stray dog a bone. “You could’ve died over there. Don’t know what yo Mama would’ve done if you’da died over there.” 

VI.

The encounter with Marren chilled the Private for a long time and almost knocked him back to the dark void. It made him remember the stink of human flesh exploding and suffocating him on a hill in Korea and hospital beds that he knew only by their feel. It made him struggle with the taste of a revolver, steel mixed with bourbon and self-loathing. It made his momma order his ten siblings, from Odell down to three-year old Little Bit, to never leave him alone. And Little Bit, who had fearlessly taken to chasing the chickens around the dirt yard like a demon as soon as she could walk, took her instruction extremely seriously. She became her brother’s anchor and his shadow. When he woke up, she would be perched on the edge of his bed staring at him. When he ate, she ate. When he headed out to the outhouse, he had to convince her that no, she could not come into the little shed, but had to wait outside until he returned.  

Over time, the Private somehow managed to push the haunting thoughts that plagued him back to a far corner of his being. He knew he needed to stay out of the dark silent void. He knew with certainty, without knowing how he knew, that the next time he went there, it would be his coffin.

Eventually, he began to tell himself what his parents had been saying all along, that he wasn’t dead. He could hear most things. He could see out of his one eye. Thanks to the Army plastic surgeons, his face looked less like raw hamburger as time passed.  He didn’t yet know if he could get a woman, but at least he still had most of his equipment so maybe he could, and maybe one day it would work properly again. 

Little by little, day by day, the Private went on living. He limped around leaning heavily on his staff with Little Bit skipping beside him. And then he hobbled along without it. And then one day, after Marren and the Class of 19-55 had made their ceremonial walk down Shiloh’s center aisle, with the whole community, except him, cheering, he shuffled down to his old school and asked the teacher to help him study for his diploma. 

Mrs. Ruby Dee Jackson had received him with perturbation and reticence, rather than sympathy and enthusiasm. She had chastised him about going into the army in the first place. She had even driven out to the farm to try to convince his parents to forbid him from enlisting. 

“He should at least wait until he graduates,” she had plead. “A high school diploma is a valuable asset, especially for a Negro. TJ is a smart boy. He could make something of himself, if he applied himself.”

But he hadn’t listened, and his parents had backed his decision. 

Now, he spent hours listening to Mrs. Jackson, who had a face as plain as a paper sack but a mind as full as an encyclopedia, read him his lessons. She had graduated from Howard University in Washington D. C., and when she read to him the books and problems that he was to figure, her voice sounded like a news broadcast on the radio. His eye tired easily as he struggled to make out the words on a paper held an inch from his face and his damaged hearing was challenged to grasp the words as they tumbled out of her thin flat lips that she always colored in cherry red lipstick. But he persisted. 

They spent months with her patiently repeating a passage or stopping to explain a word that produced in the Private (who despite her high opinion of him had never been more than the most average student) only a blank look of confusion or a frustrated pounding on the desk. But over time, he absorbed enough, and he finally became a high school graduate years after he had become a disabled veteran.

The day after he received his diploma, the Private counted his discharge pay and the money the Army had been sending him. It wasn’t much in the big scheme of things, certainly not enough to compensate for all he had lost, maybe not much to somebody else, but it was something to him. The Private used some of the money to buy his parents the first Frigidaire they ever owned.  And to show his gratitude, he bought Mrs. Jackson a handkerchief on which he had her initials embroidered and a hat with a real ostrich feather sticking out of it that he sent for all the way from Raleigh. Mrs. Jackson burst out in laughter when he presented the hat to her and she caused quite a storm when she boldly stepped into the Shiloh Free Will Baptist Church with it perched on her head.

 Mrs. Jackson told the Private about the G.I. Bill and how this time  they were even letting Colored soldiers benefit too. She said that it could pay for him to go to college. He hooted at the thought, remembering the long painstaking hours it had taken for him to earn his diploma. “Don’t tell me you want to spend your whole life reading my lessons to me.” 

Mrs. Jackson assured him that as much as she liked him, she had other plans for her life. But she also told him that he could get a job with the Veteran’s Administration and a loan to buy a house. That got the Private’s attention.

“Now you talking,” he exclaimed, with one of his still infrequent grins. Since he was going to go on living, he would need a job. “Hell, that’s why I joined up in the first place. So, I wouldn’t have to hand tobacco for some white man all my life. Any job with the VA got to be better than that.”

And why shouldn’t he take advantage of all  the VA could offer him, after all that he had been through? And as for the house, he hadn’t thought much about it. But when  he did, he wasn’t thinking to live with his parents all his life. As far as he knew, none of his kin had ever owned any property; if there was a way that he could be the first, he might just have to do that too.

In the following months, as Mrs. Jackson and he worked through all the required forms and applications, the Private would often whisper to himself ─I’m alive. I’m going to go on living. He said it to fix it in his mind and to firm up his resolve.

But there were moments, despite his new-found prospects, when waves of despair would bulldoze him. Some new insult from someone in town would compel him to go out to the back field to sit alone and eat cantaloupe fresh off the vine, his body and soul aching so much that he often vomited. Or he would masturbate for what seemed like an eternity, until his flaccid penis was raw, without relief, which even a river of bourbon could not provide.  At such times, the Private’s thoughts would roam back to that hill in Kaesong and to that day that had changed everything. He knew in his mind he was lucky to be alive; but often he didn’t feel lucky. He could walk, but now his journey through life was an obstacle course paved with hot coals and barbs he had to navigate barefoot, scarred, half-blind and half-hearing, maybe always alone. He didn’t even know if he was truly still a man. 

At moments such as these, the Private would think that maybe Kirby Randall from Minneapolis, Minnesota was the lucky one. Randall, who was crazy about his mother and his Labrador Spike and who carried pictures of both in his fatigues, whom the Private had called friend and seen become a flying mess of bloody body parts the instant before his life changed forever, who had been granted the dignity of a body bag and a closed coffin in lieu of the best medical care the U.S. Army could provide⎯maybe Randall had been the lucky one.

Maybe.

The shine and swagger of a new day.

Great Recession? Not Hous­ton. And yet, and
yet there had been a speed bump in September 2008, sure, but that had been
assessed and corrected; and now the city of Brock Wharton seceded further from
the rest of the flatlined coun­try in the first week of September 2014. As
Wharton was considering whether to rearrange his weekend schedule to pencil in
sex with his wife, one of the strangest men he had ever laid eyes on breached
the space of his open doorway. Of average height, the boyish, sun-cooked man
appeared taller than he was as his askew brown hair lashed out in every
direction. His rangy build (accentuated by the too-small, off-the-rack, navy
double-breasted suit he wore as if he were a redneck admiral at a regatta that
Wharton would never enter) seemed pulled at the sinews’ seams. It was the sort
of flawed build that none of the South Texas ranching families would ever
breed. If not for the inten­sity of the blue eyes—divided by a comic eagle nose
that dived toward raggedly chapped lips—so nakedly sizing him up in return,
Wharton would have dismissed the figure as an apparition too absurd to be real.

Unnerved by the fixed eyes that looked through him
to some burning skyscraper or falling zeppelin outside the window, Wharton
twisted around anticipating to be hit by a tornado. But the downtown skyline
was undisturbed. Annoyed by this intrusion and humiliated that he had been
tricked into a search beyond his window, Wharton spun around in his chair to
regain the initiative. “Who—”

“You’re the man to beat?” A smile the size of the intruder’s
face tore through the puffy lips and exposed a series of swollen red gums
congregated around two monstrous white tusks for front teeth, which, if not
fake, the hospital-white fangs had avoided the yellow staining of the other
teeth and clearly swam in their own current in the man’s mouth. A muddy five
o’clock shadow surrounded the giant mouth, which surely, upon closer inspection
of this dark facial sandpaper, would be attributed to not shaving than some
celebrated regeneration of stubble.

His piney, log-cutting aftershave sprayed Wharton’s
office with his scent. A hand slithered in the air above his desk toward
Wharton. He stood and asked in a harsh tone that betrayed the mask of imper­turbability
he wished to project, “Who are you and what is the nature of your business in
my office?”

“I’m Mike Fink,” the man said in a mysterious
dialect, a dialect hailing from a region that Wharton could only place as from
the land of the lower class while his limp hand was grabbed by Fink. His fla­grant
confidence-man grin expressed an expectation that Wharton knew the name, if not
the reputation. “I’m here for the leadership position.”

I, Wharton declared to himself, will personally see
to it that that never happens. This was a case that needed no analysis. Wharton
pulled his hand from Fink’s clasp and came around from his desk. “Be that as it
may, I have never heard of you. I am sure we can resolve this misunderstanding
in no time if you would please . . .” But Wharton trailed off, watching in
horror as Fink plopped down unasked in the chair across from Wharton’s desk and
wriggled his lanky body to find an incorrect posture. This creature’s
cheekiness apparently knew no bounds. Wharton found himself slightly behind
Fink and facing his back; Fink tapped his right foot, waiting on the start of
an interview.
Wharton was not about to give
such an entitled lout. Leadership posi­tion? Papers rustled behind where
Wharton stood, but he could not take his eyes off the hunched back of Fink.

“I see that you used your Special Forces
navigational skills to find Brock’s office, Mike,” a squeaky voice said behind
Wharton.

“Too easy, Carissa. Didn’t even have to consult the
compass.”

“Consult,” Carissa repeated in a higher pitch that
no doubt carried a waving of a finger at clever schoolboy Fink for his
introduction of an unimaginative punning attempt to their colloquial exchange.
“A good consultant never consults a compass.”

“Miss Barnett, what is going on?” Wharton asked, as
he swung around to see the top-heavy recruiter giggling and swaying her head to
the savage’s tapping beat. Was she blushing? Her lips certainly now bore the
mark of lipstick, adorned in a Valentine’s Day red to match a pair of six-inch
stiletto heels that had magically sprouted up from her earlier flats like weeds
in a trailer park. She was without her jacket, and it appeared that—was it
possible, even amid the other illusions?—she had lost three or four buttons,
too, judging by the excessively gratu­itous amount of breast on exhibit. All at
once, Wharton felt the butt of a joke, a weary traveler who had stumbled into
some rustic country inn for shelter only to be mocked by the randy bar maiden
and the regular patrons.

“Oh, Brock, I’m so sorry. I guess you hadn’t been
notified that Mike would be interviewing this afternoon. He was traveling from
New Orleans and wasn’t able to make it for the morning block of inter­views.”
She ruffled through the stack of papers in her hand and pulled a badly mauled
page out and passed it to Wharton. “Here’s a copy of his résumé. Like I told
Mike, you are the only one left to interview him before the meeting in the
conference room in half an hour to decide on who the new hires are.”

Wharton waved her on before she disclosed any more
details of the hiring process. Oblivious to the intent of his wave, she leaned
over to Wharton with the bright eyes of a much younger child, a mercurial
silver sparkle that screamed antidepressants, and whispered audibly for Fink to
hear, “He’s a Green Beret.”

“I don’t care if he’s the pope, Carissa, as I have
only a half hour
to give an intensive
interview,” Wharton said truthfully, for despite his conservative Christian
upbringing, he now cared little for religious figures. Indeed, besides possibly
salvation, little reward stemmed from religious fervor beyond the required
Christian affiliation among his strategic-friends crowd. Wharton thought even
less of people in the military, despite the nauseating resurgence of post-9/11
glorification of a segment who’d been the frequent subject of derision prior to
that day. In Wharton’s youth, the military was the last stop for the talentless
who could not do anything else in life. It usually wasn’t even much of a
choice: You can go to prison, or be all you can be in the Army. Now
everyone was expected to shake their hands, pick up their checks in
restaurants, turn over their first-class seats on airplanes, and worst yet,
stand up and clap for them at sporting events while nodding that the only
reason the sport is even being played is because of heroes like them fighting
in some country with cities no one can pronounce. An inane rah-rah
yellow-ribbon patriotism, a shared ritual offering peace between the jingoes,
Middle America, and pinkos where everyone emerged feel­ing good about their
participation. Doubtless this explained how this Fink character was granted a
CCG interview.

“Well,” Wharton said to Fink, shutting the door on
Carissa, “it ap­pears I am to interview you. I’m going to take a minute to scan
through your résumé.”

“Take your time,” the applicant advised the
interviewer. “There’s a lot there.”

There, Wharton quickly realized, was not a lot
there: current em­ployment listed as none, no work experience (unless
ten years in the military counted), a 2.9 GPA, and a bachelor of arts in
English litera­ture (was that not the easy major?) from Tulane University (a
bottom first-tier university that CCG did not even review applications from)
the same year Wharton graduated. Lo and behold, Fink’s résumé was actually a
mirror out of a fable, in that if you held it up, your exact op­posite looked
back at you.

“An English literature major?” Wharton murmured,
bringing the CV closer to his eyes.

“With a minor in theater. I read
somewhere that English majors make the best consultants. Stands to reason.”

Had recruiting seriously thought the special forces
bullet in bold letters at the top alone merited an interview? Special Forces
could not be that special if Fink lacked the cognition to apprehend that he did
not belong at CCG. That his presence, an interloper squandering his time, was
offensive to a Brock Wharton, who had conducted a life cultivating a résumé.
Fink was a great example of a candidate not hav­ing researched CCG; how had he
passed the first-round interview? In fact, Wharton assessed it to be the most
heinous résumé ever submit­ted for his review: not even the oversized font or
alignment from sec­tion to section was consistent in what amounted to only a
stretched half page of largely questionable achievements (high school senior
class president?). Wharton looked up at Fink in time to see him fon­dling his
Texans football!

“Put that down!” Wharton pointed at the ball holder
on the wall next to Fink, who on his orders positioned the ball upside down on
its seam.

“I apologize. I had forgotten that you were drafted
in the last round after playing for UT.”

Wharton searched the blue eyes sunk back in the
triangular face for an intended slight in the usage of “last” to describe the
still-prestigious seventh round. What it seemed Fink hadn’t forgotten was the
chatter of sports columnists, recruiters, superfans, and boosters who had once
ranked Wharton the top high school quarterback in the South and proclaimed him
the next UT football savior. He in turn ranked this same mindless mob number
one in cowardice after four years of enduring their catcalls every time he was
injured and being denounced by them for betrayal when their impossible
expectations for their fair-haired boy were not met on the field. “Were you
drafted as well after graduating college?”

“Drafted by our country,” Fink said, startling
Wharton with a belly laugh loud enough to be heard down the hall.

Wharton avoided Fink’s face to conceal the anger he
was sure must be reddening his own cheeks. He found refuge in Fink’s résumé. A
review of it demonstrated that the undereducated Fink knew abso­lutely nothing
beyond the art of exploiting some tax credit for busi­nesses that interviewed
veterans. Another bending of the laws, no less egregious than allowing veterans a pass in public
with their PTSD service dogs while their pit bulls created anxiety for everyone
else. Wharton pushed aside the flash of resentment that made him want to
physically kick Fink from his office. He settled on an approach he was
convinced would inflict far more damage to this impertinent CCG im­postor’s
candidacy: cede the stage to an unwitting Fink and allow the veteran to shoot
himself, hailing as he did from a demographic statisti­cally known for its high
suicide rates.

“Thank you for your service. Now why don’t you walk
me through your academic accomplishments?” Wharton began anew, chumming the
waters of that pesky foe of Delusion: Fact. “I see here that you had a
two-point-nine grade point average at Tulane.”

“Two point nine four five to be exact, but if you
round that up it is a two point nine five, and if you’re really telling a tale,
you could round that to a three point zero.”

“CCG, almost as a rule, requires its applicants to
have a GPA of three point six or above from a top-ranked college. You are
applying for the position of consultant with an undergraduate GPA of two point
nine against a field of applicants that all have MBAs, and, in some cases, two
advanced graduate degrees. Have you done any graduate-level course work at
all?”

“The Special Forces Qualification Course.”

Fink was making this easy for Wharton. “I don’t
think I follow,” Wharton said, baiting him to continue his charm offensive and
ram­bling lack of reflection, which conformed ideally to Wharton’s plan of
wrestling back control of the interview. “Can you elaborate specifically on how
this course qualifies as graduate school and how it relates to a career in
consulting?”

Fink straightened up in his chair. His arrowhead
chip of a face leaned in over the desk. Was he applying for a job or auditioning
for a small part in a play?

“De Oppresso Liber,” Fink said, enunciating
each Latin word for Wharton’s appreciation.

Wharton stared dramatically at the now confirmed
lunatic and awaited a further terse three-or-four-word inadequate explanation that was not forthcoming. It
was not as if Wharton lacked experience playing a part; he knew full well what
was expected of him in life’s star­ring role. Finally, Wharton asked, “Excuse
me?”

“Motto of the Green Berets.” Fink thumped his chest
with his fist (in the spot where the handkerchief, which could have been the
only item to make his costume more ridiculous to Wharton, was missing). “It
means ‘To Liberate the Oppressed.’ ”

“What does this have to do with consulting?”

“For a decade I trained not only on how to
operationally liber­ate the oppressed, but also how to free my mind from the
oppression of conventional thinking. A consultant referencing unconventional
thinking in a plush CCG office and actually being unconventional when the
stakes are high are as different as a yellowbelly catfish is from a bullhead
catfish,” Fink exclaimed. He had also managed to concur­rently use his hands to
grotesquely elucidate the contrasting courage of each subspecies by forming
what Wharton interpreted as human female and male genitalia. “Like consulting,
it’s about being adaptable. Who is the most adaptable? Ain’t that America? Now,
I’m not a big war story guy, but you asked me to describe a situation where I
had to lead a group of people and convince them that an unconventional solu­tion
was the right way and to that I say: how about every day in Iraq! If
that—”

“I didn’t ask you anything of the sort. You are
barking up the wrong tree.”

“I once stared the bark off a tree I was so riled
up,” Fink offered as further qualification. He laughed and winked at Wharton.
“Too much time overseas in the sandbox dodging death this past decade will do
that to you. The relevance of my graduate work in the Special Forces
Qualification Course is that I have unique professional training and a record
of success in solving and analyzing complex problems. As I explained to the
senior partners, and this perhaps fails to come across in a limited reading of
a CV, there is a value in being able to establish networks of influence—”

“Influence,” Wharton repeated. “You are claiming to
have ac­quired this from the military?” Here was a hick who could not influence the next banjo number at a
hoedown—could Wharton get a witness among the kinfolk (because they’re all
related) messing around on the hay bales?—and yet Fink thought himself up to
CCG snuff. The true tragedy of these small-town military applicants not being
that bright was that they were unaware of it. Seeing how everyone else was
afraid of the possibility of veterans returning to the office and shooting up
the place, Wharton saw it as his duty not to coddle military candi­dates, but
rather to use the interview as a teaching moment to direct them to their
intellectual rung below dieticians. He did not doubt that they probably thought
his posture that of a cheese dick. But comport­ing yourself as such was part of
the game, be it assimilation of the fit­test douches. In Wharton’s CCG class,
there had been an ex–Naval Academy nuclear submariner who had lasted a year out
of the Houston office with his conventional mind-set, his pervasive logical
staleness onsite incapable of turning the client ship around. He’d even had a
gut.

“May I please just be allowed an opportunity—” But a
knock at the door cut Fink off before Wharton could cut him off again.

Nathan Ellison, a senior partner in his midforties
with the body and energy of a younger man able to both network around town at
all the right social gatherings and find time to teach Sunday school, stepped
inside. “Didn’t realize you were still doing an interview.” He apologized to
Wharton, then noticing Fink, asked, “Is Brock giving you a real pressure
cooker?”

“Can’t complain, no one’s shooting at me,” Fink
said, bounding up from the chair to straighten his corkscrew backbone into an
erect fig­ure of authority for a handshake, with a nod to Wharton. “Yet.” Their
hands met and held, arm wrestling blue veins popping out in the kind of
kingmaker handshake set aside for finalizing backroom palace coup plots. They
smiled at each other and continued to ignore Wharton as if he were a naked man
changing in their locker room row. “Only jest­ing. He’s great, Nate.”
Wharton brooded over the liberty taken with Nathan’s name, paraded as it was by
Fink, who no longer sniffed the air but deeply inhaled the noxious fumes that
he had introduced to the office.

It dismayed Wharton that the late-afternoon autumn
light from his window slightly softened the crags of Fink’s bird-of-prey
profile, the challenging mannerisms and hillbilly hostility of the hawk-nosed
dive bomber jettisoned for the litheness of the assassin, high on hash and his
mission, who moves limberly along the corridor wall in wait on the balls of his
feet. “Unlike our intellectual discussion, Brock and I were sparring about the
value in establishing networks of influ­ence onsite with clients. I suppose we
represent differing schools of thought”—Fink motioned with his hands to group
him and Nathan on one side against Wharton on the other—“regarding the best
method of how to mine pertinent data to achieve effective results. Just waiting
on him to give me the case, but if you two are in a rush to get to your
meeting, I am happy to skip over the bio part.”

“Can’t talk about it,” Nathan said, and turning to
Wharton added, “or he’d have to kill us.” Was the newly christened infantile
persona Nate, once a sober CCG senior partner by the honest Christian name of
Nathan, as high as Fink?

“Influence.” Fink flicked his wrist in the air to
snap an imaginary towel at Nathan, who laughed and closed the door. Fink’s
reciprocal laughter, forced to begin with, stopped the moment the door shut.

Wharton hypothesized that Fink’s true intellectual
capacity could be brought to the surface quite easily with the right
application. Deployed not to the Middle East but to the far more unsympathetic
region of high finance, how would Fink operate in the world of big money?

“Let’s play with some numbers. We have to know that
you are com­fortable with numbers and speak the language of the business world
while coming up with unconventional solutions to complex problems, as I recall
you endeavoring to frame it earlier. The best way for us to discern whether you
have the skill set required for the intellectually rigorous environment of
consulting is by walking you through a case and seeing how . . . you . . .
compete.”

“I like to win . . . in . . . life.”

Win? Was Fink attempting to commandeer winning,
the very ethos Wharton lived by? Wharton handed him four clean sheets of paper
and a clipboard with a pen attached. “How many in-flight meals were prepared on an average day
last year for flights from George Bush Intercontinental Airport?”

“Forty thousand.”

“Come again?”

“Forty thousand.”

Wharton could not have been felled harder had Fink
launched his entire gangly frame at his knees. In point of fact, Wharton
would have normally explained if Fink had not rendered him speechless, the cor­rect
answer to the market-sizing question was forty-three thousand after factoring
in the four thousand meals for the international flights. Wharton attempted to
salvage some dignity from this unfathomable opening checkmate that had always
stumped even the smartest busi­ness school students by an incorrect margin of
at least ten thousand. “Would you care to illustrate how you arrived at that
number?”

“For the reason that around forty thousand is the
right answer,” Fink charitably clarified.

“I am interested not in Hail Mary guesstimates but
your thought process. That you were on the runway for ten minutes and watched
two other planes touch down that you then multiplied by six to calculate how
many per hour. You then extrapolated out that there were three runways total
and each plane on average carried one hundred forty-five passengers. Which you
multiplied by twenty instead of twenty-four, as the time from midnight to four
in the morning is essentially a dead zone for departures. And that, of those
domestic flights, only twenty-five percent of them provided a meal service.”

“Which is how I arrived at around forty thousand
meals. Just do the math like you just did. I solved it like I had one shot, one
kill. Some of us applicants have been vetted—and I don’t mean at an investment
banking desk job playing with myself and numbers.”

Fink released a cackle of a laugh aimed to pierce
what patience Wharton had left. The Prohibition gangster–suited Brer Rabbit
across from him had duped Wharton into illustrating a method aloud that backed
Fink’s wild-ass guess, now claiming ownership of Wharton’s mathematical
reasoning. What next: squatter’s rights to Wharton’s office? After Fink’s
barrage of assaults on football, his manhood, and the nonvetted like himself who had played with
themselves while in­vestment banking, Wharton suspected that his colleague Piazza
was behind all of this. The explicit attack on investment banking by Fink was
an overplaying of the inside information he had been fed, reveal­ing the puppet
strings. It was time to cut them, as Fink was still an applicant applying for a
job at Wharton’s firm. Why hadn’t he stuck with the Dr Pepper case, a
straightforward branding case? Fink could not even articulate his own identity.
“You will need to write down your calculations and structure an outline for the
remaining part of the in­terview. And I will be collecting your notes when we
finish for confi­dentiality purposes.”

“I understand. You’re talking
to a holder of a Top Secret security clearance.”

It occurred to Wharton that
such a fact, if true, did not bode well for national security. Wharton got up
and walked to the window. “For the sake of simplicity, let us use the number
forty thousand meals a day.” He faced Fink and began the mad minute of firing.
“Our client, a company called Swanberry Foods, is responsible for fifteen
percent of the daily in-flight meals at George Bush Intercontinental Airport
with a profit margin of one dollar per meal—but the meals only stay edible for
eight hours. Recently, management at Swanberry Foods has been considering an
overhaul, moving to frozen meals that stay edible up to twenty-four hours,
enabling our client to increase its profit margin twenty-five percent per meal.
The technology and new equipment to switch to the frozen meals costs fifteen
million dollars over five years.” Fink’s pen lay untouched atop the paper.
“What would you advise our client to do under the circumstances? You may take a
minute to struc­ture your—”

“I’d pull the trigger and double down on this new technology if our client’s only objective is to maximize profit over the long run. You’ve got to roll the dice to make money.”

“Please demonstrate beyond the
usage of military and gambling metaphors how our client should strategically
approach this decision. This time, be so kind as to walk me through your
calculations that support your hypothesis after taking a moment.”

Fink held up his index finger
to Wharton and began to scribble manically. The same index finger reappeared
two more times sepa­rated by three-minute intervals between flashes. It took
all the reserve in Wharton not to snatch the finger on its third appearance and
break it.

“What do your numbers say?”
Wharton asked, putting an end to the longest ten-minute silence of his life.

“Profits of almost six million
dollars a year if Swanberry switches to the proposed plan. That’s before I
shave their fixed costs to trim them down.”

“I think you mean variable
costs,” Wharton said, allowing a laugh to escape at such amateur histrionics.
He leaned over to try and read the chicken scratch on the top piece of paper.
He was enjoying this and shook his head slowly at the illegible writing,
indubitably representa­tive of the mind that had dictated it. “God only knows
where, but I’m afraid you have an extra zero or two in there somewhere. I don’t
know where to begin helping you because I can’t make out a single number on
your paper. This is why a successful applicant will use this as a dia­logue
and voice aloud each major step in his or her explanation; that way we can help
guide you a little should you stumble in one of your calculations. Had you done
the math correctly, you would see that at their projected rate of sales
Swanberry would lose almost a quarter of a million dollars a year over the next
five years, and that it would take almost six years just to break even after
the investment if they could withstand the initial losses.”

“I was shooting for long term,
the big picture.”

Like the trajectory of a clay pigeon, Wharton had anticipated this
rationalization before he fired. “If you were thinking ‘long term’ and the ‘big
picture,’ you would have noted they needed to increase their market share by
marketing to airlines that their newly designed meals would last longer and
save the airlines money compared to the other products being offered by
competitors. Even acquire a competitor and streamline costs. And that’s only
after analyzing whether the indus­try is growing. You would have recommended
that they diversify with other products or at least expand their current market
into supermar­kets, hospitals, retirement
centers, prisons, and even your military base chow halls. And that is exactly
what we did, because I worked on this for eleven months—though the real company
was not called Swanberry.”

“Not bad, though, for ten minutes versus what took
you a year, right?”

Wharton did not bite on this tease designed to
distract him from closing in for the scalp. “Where’s your outline or structured
strategy? I need to collect your scratch paper as well.”

Fink first handed Wharton a sheet from the bottom,
the out­line. “There might be a gem or two buried in there y’all could use,” he
thought he heard Fink say as Wharton gazed transfixed on the only two things
written on the paper: profits = revenue –costs, and cir­cled below it, always
look at the revenue.

“ ‘Always look at the revenue.’ I don’t even know
what this means,” Wharton muttered in shock, letting the outline float down to
his desk. “This is your foundation?”

“Winning,” Fink instructed, standing up and tapping
with the fa­miliar index finger on the written equation at the top of the
outline. “Or in the more narrow terms of this particular world, maximizing
profits. In a wildcatting oil town like Houston, a thin line—”

“I must conclude this interview, for I have to
attend our office meeting,” Wharton said, rising from his chair and sparing
himself from Fink’s clichéd interpretation of the essence of Wharton’s home­town.
“Do you have any questions for me?”

Fink held up his hands as if about to make a
confession. “I’ve got nothing for you.”

Wharton thought it was the first valid point Fink had made.

Excerpted from King of the Mississippi, Copyright © 2019 by Mike Freedman. To be published by Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, on July 9. Excerpt published on Wrath-Bearing Tree with permission.

For the amputees of Walter Reed Army Hospital, Segways were the new fad. It had become common to see roving gangs of them, upright and speeding across campus and through the hospital, riding in elevators and waiting in line at the cafeteria or pharmacy, causing a flurry of complaints from doctors and staff. And when Doc Rodriguez looked up from his physical therapy mat and saw Anthony cruising down the hall on one, a public affairs officer plastered against the wall as he sped by, Rodriguez couldn’t help but smile.

Rodriguez had been feeling sluggish, unmotivated. Kristen, his therapist, had tried getting him to do some core work with a medicine ball, but he stopped as soon as her attention moved on to another patient. He was about to leave when, through the glass windows that made up the room’s far wall, he saw Anthony. Anthony had gotten his Segway a few weeks prior from an organization that was donating them to wounded vets, and he hadn’t gone anywhere without it since. Rodriguez had tried riding one, but it bucked him off like a horse when he awkwardly attempted to step up with his prosthetics, and that was enough for him. Anthony parked the Segway against a wall and then joined Rodriguez on the stretching mat.

“What’s up, Rod?” Anthony asked.

Rodriguez shrugged.

“Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Hey, we gotta hit up some Halo later.  Gotta practice for the tourney next week. Can’t let Jeff and those army assholes beat us again.”

“For sure. Talk to Juan and the guys lately?”

“Nah, haven’t seen them online for like a week. Wonder what they’re up to?”

“Getting ready for another deployment, probably.”

Anthony paused.

“Miss those guys.”

They were silent for a while; Rodriguez picking at an ingrown hair on the stump of his left leg, Anthony brushing dandruff off his shoulder. There was a commotion in the hallway and Rodriguez looked up to see some officer striding towards the entrance with a gaggle of aides scurrying around him, one of whom broke off ahead and opened the door shouting, “Officer on deck!” to everyone in the PT room. When the officer, a colonel, entered he waved his hands saying, “At ease, at ease,” despite no one having gotten up to begin with.

“Must be the new base commander,” Anthony whispered. “Looks like an asshole.”

“That’s just how officers look,” Rodriguez said.

The colonel was now walking towards the center of the room, “Don’t mind me, gents.  I’m Colonel Darby, new Commanding Officer of Walter Reed. I’m here to introduce myself and get the lay of the land, to see how the sausage is made, if you will.”

His aides, a group of lieutenants and captains, stood behind him, their hands on their hips.

“Definitely an asshole,” Anthony said.

The room then shifted back to its normal atmosphere. Patients returned to their workouts and conversations, therapists moved from mat to mat, treadmill to treadmill.  Colonel Darby stalked around the room, asking questions about exercise machines and what unit people had served with, which they grudgingly put up with. His jovial attitude wore off slightly with each conversation. When he moved on, a captain appeared and handed the patients a heavy challenge coin with the Colonel’s name on it.  Eventually, he made his way to Rodriguez and Anthony.

“So, what are your names?” Darby asked, arms crossed tightly.

Time for another life story, Rodriguez thought. They had all been through these conversations before with every fucking VIP that came by. He was about to speak, but Anthony beat him to it.

“I’m Anthony and this here is Rod,” Anthony cracked his knuckles, causing Darby to flinch.  “We got blown up together, which is pretty cool. I think. We were both—”

“Do you have a rank?”

Rodriguez and Anthony exchanged glances. “Well, I’m a lance corporal.”

“And you?” Darby nodded.

“HM2 Rodriguez.”

“HM2?  I’m not familiar with Navy ranks.”

“It means I’m a petty officer, an E-5.”

“Sir,” Darby said.

“Hm?”

“You will address me as Sir, HM2 Rodriguez,” Darby said, drawing out the syllables in Rodriguez’s name and rank and jabbing his finger into Rodriguez’s shoulder.

The room was quiet again and he could feel a dozen pairs of eyes on him.

“I’m an E-5,” Rodriguez repeated. He lowered his eyes to the floor, deflating his previous confidence, before adding, “Sir.”

Darby smiled and leaned back.

“E-5. An NCO. Tell me, petty officer, how is it everyone here is so undisciplined? Going by first names, not respecting rank. Have you forgotten you’re all still soldiers? Why are you not ordering them to wear authorized PT gear? Why do half the soldiers in here not have proper haircuts? I didn’t want to believe the reports of poor morale around here, but now I completely understand.” He was no longer speaking to Rodriguez but addressing the whole room. “There are going to be some changes around here.  It’s time you all started looking and acting like soldiers again instead of a bunch of moping civilians.  You’ve lost your pride.”

“Actually, some of us are Marines, sir,” Anthony said.

Darby glared at him and then stormed out of the room, followed by his aides.

*

Every now and again, despite not having feet, Doc Rodriguez took the bus up Georgia Avenue to the Wheaton Mall and bought a pair of shoes. These were the only trips he took outside of Walter Reed since arriving from Iraq eight months ago, and so he liked to make the most of them. Months in a wheelchair had taught him how people tip-toed around him, afraid to make the slightest insult. It amused him to watch them squirm.

Col. Darby had been in command for over a week now and the hospital was beginning to feel even more suffocating than usual. Every wounded warrior (a term Darby had grown fond of repeating) living in the barracks now had to attend 0700 accountability formations. Authorized PT gear was made the uniform of the day, no longer could they wear what they wanted or what was most comfortable. Wounded warriors had to check-in and out with the SNCOIC every time they went to an appointment, which was often multiple times per day. There was even talk of a curfew being put into effect. Rodriguez needed some kind of escape. So he went to the mall.

When he reached the shoe store, Rodriguez rolled straight to the athletic section. Two salesmen behind the counter exchanged looks of confusion with each other before pretending to be busy on the computer. No doubt hoping he would leave, Rodriguez thought. After a few minutes picking up shoes, checking the flexibility of the toes, comparing their weight, the younger of the sales reps, a lanky teen who hadn’t yet filled out his overgrown frame, cautiously approached.

“Looking for a gift for someone?”

“Nope,” Rodriguez inspected the tread of a running shoe.

“Well, that’s a great runner right there,” the rep said, rubbing his hands together and looking back at his comrade, who was still feigning interest in the computer screen.

“It’s got great tread for cross-country and is very light weight. And the sides here allow your feet—” he paused, a hint of panic in his eyes. Rodriguez said nothing and waited for him to continue— “um, they allow your feet to breathe.”

Rodriguez raised an eyebrow, wondering how long the kid could last before bursting into a frantic apology. But he’d had his fun, and instead asked if they had them in size ten; a good, solid size, he thought.

The sales rep made a quick glance towards Rodriguez’s nonexistent feet. “Let me go check.”  He disappeared into the back of the store, the other rep following close behind.

Rodriguez knew he was being an asshole. It made him feel good, normal, like he still had some control over his life. If that meant some ableds had to feel uncomfortable for a minute or two, then so be it, they could walk it off.

The lanky rep came back out, alone this time, and Rodriguez met him at the cash register.  The rep removed the security tag and boxed up the shoes, asking Rodriguez how he would like to pay. He was relaxed now that he was making a sale. Rodriguez was about to respond when he was grasped around the neck. Whoever it was squeezed tightly.  Rodriguez could feel their body pressing against his back and shoulders.

“Excuse me,” Rodriguez said.

The arms gently released and he turned to see an old woman. She was somewhere in her sixties, seventies maybe, judging by her gray, dry hair and purple fanny pack. He could see tears welling up in her eyes.

“Oh, I’m sorry I just couldn’t help myself. I saw you and just had to come over and hug that poor soldier. I just can’t imagine what you’ve been through.”

“Sailor.”

“What was that?”

“I’m a sailor,” he said, pointing to his shirt which read “NAVY” in big block letters across his chest. “A Navy Corpsman.”

“Oh, I apologize, I just assumed. What’s a corpsman?”

Rodriguez sighed. Nobody ever knows what the fuck a corpsman is.

“A medic for Marines.”

“That sounds wonderful, sweetie. A real hero! Please, let me buy these shoes for you.”

She had already pulled out her card from the fanny pack and was handing it over the counter before Rodriguez knew what was happening.

“No, ma’am, it’s really all right.  I can—”

“Oh no, don’t you worry.  It’s the least I could do to thank you for your service.  You boys really have done so much for this country.”

“Thanks, but—”

She pulled him in for another hug, nearly yanking him out of his chair. When she was done, she kissed the top of his head, signed her receipt and left. What the fuck? The sales kid was stifling a laugh.

He sat at the bus stop, waiting to return to the hospital and hoping no one else would talk to him. Other than a few confused glances at his shoebox and the empty space where his legs used to be, no one bothered him. He wanted to shrink into his chair and disappear.  When the bus arrived, he waited for everyone to board before moving to the door and asking the driver to lower the lift in the back.

“Didn’t notice you there,” the bus driver said. He was a big man and had to rock himself forward a few times to build enough momentum to get out of his chair, but once he was up the bus driver was surprisingly quick. “My apologies, folks.  Gotta help get this young man get loaded up.”

He met Rodriguez at the back of the bus. “This’ll take no time,” he said, reaching for the lift controls, as if Rodriguez hadn’t done this a hundred times before, and didn’t in fact know that the lift was slow as hell. Rodriguez could see the other passengers watching through the windows, visibly annoyed that their ride was being delayed. When the lift was finally lowered, he reached for his wheels, but the bus driver beat him to it, grabbing onto his chair and pushing and guiding him onto the ramp.

“Hey,” Rodriguez said, “I got it.”

“I just want to make sure you get on nice and straight. See?”

“Fine, whatever.” He just wanted to get on board.

“Make sure you lock your wheels, I’d be all shook up if you rolled off backwards once this thing is up in the air.”

“I’m good. I’m holding on to the rails.”

The bus driver ignored him and locked the wheels himself.

Rodriguez wanted to scream at the man but didn’t want to make this already ridiculous scene any bigger, and so he bit his lower lip instead. The other passengers were huffing and sighing, checking their watches and phones with annoyance. It was embarrassing to be such an inconvenience. When Rodriguez was finally aboard, the bus driver pulled out some hooks and straps, and used them to anchor the chair to the floor.  Rodriguez again tried to protest, he hated the idea of being locked in place, unable to move until someone came and untied him, but the bus driver, all smiles and stupid jokes, ignored him again.

*

Back in his room, Rodriguez tossed the shoebox on top of the dresser and transferred from his chair to the bed, shoving a pile of clothes out of the way. He was tired, mentally drained. No, it went deeper than that, he thought. Spiritually drained, that was a better word for it, but not in the religious sense. Mentally, he could take anything, had taken everything, but this place was wearing him down in other ways. And now Darby.  Rodriguez was still pissed about their first encounter. Address me as Sir, he thought.  Act like soldiers. Where the fuck did he think he was? Like we don’t have more important shit to worry about than getting a fucking haircut every week. And that dumb grin. He should have just stuck to his guns.

He couldn’t dwell on it, he thought. Negative emotions will just demoralize the patient, making their survival less certain. Always direct their attention elsewhere. He began to run through the procedure for bandaging a sucking chest wound: stop the bleeding, seal the wound with plastic, you don’t want any air entering the chest cavity, place a bandage on top of the plastic and tie it around the chest for good pressure, roll the victim onto their injured side while awaiting evacuation, monitor for shock. When he was done with that, Rodriguez moved on to treating immersion foot, pitted keratolysis, where to place a tourniquet and for how long.

After several minutes his phone chirped with a text message: get online bitch. It was Juan, one of his old squad mates still down at Camp Lejeune. Rodriquez reached over to the nightstand for an Xbox controller and microphone and logged on.

“Hey, Doc, how’s it goin, dude?”

“Same old shit, man,” Rodriguez said, “It’s good to hear from ya.”

“Fuck yeah, man.  Ain’t nothin new here, just playing some Call of Duty while the boots do working parties.”

“Ha ha, just like the old days.”

Rodriguez wished he could be back there, dealing with all the bullshit, but these game sessions went a long way to make him still feel connected, still part of a unit. When he first arrived at Walter Reed, the doctors and therapists kept going on and on about his “new normal” and how once he got adjusted he wouldn’t feel different at all. A life of adventure awaited; wheelchair basketball, handcycling across the country, sit-skiing down Breckenridge, fucking hiking up Kilimanjaro, and all that other inspirational horseshit everyone expected them to be doing. New normal, he scoffed. Fuck all that. He just wanted to feel normal normal.

“Aint the same without you, Doc. These new corpsmen we got are boot as fuck. Could use you down here training ‘em up.” There was a commotion on the other end and Rodriguez had to pull the headphones off when the sound started banging around and scraping in his ear.

“Yo, Doc, you legless asshole.” It was his old roommate, Benjamin, clearly drunk.

Rodriguez laughed. “Benji, what’s up, brother?”

“Corporal Benji to you, you fucking squid.”

They continued like that for a couple hours, shit talking back and forth, Rodriguez asking what training they were up to, if they got their next deployment orders yet. Afghanistan, Juan said, though he didn’t know where exactly. They were heading out next week for mountain warfare training in California, they’d be gone for a few weeks. Even though he had hated combat, hated how afraid it made him, hated bandaging up his friends, had felt relief when he woke up in Germany with no legs, knowing he’d never have to do it again, Rodriguez had a sudden, deep longing to go with them, and when he logged off and turned out the light, he fell asleep fantasizing about not having been blown up, about getting drunk in the barracks, about training in California, about the mountains of Afghanistan.

*

The next day, after physical therapy, Anthony came over to Rodriguez’s room to play some Halo. It was a usual routine for them after PT and helped them relax after working out for two or three hours. Though Rodriguez would never admit it out loud, playing video games made him feel like his old self, back when he didn’t need any kind of handicap or special equipment to play sports or any other activity. They were the one thing that made him feel like he was still equal and whole.

There was a knock at the door and Anthony got up to open it. It was Jeff, their Halo tourney rival. He pushed past Anthony and walked in.

“Yo, you trying to steal our strats or what?” Anthony said.

“Like I need to.  You noobs can practice all you want but you’ll never beat me and the LAN Warriors.”

Rodriguez rolled his eyes. “You idiots still using that dumbass name?”

Jeff waved him off, “I’m not here to talk about that. Colonel Darby is doing room inspections. Just finished with the second floor.”

“What, here?” Anthony said.  “Are you serious?”

“Yeah I’m fucking serious. Asshole just burst into my room and chewed my ass out for leaving one of my arms on the bed and clothes on the floor.”

The three of them surveyed the room. The “barracks” they lived in was actually a former hotel, converted for use as overflow patient housing when amputees began coming home in unexpectedly large numbers, and like most hotels was not an ideal long-term living solution. Every inch of floor space not necessary for wheelchair traffic was covered in luggage bags and spare limbs, a collection of t-shirts and knitted blankets lay in the corner, growing with every new tour of American Legion and VFW groups to come through. Clothes were haphazardly piled on the guest bed and the small garbage can was overflowing with empty Red Bull cans and soda bottles. The bed sheets were open and scrunched to the side. A collection of magazines, pizza boxes, and orange pill bottles lay across the desk.

“Well, it smells all right,” Anthony said.

The door swung open and in walked Col. Darby, who gave the room a quick once over and then stood in front of the TV.

“HM2 Rodriguez, why am I not surprised?”

“You tell m—”

“I’ll tell you why, HM2 Rodriguez. I’m not surprised by the state of this,” Darby scanned the space again, “room because every gosh darn room so far has looked exactly the same.  Clothes every which way.  Pizza boxes, spit bottles, pop cans,” he hesitated, “pornography.”

“And I’ll tell you something else, HM2…”

Rodriguez could have sat there silently and taken the ass-chewing like he did earlier. Just stare and say a couple of “Yessirs,” maybe squeeze in an “Aye Aye, sir” just to throw Darby off a bit, a slight stick of the needle so he could feel smug about it later. Then toss him some platitude like “I’ll get right on it, sir” with no intention of actually following through, but offering just enough to make Darby feel like he had accomplished something so he could leave.

And that’s exactly what Rodriguez did, Anthony and Jeff following his lead. But when Darby finally reached the end of his self-indulgent tirade he said something that caught Rodriguez off guard.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“I said, HM2, that I’m tired of seeing all of these Nintendos.  I don’t believe in coincidences and I believe there is a direct correlation to the lack of discipline around here and those darn machines.”

Nintendos? he thought. “Do you mean video games, sir?”

“Don’t correct me, HM2. Give me anymore attitude and I’ll be speaking with…whoever it is in charge of you.”

“Aren’t you in charge of me, sir?”  Rodriguez allowed himself a slight grin.

“You find this amusing, do you? Well, I think I’ve seen enough here. It’s obvious what the problem is. Captain!” An aide appeared at Darby’s side as if she had been there the whole time. “I want you to call IT and instruct them to shut off network access for all…video games.” She nodded and pulled out a Blackberry.

“You can’t do that,” Anthony nearly shouted.

Darby regarded him, “It’s my base, son.”

“You can’t mess with our personal time like that,” Rodriguez countered.  “We’re,” he searched for the right word, something Darby would understand, “off-duty!”

“You’re never off-duty when you live on base.”

“But, we’re fucking hospital patients!”

“And that’s exactly my point. You all need to get back in the right mindset. You’re not hospital patients, you’re soldiers! And soldiers don’t play video games, they train. You should be working on PMEs for promotion boards or taking online college courses. There are plenty of more productive activities you could be doing. Believe me, I’m doing you a favor.”

“But, sir,” Rodriguez pleaded, all the resistance in him from a moment before had drained out, “I know it’s hard to understand, but this is important for us. All of us. It’s how I keep in touch with the guys in my unit.” He hoped that would be enough, that Darby could at least sympathize with that.

“You have a cell phone, don’t you? Shut it down, captain.”

She was still holding the phone to her ear but gave a thumbs up.

“Why don’t you three spread the word.”

*

They gathered at the smoke pit in the courtyard. A few dozen soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in wheelchairs and on crutches. Some listened from their windows, their heads and arms dotting the walls of the hotel which surrounded the courtyard on three sides.  They were angry. They were powerless. Who do we blame? The colonel?  For most of them he only existed in the abstract; some liminal force both real and unreal, capable of controlling their lives, their actions, manipulating their fears and desires towards his own ends.  Another authority free of accountability. And so they blamed each other.  Arguments spread over who hadn’t been keeping their room clean, who spent more time playing Xbox or Playstation, who didn’t cut their hair, shave, bathe, didn’t render a proper salute, act professionally, ate too much pizza or Chinese takeout—

“Enough!” Rodriguez shouted.

He made his way to the front of the group, wheelchairs parting to let him through. All eyes reluctantly turning to him.

“Are we really going to turn on each other? Over one asshole’s stupidity?” That got him a few laughs. “An asshole who’s been here all of a few days and already thinks he knows how to the run the place, who thinks he can barge into our rooms, our PT building whenever he pleases? Humiliate us?” Hell no, someone shouted. Rodriguez pointed at Jeff, “How long have you been here?” Thirteen months, Jeff replied. He pointed at someone else, “How long have you been here?” Ten months. “And you,” he pointed to his left, “how long have you been here?” Two years, was the answer.  Rodriguez paused and let that sink in.

“Walter Reed exists for us. We are the reason for that state-of-the-art PT building. We are the reason celebrities and politicians come here, supplying them,” he pointed towards the administrative buildings, “with good PR and propaganda. We are the reason their budget has been doubled.” Hell yeah! Damn straight! The crowd was nodding and clapping in agreement. “I don’t know about you all, but I’m tired.” Real fuckin tired! A shout from the middle of the crowd. “Tired of people grabbing my chair without permission.”  Yeah!  “Tired of having my therapy interrupted by some chicken hawk senator or b-list actor offering to take a picture with me.” Fuck those douchebags! “Tired of being told about my ‘new normal.’” Hear, hear! Hell, yeah! Speakin truth! “Tired of being forced to live up to everyone else’s expectations of how we should think and act!” Furious applause.  “And I’m fucking tired of thinking we have no control around here!” The crowd was wild, clapping and waving canes in the air, surging towards him. “WE run this place!” Rodriguez shouted over the noise. A chant began seemingly from everyone all at once, “No play, no work!  No play, no work!  No play, no work!”

Back inside the group gathered around Rodriguez. It had grown larger as more people came down from their rooms and into the open lobby.

“What are your orders, Doc?”  Anthony asked.

“I’m not giving any orders. But we do need to organize. We’ll need volunteers.”  Everyone raised their hand. “Good, strength in numbers. First off, we’ll need some counter-intel.  People who can make some posters for propaganda and psy ops.”

“I can do that,” Anna said. She was an air force staff sergeant who had lost her left arm in a rocket attack. She was fairly new, having only been here a few months. Normally, she kept to herself in her room, went to PT in the afternoon when fewer people were there. She wasn’t timid, Rodriguez thought, just quiet. He nodded to her and she raised her one fist in acknowledgement and then left to gather more members for her team.

“Okay, hopefully we won’t need it, but a direct-action team would be nice.”

“That’s got my name all over it, Doc,” Jeff said.

“Focus on gathering stuff to use as barricades, we’ll need to be ready to block the entrances and stairwells in case they try to force us out.”

“Roger that.”  Jeff raised his fist.

“Everyone else should help out where needed. Prepare some defenses or gather up enough food and meds to last us a few days. We’re not going to ANY appointments until we get our video games back. They can’t punish us all if we stick together!”

Rodriguez turned to Anthony. “I’ve got a special mission for you.”

Two days later they were still holding strong. That first night, Rodriguez had called Darby’s office and stated their demands. He hung up before the colonel’s aide could respond. Soon after, all internet access in their rooms was shut off. They’d heard nothing since. But morale among them had never been higher. With no instruction they had eagerly organized themselves into four-man fireteams, each responsible for a set of windows or hallways. A rotating guard shift was set up at every entrance and a direct-action team waited in the lobby ready for anything. The building custodial staff had given them the keys to the building, raising their fists to Rodriguez when they handed them over, and now they had unlimited access to the cafeteria as well as the roof, where they posted lookouts. The staff had also donated a few sets of walkie talkies, which were distributed throughout the building. If Darby thought he could wait them out, Anna had said, he was mistaken.

“Man, we shoulda done this sooner,” Jeff said. “I’m fuckin’ pumped.”

“It’s nice to feel useful again,” Anna replied.

“I’m just glad to be a burden on my own terms for once,” Rodriguez said. The others nodded.

OP1 to HQ, movement on the northwest of the courtyard. Coming down the path, looks like Darby and some aides, over.

Anna clicked on her radio, Roger that, OP1, out. “Looks like he finally wants to talk.”

“We’ll see,” Rodriguez said.

They waited for Darby to come closer, so he could see what they had left for him. All along the building, along all three sides of the courtyard, the windows were plastered with posters. NO PLAY, NO WORK was the most predominant, with others like FUCK THE POLICE and ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US interspersed throughout. A large pirate flag hung from a window. From behind the glass doors Rodriguez could see Darby carefully scanning each sign, his disgust evident by the ever-growing scowl on his face. His aides stood nervously behind him. Rodriguez instructed the guard to unlock the door and then rolled out to meet him.

“This little insurrection of yours ends right now!” Darby said as soon as Rodriguez was out of the building. “If it doesn’t, I’ll have every last one of you charged and court martialed!”

Rodriguez snorted, “Good luck with that.”

“Listen here, Aitch. Em. Two, this facility will not be held hostage and I will not negotiate with insurrectionists. This insubordination will end—”

“I’m sorry but we don’t really care what you think is going to happen.”

“How dare you, you—”

“And we don’t much care for your indignant attitude.” A round of banging echoed across the courtyard as those watching from the windows drummed their canes on the window frames. “It’s time you recognized who holds the power around here. Us. You’re here to serve us, to make sure we’re getting the proper care we need. We’re through with being treated as if we were children on timeout. Now, turn the internet back on and restore our video game access and we’ll gladly return to our duties.” More drumming. The aides took cautious steps back.

“I will not be ordered around by some enlisted man, a petty officer! I’m in command here and you will shut this, this, this charade down!”

“I think we’d prefer not to.” Rodriguez smiled and crossed his arms.

“Fine. Seize him!”

Darby’s aides hesitated a moment, and then rushed forward. A lieutenant grabbed his left arm and Rodriguez punched him in face. The lieutenant let out a sharp squeal that even had Rodriguez feeling embarrassed for him and crumpled to the ground. Before Rodriguez could reposition himself two captains clutched his arms from behind and tried to pull him out his chair.

“CHARGE!”

The captains paused and turned back to the building entrance. Out from the building burst Anthony on his Segway wearing a Che Guevara shirt followed by two others on Segways. They were wearing helmets and elbow pads, and wielding canes. Anthony pointed his cane forward like he was Patton galloping towards the enemy upon his steed.

“Go for their legs!” He shouted and soon they were upon the aides and slashing down on them. They rode circles around them, smacking and beating their thighs and calves.  Projectiles were now reigning down from the windows; shoes, challenge coins, tomatoes; someone was firing BBs from a slingshot.

“Retreat!” Darby ordered. “Fall back!” The officers, laying in the fetal position, scrambled and stumbled to their feet. They sprinted shamelessly, trying to catch up with the colonel.

“NO PLAY, NO WORK. NO PLAY, NO WORK.” The chant grew louder as they shouted from their windows. The officers ran faster. Anthony and his team escorted Rodriguez back inside where the direct-action team prepared for a possible counterattack.

“Lock it down!” Rodriguez shouted.

Jeff reached for his radio and gave the signal, Turtle up!  Turtle up!

A flurry of activity ensued as they locked the doors. Empty wheelchairs and spare limbs and unused furniture that had been kept off to the side were now piled against the entrances. Fireteams on each floor pushed more wheelchairs down the stairwells. Every lookout and post were doubled up as they went to 100% security. Food and water were evenly distributed. Their time had come.

*

Over the next thirty-six hours, the base MPs made several probing attacks. The colonel’s goons first tried to get in through the front entrance, rather than attempt another courtyard gauntlet, but found the way blocked by a lifted, yellow H2 Hummer and a black Mercedes Benz AMG (both courtesy of the government’s tax-free $50k/per limb compensation to each amputee). They then attempted a night raid through the courtyard, thinking the resistance would be asleep. They were beaten back by a combination of million-candle-power flashlights and water balloons filled with urine. Jeff was particularly proud of that idea. Then, on the fifth day, the real assault began.

They heard it first. The unmistakable sound of boots on pavement, marching. The lookouts on the roof confirmed what the others already knew, this was no probe. I count at least 50 headed towards the courtyard, over. It took ten minutes for the MPs to file in, riot shields over their heads, boots clomping in a methodical rhythm, but the resistance held their fire. They formed up five troops wide, all that could fit through the doors at one time. Rodriguez, Anthony, Jeff, Anna and two dozen of Jeff’s direct-action team stood ready to face them at ground level, a mountain of twisting metal and rubber separating the two sides.

Panic seized Rodriguez for a moment as he considered what was about to happen and all he had done to bring it about. He may not have forced his comrades into mutiny, but he couldn’t help but feel responsible for the real danger they all now faced. Had he been right? Were these actions justified? Was their cause doomed? He began to cycle through a dozen similar questions he hadn’t contemplated before and the weight of it all nearly sent him to grab the nearest white flag, until Anthony placed an arm around his shoulders.

“If we could only see us now,” Anthony said, smiling.

Rodriguez looked up and down the line and saw the same determination in every face.  His panic passed. Doomed or not. Right or wrong. They were together.

It happened all at once. The MPs rushed forward, quickly smashing through the glass doors. The window teams opened fire with an assortment of heavy and disgusting objects. The MPs responded with pepper spray, but their range was limited and could only reach up to the second floor. Both sides dragged away their wounded. The front rows of MPs were grabbing and tossing all the debris in the blockade aside, passing it over their heads to be carried back and out of the way. “Hit em with the balloons!” Jeff barked. They crashed and broke against the barricade, spraying the MPs with all their contents. The front row disappeared as they retreated out of the line of fire but were quickly replaced by those behind them. The two sides repeated the cycle for several minutes, but the MPs were removing the debris far quicker than the resistance could deplete their ranks, and eventually the MPs broke through.

“LAN Warriors, charge!”  Jeff sprinted towards the breach. Rodriguez nearly choked laughing, but he and the others followed right behind. The next moments were a blur of canes and batons being swung back and forth. Two men, one in a chair, the other on crutches, fell to the floor, blood spilling down their faces. They were quickly dragged off.  Rodriguez and the others were slowly being pushed back by the MPs, lacking the leg power needed to hold their ground. The MPs had given up on pepper spray now that they were in close quarters, switching to their tasers instead. Two more amputees on the left flank went down, bloodied, forcing the remaining men on that side to fall back and cede ground. The MPs quickly took advantage and Rodriguez and Jeff found themselves surrounded, batons coming in from all sides. Rodriguez fought back with all he had, swinging his cane like a baseball bat, chopping down like an axe. He smashed one MP in the nose, sending a gush of blood spraying out. Jeff knocked another out cold, he had lost his cane and was now punching any uniform he could reach. An intense pain surged through Rodriguez and he lost control of himself as his body seized up. He fell out of his chair and was convulsing on the ground as two MPs tried to drag him off.

He heard a scream from somewhere in the mass of bodies and he couldn’t tell if it was one of his or one theirs, but then Anna burst from the crowd and threw herself at the MPs dragging him. “Get Doc outta here!” There were new hands on him now, dragging him away from the fight, further inside the building. Anthony screeched by on his Segway and drove straight into the mass of uniforms, disappearing as he flew over the handle bars.  The last glimpse he got of Anna before the MPs surrounded her was of her swinging her prosthetic arm like a club.

*

Now in the casualty collection point, Rodriguez had time to think again. He was badly bruised and sore from where his muscles had tensed themselves up into knots after being electrocuted but looking around it was clear he had gotten off easy. Nearly two dozen people lay about the floor in different states of shock and injury. Most had blood leaking from gashes in their heads, some lay unconscious, others had their arms in slings. A group in the far corner were busy pouring milk over their faces and sitting in front of large fans.  A man Rodriguez didn’t recognize lay next to him, struggling to wipe the blood from his eyes with the stubs of his arms. Rodriguez leaned over and pulled a bandage from his pocket. He did his best to wipe the blood from the man’s face and then applied the bandage to the wound on his forehead.

“Thanks, Doc,” the man said before groggily closing his eyes.

It was all too much for him now as the panic crept its way back into his chest. How many had new concussions? Rodriguez thought. How many broken bones? How long would their recovery now be delayed because of these new injuries? He began to shake and he lost the strength in his arms, and fell back against the wall. He took another look around the room and nearly burst into tears. “I thought I was done with this,” he said to himself.  He could still hear the sounds of battle going on in the lobby. The banging, the shouting.  He tried to cover his ears but the sounds were too loud and slipped past his fingers. There was only one thing he could do. He pushed himself back up and crawled from patient to patient, tending to their wounds.

The fight went on for thirty more minutes until the MPs retreated. A second direct-action team had arrived as Rodriguez was being pulled away and managed to hold the lobby. Jeff found Rodriguez and gave him the quick AAR: half of their resistance was injured, and of those, half could still fight. Several members were missing, including Anna and Anthony, and were presumed captured. They’d depleted all their water balloons and most of the projectiles. But, Jeff said, we still own this place. No MPs got past the lobby.

Rodriguez was quiet. Anna. Anthony. Everybody. They sacrificed themselves, for me, for my dumb plan, he finally said.

“No. They did it for themselves,” Jeff answered. “Look around, man. Even with blood and pepper spray in their faces, they’re laughing.”

Word had spread of the MP’s retreat and the mood in the room had shifted to an exhilaration not unlike that after a firefight. The exhilaration of fear and of being alive. Of having fought and won. It became clear to Rodriguez that the outcome of this mutiny no longer mattered, had probably never mattered. He climbed back into his chair and he and Jeff headed to the lobby.

A voice from a bullhorn echoed in the courtyard.

“HM2 Rodriguez. I think we’ve all had enough of this and are ready to come to an agreement.” It was Darby. “Unless you’d rather I throw your friends in the brig.”

Rodriguez and Jeff approached the window. Darby stood in the courtyard with a team of MPs in SWAT gear. Anna and Anthony sat handcuffed and bandaged at his feet.

“That motherfucker,” Jeff said.

“I’m willing to restore full internet access and grant everyone immunity if you end this rebellion now,” Darby continued, “Well, not everyone.  HM2 Rodriguez will have to face punishment. Someone has to, after all this destruction.”

“Fuck that, Doc. If anyone needs to be punished it’s that asshole.”

“No. We’ve won,” Rodriguez said. “We did it.”

“But you can’t just turn yourself—”

“I don’t want anyone else hurt over this.” Rodriguez looked over his shoulder at the guards by the doors, still defiant despite bandages on their heads and torn shirts, one of them raised his fist. “We got what we needed.”

Jeff nodded reluctantly and clapped his hand on Rodriguez’s shoulder.

*

It was silent when he rolled out to Darby. The grin and arrogance from Darby’s face was gone. It was clear he hadn’t slept at all for the past five days and looked as though he had lost twenty pounds, his uniform hanging off his shoulders and arms. Rodriguez raised his fist at Anna and Anthony and they both smiled in return. Darby said nothing to him, didn’t even look at him, just signaled for the MPs who came and handcuffed Rodriguez’s arms behind his back. They took hold of his chair and began pushing him towards a patrol car on the far side of the courtyard.

They were halfway down the courtyard when a single voice shouted from the windows, “NO PLAY, NO WORK.”

Others joined in and the chant quickly spread around the courtyard.

“NO PLAY, NO WORK.”

A prosthetic leg came sailing out from a third-floor window. Another came from the second floor across the way. Then an arm, a foot. More and more came tumbling out of the windows in a cascade of limbs all around the courtyard. The chant got louder and built up to a thunderous echo, bouncing off the walls and the trees, rising, rising, rising above the buildings and out across the street and into Rock Creek Park, down Georgia Ave and downtown and into the Capitol, the National Mall, the White House.

“NO PLAY, NO WORK.  NO PLAY, NO WORK.”

Rodriguez laughed and laughed, tears streaming from his eyes, as he was wheeled down the path and out of sight.

No more than 10 percent of the United States military was special operations when I got out. Being in special operations or “specops” as it was known at the time was something to be proud of. There were Rangers and Special Forces and Marine Special Operations and Force Recon and the SEALs like me, and the boat guys who did infiltration aka infil operations for the SEALs, and the different task forces, and CAG (I’m sorry I don’t know what the acronym stands for) otherwise known as Delta Force. Then there were the pilots for helicopters and planes and who knows what else all. There was a lot of special operations, is my point, but that amounted to about (again) 10 percent of the military, maximum. Special operations meant something. It was special.

Now, man, whew. The number’s closer to eighty percent. No joke. Eighty percent of the military is special operations.

I had to join again, is how I found out. When I left the military to get an education and pursue a career—back when I had dreams like that—it never would have occurred to me that one day the military would be people wearing different colored berets and taking part in top secret missions to countries I’d never heard of. But the education I got outside didn’t amount to much. And the career, working for some jackknife-grinning moke named Carl doing financial spreadsheets didn’t go anywhere either. I guess I’m just unlucky that way.

So I slunk back down to the Army recruiter’s office one cloudy Tuesday on my lunch break. I’d been posting on Facebook about how well things were going with my life and the job, but in reality it had been a mess. The beard and tattoo photos, the birthdays with kids, a promotion—sure, they’d happened, and online they probably seemed impressive to everyone who wasn’t there, but living those moments had been stuffing my mouth full of ash. I needed back in “the game,” as we special operators call it, but was so embarrassed that my former buddies would see me and find out that I couldn’t make it on the outside. I asked the recruiter what openings they had. “Anything except special operations,” I said, certain that they’d open the book for me.

The recruiter, a former sniper in the Ranger Reconnaissance, looked over my resume, and then laughed. “Buddy you want to go into the Regular Army? What are you going to do, water logistician?”

“Yeah,” I’d told him. “That sounds good.”

He’d jumped out of his chair. “The fuck do you think you
are, squid, walking in here and asking to be a water logistician.” His face was all snarl, but I wasn’t afraid of
him. Ranger Recon Sniper infiltration teams were tough, sure, but we special
operations folks knew that the Rangers barked harder than they bit. I stood my
ground.

“That’s right pal. Hook a trident up.”

“Look around. You notice anything?”

I scanned the room using my SEAL powers of observation, and
realized something odd. Everyone was a Ranger or a Special Forces Green Beret,
or a CAG sniper from Delta.

“What’d I walk into, special operations recruiting command?”
I quipped.

I had, which made it all the more appalling how few options
were open. There was a 10-year waiting list for water logisticians, and a bunch
of other lousy jobs in the Army. They were the most coveted positions around,
according to the recruiter.

I leaned over the desk and grabbed the Ranger by his lapels.
“Listen, I don’t have time for your b.s. Are you telling me that everyone in the military is special
operations?”

He gritted his teeth. “Geddoffa me, you bum,” he said
through clenched teeth. It was good special operations talk, strict, macho, and
I appreciated it, so I let him go and dusted off his shoulders.

“Sorry, don’t mean to be sore. I’ve been out for a while,
this seems really different from the military I was in before,” I explained,
hoping to assuage his anger. It worked: he calmed down.

“Let me see what I can do,” he said. “I’ve seen your record. You did a lot of good work sniping terrorists when you were in. Saved a lot of special operators. And that still means something to us.” He tapped my file meaningfully. “We stand by our own here.”

He sat down in his beaten swivel chair, purchased by the
limitless dark cash swilling about the special operations community (which to
remind you here was basically the whole military at this point!!) and punched
up the employment system only us JSOC / SOCOM folks had access to
(again—literally eighty percent of the military). He scanned through the job
listings for a minute, then turned to face me, his chin resting contemplatively
on a pyramid made by his fingers and thumbs.

“How does this sound. Human waste disposal specialist. Fort
Polk, Louisiana.”

His offer was not suitable, and I told him so.

“Let me hit you with this then, cowboy—more appropriate for
your skill set as a SEAL. Are you ready? Okay. Chaplain’s aide. Comes with a
two-year stabilization incentive. Fort Irwin, Kansas.”

That wasn’t it, either. I would’ve asked for things like
infantry or armor, even artillery, but those jobs were long gone. The Germans
and Poles handled those duties, now, and some Ukrainians. The professions I
could’ve fit into were no longer available and hadn’t been for years. “Got
anything in communications? Signal, public affairs, anything like that?”

He laughed, a harsh and insulting laugh, the more so for its
apparent sincerity. “Look,” he said, wiping tears away, “I got one more
opening. Veterinarian. You go around putting meds up the ass of sheep, donkeys,
that sort of thing. Think you can handle that, hotshot?”

Now, normally, I’d have walked right out. But I could see what was what. If it was between cleaning actual human shit all my waking hours, having to sexually service some randy old clergyman (that’s what chaplain’s aides did and do, it’s a fact, look it up) and slathering up sick animals with medicine to keep them walking, well, dang. I might not’ve made it in the real world, I might’ve been just another financial stock-whatever day-trading bro with a 29-year-old shift manager named Carl who was a cousin of Eric Trump or something screaming at me as though I was a child, and all of my SEAL skills might have come to naught, but dad didn’t raise no fool.

“I’ll do option number three,” I said. And that’s how I got
back into the military, and learned how few people were outside special
operations any more. It wasn’t what I expected, but it wasn’t all bad, either.
The only thing I wish were different (apart from everything about my job) was
that there were fewer generals. I think the exact number is 19.8%, 19.8% of the
Army is generals. And I, dear reader… I am not one of them.

August 2011

I remember when you first joined, I used to tell you that the Army would be four years, the way that college had been four years, and that really used to help you. These days, I’m not so sure. You called me this morning on my way out the door. You know the routine, the sun’s still not out yet so I go out onto the landing looking down on the parking lot to wait for the carpool of teachers so we can drive the hour north to Clinton. Closer to Mississippi than Baton Rouge, but we don’t pick where we’re assigned, you of all people know that. I was smoking my morning cigarette—God, I’m turning into my mother—when you called me and told me you’d killed a man. I didn’t know what to do with that—I don’t know what to do with a lot of the things you tell me. So I told you to wait, wait until you got home. We would deal with it together. You said you didn’t feel anything, weren’t you supposed to feel something? But then Jimmy and Becky and Mormon Rick showed up in the carpool, headlights jumping at the speed bump and I told you I had to go. You said you knew. Hung up.

#

So why did I stay with you? Maybe because I remember the string lights hanging above us like torch flies when we’d kissed. The smell of the East River as you’d walked me to the train. The sound of your voice after midnight, how it felt like biting into something alive. The vacuous kinds of things people with marriages that never last say. Maybe because I looked at you, and there was a sadness on your face that you’d been born with, like the freckle beneath your eye or your fullness of your lips.

You told me about your mother, your father during the war, and I envied them. I thought your parents took up so much space in your heart, and I wanted to take up as much as they did, to be carried as you carry them. Maybe I’m just another white girl with a savior complex, but then, all those Peace Corps kids can always go home. It can’t be like that for me; I need you. I’m struggling to figure out why. If you would just talk to me again in that open way you do like when we’d first met and it was like I’d known you all my life, if you’d topple those walls of sandbags and pull away those spirals of razor wire you put up around you, if you’d fucking say just one honest thing to me instead of going out there every day, rifle in hand, and pretending like you’re doing something good even though you know you aren’t.

When I hear your voice, I know that something else sits there in your heart, beside yours parents’ memories. I should’ve known it was never them—a woman I’d met twice, and a man I’ll never meet—who’d, like a festering tumor, plastered itself to that beating organ. It was always war, wasn’t it? It grew, it grows, it will grow, and one day it’ll kill you. I shouldn’t have to compete with something so big for possession of you. Any sane woman would be long gone. But I wonder if that’s what love is, a kind of insanity, an irrational urge to never wash your pillowcase and sleep in the dip you’ve left in the mattress. A mnemonic kleptomania of the way your hair feels between my fingers, the way your sweat smells stuck to all those worn out shirts, the way your eyes look in the sun—not black, but a deep, warm brown masquerading as the absence of color. A manic episode of binging on the way you smiled. A depressive plateau when I realize I may never see that smile again. I hoard these pieces of you and each one slices into me, bleeds me. It’s the only thing that’s real anymore, the pain of it. And I fear if I ever let go, I’ll be letting go of a piece of myself.

#

Things That Quicken the Heart

(After Sei Shonagon)

How fewer egrets there were after the oil spill. Imagining you with an infant on your chest. Laying down to sleep and dreaming about waking up from this life into another. Looking into a broken mirror that splits me in two. A beautiful woman with a simple request who makes me forget you for just a moment. The weight of a camera, to spool a ribbon of cellophane into it and walk out onto a strange boulevard somewhere, and even if I’m nowhere special, I feel a drunken kind of pleasure knowing I can capture thirteen moments in time. After all this waiting, on a night someday soon, knowing that, like the summer rain, you’ll come back to me and drown the stifling sun with the heat or cold of your body, making my heart quicken.

#

You disappear for days or weeks at a time, and when I don’t get an email or a phone call, I’ll make whoever is driving us to work or home turn the radio to NPR so we can catch the BBC World Service or Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne read the news. I’ll hear things like, five dead in Kandahar, drone strike in Helmand, bombing outside the embassy in Kabul, and Becky or Mormon Rick might say, oh God, but I’d tell them it had nothing to do with you—probably. I often stew over their ignorance, tell them for the fiftieth time you’re in Wardak province, Wardak goddammit, and they forget again the next time, but I guess I can’t really blame them. They don’t have maps of Afghanistan pinned to the walls of their bedrooms.

There was the week you sent me a short email, told me to check the news, and I looked up the Times and there was a developing story about that helicopter full of SEALs that’d been shot down, how it was the biggest loss of life in a single day since the beginning of the war. You called when you got back, told me how, on the last day there in that valley, you’d killed that dog—a bitch you called her. But then you surprised me and said you wished you hadn’t. You said there were pieces of men scattered all through the branches like Christmas ornaments; how the valley smelled like raw crab and you didn’t think you could ever eat crab again. I didn’t know what to say, then. I guess I don’t know what to say still.

Then there was the day bin Laden died. I came home, turned on the news, watching those fraternity bros and sorority girls partying in the streets. I thought, they’re the ones who should get drafted and they’re the ones who should be sent over there, because I wanted you back here with me. It should be them, not you, over there fighting. But you don’t know that, do you?

We say so little when we talk, always speaking around and past and between one another. You want to know more about home, and when I tell you what’s happening in Louisiana, back home in New York, it only makes you seem further away than ever. I want to tell you, instead, how tragedy magnifies beauty, how this pain stitches us together, how I hope that someday all this distance and lack and yearning will be useful, one day. I want to tell you that you need to survive so we can start a family together, like we always wanted. I want to tell you that I know you’ll be a good father, no matter how afraid you are of becoming one. Instead I just talk about the radiators in my classroom cranked up to eleven and phone bills and what so-and-so said at that party I’d half forgotten because I drank too much. If I could go back, change anything, I think I’d like to say what I feel more often.

#

At the beginning of your tour, when we spoke on the phone, it felt like you were right next to me. Now you sound like you’re on an entirely different planet.

#

July 2011

When you told me Sergeant Finley died, I thought of his straw-haired wife, that EMT. I wondered if she would get a flag at his funeral, seeing as they’d been divorced. Or would they give it to her boy? I wanted to give you all the time and space in the world to grieve, I wished you would cry, if only to remind me that the man on the phone was the same man I’d fallen in love with. It’s selfish, I know. But you didn’t, so I cried for you.

#

There’s still time, that’s what I kept thinking the whole time you were on mid-tour leave. Then it ran out and we missed our chance. Now, with all this—a dead man on your conscience, all that fighting, all those moral compromises that have shaken you, I can’t help but think of where I went wrong, what I could’ve done differently to persuade you to run across the Canadian border. Now I worry that even if you make it home in one piece, it wouldn’t matter, because I’ve already lost you.

I know there would have been consequences if you had run. Maybe you would never be able to come back to the States. But it was never your country—not really—anyone could see that. Just a flag and a bunch of stupid rules everyone agreed to. But then again I’m not one to talk, am I? I pay my taxes and have a bank account and drive a car to work every day, I follow the rules just like you, like everyone else. Sometimes I wonder if you think I’m a hypocrite, turning my back on my convictions. You used to say my life was politics, but now, I wonder if you think you couldn’t trust a college anarchist who’d once shouted about abolishing the state, only to become one of its many drones. Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe telling you to run was selfish of me, a way for me to stay true to the woman I’d used to be. Or maybe this was a way to keep you all to myself.

I thought I knew your heart well enough—you were always selfless in a way that you refused to see—and if you didn’t to it for yourself (how could I ever believe you’d do something for yourself?), then at least you’d do it for me. I forgot about your boys. You were thinking about them after Finley died, weren’t you? What you could have done differently. But if you’d gone AWOL, you wouldn’t have been there and it wouldn’t have been your fault and you wouldn’t have to carry that around with you.

I also forgot about Afghanistan. The first few weeks you were there, you’d write me, saying that you hoped there’d be peace soon so I could see it. No place as beautiful in the world, you’d said, you could understand how people believed in God—just seeing how small it makes a man feel, you’d said. Sometimes you’d write angry e-mails or be flustered on the phone over how the people around you refused to see the Afghans as people. Mothers and fathers and children just like us. You’d wanted to do everything to help them, and I was proud of you, but now I wish I hadn’t told you that, because I know your heart is over there, and not here with me.

Sometimes, I dream that you did run off, go AWOL. I see you rowing the little aluminum boat up Champlain, going north, and I’m worried you’ll get lost or caught, but I’ll remember that you’re a soldier and I should have faith in you. In the dream, I wait months or years—impossible to say in that floating life—but I find you, we start our lives over. I go on teaching, you become an artist, we start a family—in Montreal, maybe. I dream our kids have miraculously red hair and wide smiles and you see them and forget all about that faraway country and the mountains that made you feel small. I dream this dream, and when I wake up, I half expect you to be in the kitchen making coffee, frying eggs.

#

I worry sometimes that you’ll kill yourself and leave me all alone to put the pieces back together. Maybe you wouldn’t do it by your own hand, but let the enemy do it for you. That way you get to die a hero. I think about you, sitting on the bank of the Mississippi in New Orleans, before you deployed. We watched the barges and container ships easing past as slow as honey. You joked that if you were killed over there, I’d be able to pay off my student loans with the life insurance money.

#

I’ve been thinking of writing poetry, like Shonagon’s The Pillow Book. I like the idea of a book composed of lists. I like the way that, in Japanese, every word stands on its own.

#

June 2011

When you were on leave, we developed rolls of your film and I saw all those smiling girls in the school you’ve been helping to support. I wish I could speak Dari and I didn’t have asthma and I could come to Afghanistan and teach in your girls’ school. I would teach math, just the same as I do here, teach them to make cranes from square sheets of paper, how to make garlands of them to hang in the classroom. We might have to share the same discomforts and dislocations and disappointments, but at least we would be sharing them together. At least that way, I’d be making a difference. Not like teaching to a test my kids will fail because they’ve got bigger problems, like grandparents on dialysis and electricity getting turned off and their unemployed parents and the revolving door of principals at the school.

If we actually did what we said we were supposed to—get kids to graduate and go off to college and rise out of this backwoods Jim Crow town, that’d put this whole white savior factory out of business, wouldn’t it? I fantasize about flying away from this place every time I go to the dollar store to buy school supplies to send you. When I pack boxes full of crayons and notebooks and pens and coloring books, with a carton of cigarettes or a can of shag tobacco on top for you, I feel like I’m sending myself over there piece by piece. I wish that were truly the case; that I could just mail myself out of here.

I used to look forward to teaching, but these days I’m just looking forward to the end of the week. One of my kids has been acting up since her father left, and one day poured a soda out on one of her friends. I didn’t want to send her down to the vice principal’s just to get smacked around a bit. I told you about the vice principal, didn’t I? Has this big paddle hanging on the wall with air holes drilled into it and a handle wrapped in leather. My student’s grandmother, who has taken over raising her, told me just to whup her right there in front of the whole class. That’s what she’d said, whup. Said if I didn’t want to do it, she knew enough teachers who’d be glad to. I thanked her and hung up. When I told it to one of the other teachers—a scab like me—she said I should’ve let the vice principal take care of it. These kids can be animals, she said. Her eyelids have become a sleepless shade of red, her skin—I used to marvel over how it was so clear she never had to wear foundation—was caked to cover up the way her skin looks like spoiled milk from all the stress. When she said, animals, there was a rusty creak in her birdsong voice. We were all so idealistic when we’d started. How much a year can wear on you.

I don’t think you remember when I told you this on one of the nights we talked. Our conversation lasted only a few minutes—you’d just gotten back from a long patrol rotation. You didn’t say much, but when you spoke, I heard that creak in your voice too.

#

May 2011

After you started helping that Afghan school, I felt something else. A little worse than envy. It seemed like your work was the most important thing in the world and I took a back seat. You, playing the man, the savior, the martyr, the hero. You get to be Odysseus. I’m typecast as Penelope.

You fucker, can’t you see how hard I’ve tried, how much work I’ve done for you? I do the taxes, I pay the bills, I go apartment hunting, I manage the bank accounts. I’m the one on the phone with the rear-detachment commander every time we get a red message, a white message, seeing if there’s anything I can do for the families of those dead and wounded boys. I’m not some shrinking violet in the damn wives club, and even if I were, they’ve got kids to raise while you men are off playing GI Joe. Can’t I be the hero of my own story?

But I don’t suppose you know that. A little like how I can’t know what combat is like, how I can’t feel it in my veins.  So how could you ever know what it’s like waking up every morning and wondering if today will be the day two men arrive on my doorstep to tell me you’re dead? How do we balance the two? How do we reach across these shores?

If I were the hero of this story, it would be the war at home, not the one over there that I’d fight. We’d march on the Capitol, throw off the government and hang the profiteers and politicians from their neckties, line Pennsylvania Avenue with their corpses and leave them for the crows. I’d build schools where we taught girls and boys that life isn’t money; it’s clear September days and the way the leaves are most beautiful before shedding in death and how finishing a book is as bittersweet as saying goodbye to a friend. If I were a hero, I’d go over there and rescue you, my damsel, and all the soldiers toiling and bleeding and dying. If I were a hero, I’d have a little agency, a choice to make, a journey with arcs and morals and an ending well earned, but this isn’t that kind of story.

#

March 2011

Here is a List of Things That Make My Heart Lurch:

-Strangers’ footsteps in front of my door.

-The country code +93 before a number beckoning on my phone.

-The word Afghanistan.

-The words America and liberty and freedom, and how I don’t know what they mean anymore.

-The words Standardized Testing.

-How the word rifle, which figures so heavily into the stories you tell me, is so violating, as if a stranger goes through my things each time I hear it.

-A scowling parent and/or guardian.

-The sounds of police helicopters overhead and how I look up and wonder if you too are looking up at a metal bird beating its wings.

-The way I sometimes confuse your dismay at what you’re doing over there with my dismay at what I’m doing here.

-Other couples with their cliches, couples who wonder if their lovers are looking up at the same moon. For you and me, that’s impossible. The moon can’t show its face to both of us at once, and my day is your night.

-Sleep deprivation combined the hour long commune to East Feliciana Parish at 5am.

-What waiting feels like.

-What nothing feels like.

-What knowing that no matter how hard I try, I’ll fail feels like.

-The nightly news.

#

February 2011

There’s one memory I save for special occasions. I hide it away, use it sparingly to keep its blade sharp. It comes out when I’m alone and the night is cold like it had been the night we’d met. When I see a couple all tangled up in one another’s arms. When the news reports six dead in a suicide bombing at a remote forward operating base. In it, you walk me to the train. I wear your coat. You even swiped onto the platform to see me onto the car. Then I gave you my number. Then the train took me home. You forgot to take your coat back. Then you called the next day. No one does that.

#

January 2011

I wish my great-grandmother Ada were still alive today, so she could tell me what it was like to see her husband enlisted in the Navy and sent off to the battles on the Atlantic. I wish I were as lucky as she; to learn that the war had ended ahead of schedule, sparing my great grandfather, sparing the generations that followed from meeting our ends at the hands of a German submarine captain. I’d want to ask her what was in my great-grandfather’s heart when he’d sworn that oath of enlistment to a country that hadn’t considered us Jews any more American than they consider blacks or Latinos or anyone or Vietnamese. I’d want to know what my grandfather’s skin felt like when they reunited, if the sun had tanned and cracked his face, if ropes had calloused the palms and fingertips his large hands, if there were other changes—in his heart for instance—which took years to undo, changes which could never be undone.

#

November 2010

I sometimes wonder if it was right to follow you to this place. I wondered it the day you left, and I saw you march to the buses that’d take you to the plane that’d take you away. I had to drive the two hours back to Baton Rouge to get to work on time, and I got lost in a cornfield because I couldn’t stop crying long enough to notice I’d taken a wrong turn, and I thought why the fuck did I follow you here? I don’t mean Louisiana.

#

October 2010

I hadn’t been able see you when the whole brigade assembled on Honor Field, patchy with carcinomas of dead grass and barren dirt. You said you you’d be in the first rank, and that may have been true, but I didn’t see you. You said you saw me there, in my green dress with my Yashica in hand, waiting to snap a six by six of you, my soldier husband. I thought I’d show it to our children one day, and they’d say it was funny how daddy’s body blended into the bodies around him, your uniforms melting into the half-dead landscape. A hot day, and the medics had their hands full with soldiers passing out from standing in the sun so long. Everyone wore those bladders of water on their backs, and you seemed less like brave soldiers and more like brigade of hunchbacks. They played some Sousa march from speakers hooked up to a CD player. It reminded me of high school football games. I thought of our future children again, and what you said to me when your orders came through for Afghanistan—there was more danger here, in America. That I ran a higher risk of dying in a car crash than you did in combat. Look at the numbers, how few people died anymore. Saved by the wonders of modern medicine, all the clotting agents and cargo planes turned into ICUs and little strips of velcro and ballistic nylon used to stem blood from severed limbs. You told me about all these things that were meant to reassure me, but didn’t. You marched past and I couldn’t find you, so I snapped a photo of a row of soldiers, their heads turned to face the reviewing stand.

#

September 2010

At the cavalry ball, you men all wore your ridiculous cowboy hats and silver spurs on your shoes as if they made you like those horse soldiers on the plains, as if they tied you to history. It would’ve been amusing if I was drunk, but I stayed sober so I could drive us the hour home. I stewed. At our table, Barker kept making jokes about the red snapper, and I told him to shut his mouth. I think his wife, Kelly, smiled at that, but I can’t be sure. She didn’t say anything all night.

You sang your damn songs and waved your damn flags, and I thought it was all a nice bit of trickery, all this ceremony and pomp. What is it Napoleon said, that he could persuade a man to die for a pretty piece of ribbon? You were getting drunk with your soldiers, who had their arms around you, pulling you towards the dance floor, and I could see how uncomfortable that made you; how you couldn’t tell where the line was between fraternal love and fraternization. But they were—we all were—just a bunch of dumb kids.

I didn’t talk to the officers’ wives; we didn’t have anything in common, not really. Tupperware parties and boozy breakfasts and needlepoint or whatever it was they did with their time. The enlisted wives—who were covered in tattoos with jobs as bakers or smile-worn shop girls or soon-to-be de facto single mothers—all reminded me of people back home, a little creased and windswept, even though they were, for most part, youngish. Two of them were still in their teens; they could’ve been plucked out of the graduating class of my anemic Upstate high school. They were both knock-kneeed and vine-armed and clinging to each other while their husbands—barely old enough to drink themselves—fed them booze for what I’m sure they thought would be a romantic night. They reminded me too much of home, so I kept to myself. I was alone, even then, even with you just a few yards away. That’s not why I came to shindig, to sit by myself and watch a bunch of grown men act like kids who’d broken into their parents’ liquor cabinet.

You and I used to sit in laundromats and make up stories about strangers passing by the big storefront window or eavesdrop on diners in the restaurants we could barely afford, whispering jokes about their problems and arguments and bougie sensibilities. We’d been so sure we would never be those people. I remember once, it had rained while we were out buying books and it didn’t let up, so we’d had to spring to the L and rode home soaked. You put my book—I can’t even remember what I’d bought—and stuffed it under your jacket so it wouldn’t get wet. We stripped out of our clothes when we got home and you made tea. I lay in bed naked, thumbing through a graphic novel—The Photographer—and there was something about all those images, the real contacts sheets and fictive illustrations, and the way the protagonist cried that’d given me the idea to give you a camera to take with you over there. You brought in the tea and we drank it. Got under the covers of your thin twin mattress, and stayed up talking about all the nothing we’d do after you were done with the Army, talking about where we’d live and what our kids might look like—if we wanted them. We’d talked about how, sometimes, the most important thing in an image wasn’t its subject, but what lay just outside the frame. We’d talked until we stopped, and we stopped because we slept, and we slept through the soundless night in your windowless room and it felt like the world had ended and it was just the two of us in our abandoned city. When I woke, I was disappointed to hear your roommates shuffling around outside the door, to hear that life had continued without us.

Here it was again, all this life around me marching forward, but this time I was alone. Your men kept pressing drinks on you, and each time you refused, but took it anyway, and you were all were singing, I wanna be in the cavalry, if they send me off to war. So I went to have a cigarette, out in the air, which was somehow as sticky hot as inside, and found a bench out front. I hadn’t noticed that Barker had followed me out. He asked me if I was okay, and I just shrugged, and didn’t say anything. I gathered he wasn’t used to that—not being listened to. He started talking about my dress, if this was one of those ironic things people my age did. Something about making a statement by dressing like a flapper instead of wearing a ball gown like all the other women. It was an A-line, a formal mid-century modern piece I’d found in a thrift store, but I didn’t bother to correct him. I was a little afraid of him, the way he looked at me, the way he swayed ever so slightly. He was drunk, and I might be able to throw a mean punch, but he’s a large man and we were basically alone. I crossed my arms, like I was cold. He offered me his jacket, which I didn’t want. He sat down beside me, fanned himself with his Stetson. He said I shouldn’t worry, he’d do what he could to bring me back. He said it’d be hard, what I was about to go through, told me how when he’d come back after Iraq, things with Kelly, well they’d never gone back to the way they’d been before. I thought these were just the musings of a drunkard who’d stayed in the Army too long, who’d lost touch. These days, I wonder if he was trying to warn me.

#

Here is a List of Things I Would Do if I Left You:

Here is a List of Things I Would Do if You Died:

–Drink Find something less cliche to do, something warm and numbing, something that feels like early-onset dementia—and permanent.

-Find someone new to sleep with and feel nothing.

-Gather up a handful of blow-flowers and instead of doing what the name commands, set them on fire.

-Think about suicide without making a plan.

–Eat a handful of pills. I could eat a handful of pills, but someone would find me because I’m a broke-ass teacher and we share everything, like cars and bar tabs and apartments and a pool of school supplies which always comes up short when you go looking for another manila folder or calculator battery—and yeah, we share pills too—so that’s out.

-Think about suicide and try not to look at the Huey P. Long bridge—the second smaller one, its steel bones oxidizing to death—or the Mississippi. Think about how stupid people are when they believe water will somehow be softer than concrete at that height.

-Go to the funeral.

-Push everyone away.

-Quit TFA and leave all the future politicians padding their resumes and the twenty-two-year-old scabs who don’t know better and the white saviors with their Jesus complexes behind.

-Nothing.

-More nothing.

-Enough nothing to get behind on the rent, which, as you know, is not at all like me.

-Live out of my car for a while.

-Consider moving to Arizona like my doctor had suggested when I’d been hospitalized for asthma for the fifth time in a year. Consider doing something with turquoise, maybe. Remember how much I hate sand and heat and the sun and fucking turquoise.

-Move back in with my parents.

-Climb the Adirondacks

-Try not to think about suicide when I make a climb in the rain. Try not to hope for an accident, a slip, a broken neck, a painless death.

-Write poetry, let one be titled: Here is a List of Things I Would Do if You Died.

            -Write a poem titled: Here is a List of Things I Would Do if I Left You.

-Burn everything I’d written.

            –Never write poetry again.

-Never shave a hair on my body again.

-Never date another man again.

-Never look at anything that reminds me of you.

-Never start wearing makeup.

-Never date.

-Never say never.

-Drink, and try to think of less cliche things to do with grief.

-Apply to every job that’ll take me to the place that took you from me.

-If rejected from every job for which I’d applied: book a ticket to Kabul anyway.

-Make a list of things to pack. A camera will be at the top of it.

-If visa to Afghanistan gets rejected, buy a ticket to Pakistan, plan to sneak across the border.

-Come home alive or die there or never come home at all or abandon all those plans—I haven’t decided yet.

-Buy a hairless cat, name him/her/they Gefilte Fish. (I’ve always wanted a cat.)

-Live longer than my cat; remember that nothing lasts, especially not love.

-Find the shoeboxes and musk-laden clothes and books and 35mm negatives that remind me of you and start a fire and burn it all and immediately regret what I’ve done.

-Find some small town—preferably in Vermont—with an empty role to fill, a need, a lack. Occupy that unoccupied space, and with time, become a familiar fixture, a woman with graying hair, a woman past her prime and alone. Become someone everyone wonders about, worries about. Become an enigma, a mystery. Let them say, there’s Old Lady Fishman, off to the library/animal shelter/schoolhouse/tollbooth, what a sad story—even if they can only speculate. I’ll put my lights on at Halloween and give out full-sized candy bars. I’ll put out food for all the neighborhood strays and the town will try to stop me, but they won’t succeed. I’ll teach a class to the local kids on how to photograph, just like I’d taught you; I’d teach them to think about the picture plane and what lies outside it and how absence is sometimes more poignant. Maybe I’ll find another lonely woman, let her fall in love, never her tell her anything. (She’ll leave eventually.) And when I’m in my autumnal years, I’ll think of how trees are most beautiful before they die and think about you and not think about suicide and fade and fade and finally go, and I’ll die thinking that if I can let you go in this life, it’ll make the next one, our next meeting, our next reunion, that much more sweet.

#

March 2010

Our honeymoon was one night in a fancy hotel. The next day, you drove two days south to your new unit.

#

Our wedding day, in the living room of my parents’ creaky old farmhouse, was a string of mishaps. It was rushed. So much went wrong. My mother was sour that we hadn’t asked the rabbi to conduct the ceremony, but a county judge. At least he looked Jewish, she said. When your family arrived, your grandmother brought me a jade bracelet as a wedding present, but it wouldn’t slip over my knuckles, not even with a little grease, so I couldn’t accept it. Then I heard your little brother whisper to my brother how he’d just enlisted, and to not tell you, because last time you saw him, you’d told him not to join. Then we even saw each other before the ceremony, and my mother rushed you back into my bedroom where you were changing. It’s a stupid tradition to keep bride and groom apart, but I guess that’s what I’d signed up for. Some anarchist I am. Just to make sure, you practiced breaking the glass under the chuppa half a dozen times, and each time you did it perfectly.

But then none of it mattered, because I saw the tears in your eyes and heard the shudder in your voice when you recited our vows. I wasn’t thinking of tomorrow or the next day, just this moment together. If you weren’t wearing your dress blues, we could’ve pretended we were just like any other couple in the world. But I hold onto that moment, that idea that a wedding ring represents infinity—I hoped, for once, one of these damn symbols would hold up. My father put the glass on the ground. You brought your foot down on it, but it slid off, breaking only the stem. I wonder now if it was an omen, but you’d always been the superstitious one, not me.

#

After we got our marriage license, we threw ourselves a little engagement party. You were on leave. The old rad crew was all there, belting out Defiance, Ohio songs and dancing like the tomorrow would never come to that indie electronica garbage you like so much. There were gifts, even—like we were real adults. Sara brought us that Spanish wine that we didn’t know would, turn to vinegar during the move to Louisiana. Daria brought us pralines from New Orleans without knowing I was allergic to all those tree-nuts. We got a few cards, a leather-bound edition of Arabian Nights from Ranya, which, if you’re wondering, I call dibs on if we ever get divorced. I don’t know why I joke like that. I don’t know if I could’ve stood any more gifts than that, and thank God all our friends lived on day-old bread and bottles of Four Roses and were too broke to give us anything but their presence—or pretended to be that poor, at least.

Everyone marveled at how we were getting married, how young we were—I was 21, you were 22. I guess we’re still young, in a way. I know some people judged us for it. Judged me, really. They were my friends, anyway. All those dreadlocked boys with their bandannas tied around their necks like their convictions and girls who’d thought freeing the nipple was the first step towards the revolution. That’s the thing, we were so young, believed so ardently that things like matrimony and jobs are quaint antiquities that belong in museums. But that’s not real life. They didn’t have to worry about the things we did to pay for college like holding three jobs or joining the military, and still leaving with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. If I told them how it is now, waking up in the night, thinking there’s a knock at the door, and two men in their blues are waiting outside, what would they say? If it were them, what would they do? Anyway it was my choice.

Arianna was there. You already know all about us. You already know she was never right for me. But she’s loyal, and my friend, and I couldn’t just throw that away. She watched the two of us dancing our asses off, dancing and drinking because it all hurt so much was already on our shoulders. I found her crying in the stairwell, her voice bouncing off the breezeblocks. She’d told me she asked you why you were doing this—the Army and all that. You said you had to go. She told me, he’s got you, Mir, and now what’re we going to do? I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she was drunk, and I pulled her up and folded her into my arms. She held the hug for a little too long, pressing her nose into my hair. She pulled back and looked at me with her head tilted to the side, her eyes half-closed. I don’t know when I’ll ever get around to telling you this, Dave, but she tried to kiss me. Like it was the easiest thing in the world to get me back, like real life and marriage and hardship and poverty were quaint things best left in museums. I dragged her back inside, told her she was drunk.

#

November 2009

I decided we’d get engaged, there in the whispering gallery with all those Metro North commuters buzzing past. We were going to my Aunt’s place in Westchester. You were on pass; flown in from Armor School for Thanksgiving. I was thinking how we had so little time, how fast life was moving—and wasn’t it crazy that two kids had to rush like this? But it wasn’t rushing, it was the right time. How we knew, and couldn’t explain it, but we did. I was thinking, at least if he gets hurt, I’ll get to come to the hospital. At least if he dies, I’ll get a folded American flag. A Gold Star in my window. The excuse of a lifetime. I was thinking how I’d look in a black dress and a black veil and what it’d feel like to watch your body lowered into the ground and how selfish I was—that’s what came to mind, selfishness—to fantasize about your death.

And/or I was thinking of simple things—the ways your eyes snatch the light out of the room, how your face opens up when you see a film, the way your hair feels between my fingertips. How our words curl and nest into each other’s and I feel like something missing had been found. Does that make sense? Let me try another way of saying it. When you speak, I can’t help but listen. When I talk, I can’t help but feel heard. And without you, I’m mute to the world, deaf to its music. How no one else in the world can do that to me. Fuck me, I’m drunk and you’ve got me talking all purple. I’ve always hated over-qualified language. But it’s always the small things, the details.

I thought these things, and decided—in a split second—to tell you to stand in one corner and press your ear to the tiled wall. I hushed my words up the vaulted ceiling and over the bustling commuters’ heads and into your ear. I slipped those words in like my tongue, and I could almost taste the bitter wax and delicate hairs when I said marry me. I thought about how I could stick my tongue in your ear, and that’s all I needed to get you going. I was thinking how much like foreplay it was. How our children might look, what features they’d steal from you, from me. What your body would look like beneath a closed casket, because I can’t imagine it being anything but closed. How there’d be a hunk of me carved away and how I’d wake up each morning you were gone and be surprised that I’d waken up at all.

#

October 2009

As a birthday present, I sent you a copy of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. You said it was the best gift you’d ever received. Then, you sent me the diary you’d filled since you’d started training. I was dismayed at how often you’d sketched scenes of your own death.

#

August 2009

You went back and forth between the city and all those joint bases and forts and posts where you’d trained. Each time, you’d come back to me a little changed—though I don’t think you’d noticed. After Fort Benning, your manner had stiffened. You told me how one of your training sergeants said you were too polite, that it just wouldn’t do in combat. They asked which branch you’d been assigned to, and when you told them Armor and Cavalry, they laughed. No room for good manners among tankers and scouts, they’d said. Still, you spent nearly all your pay on flights back to me when they gave you the rare weekend pass. I thought that’d be enough to keep us—this—going.

#

July 2009

There’s a photo you took of me in Montana, on the first leg of our cross-country road trip. That was supposed to be our send-off. The last hurrah between college and the real world. We’d agreed that this was how our relationship would end. I look at that photo now; I use it as the backdrop for my computer, and sometimes I think it’s a kind of self harm, like I’m carving hatch-marks into my skin every time I set my eyes on it. I’m the subject in the photo—a strange sensation. I’m wearing your plaid flannel, cleaning my camera. There’s a layering of images—you’re on the other side of the motel window, the reflection of a parking lot of cars superimposed on our room, the ghost of your silhouette imprinted on the pane of glass. I see me as you see me, and that makes the distance harder. Don’t ask me to explain how that works. I’m looking at the photo, and it’s only been a year, but I’m already thinking, I used to have such good skin, I’m already thinking, we used to be so young.

We went out to dinner that night at the motel bar, where they served us steak and fries, and when we were done, we got a six-pack of that skunky beer they called Moose Drool, which I hated, but which you liked just fine. When we finished it, we had sex on the motel bed with a movie flickering on our bodies, and it felt desperate, like something out of a neo-noir film, like we were on the run from gangsters or cops or both, and of course they’d all have ridiculous accents. Cawfee. Shawtgun. Brawd. I wished it was real—that we were on the run, I mean. And if the villains caught up to us at the end and we made our last stand in some seedy parking garage staring down a dozen goons with automatics, that would be fine by me.

At the time, I was thinking about how far we’d come to just end it. It couldn’t; I couldn’t. We saw Ohio and all that flat farmland, Chicago on the shore where you reached down and dipped your hand into Lake Michigan, the Twin cities where we imagined ourselves settling in a brick house if New York ever sank into the Atlantic, the Crow Reservation where I wanted to go one day, to teach, and past Billings and Bozeman and Butte and Missoula and into the Rockies. How much further we’d go. Past the mountains, into Idaho, through Coeur d’Alene, where you’d be terrified of the way down, coasting the whole winding descent. We’d strike forth into the Eastern Washington scrublands and desert, into the Redwood forests and onto the coast, the briny-aired Pacific coast. And I’d imagine it’d be a new beginning, just the two of us. I would’ve let that air stay in my lungs forever if I could, but it wasn’t the start of a new life, just a brief interlude.

When you reported to your first duty station—a temporary posting to train cadets, just like you’d been a year ago—I flew back to New York to my para job at PS 21 and the ICP gig. You’d given me all those rolls of film and all those moments  from out trip, and when I developed them, I was surprised to see how many you’d taken of me. That image of me in your flannel, the ghost of you on the window. I thought about asking you to marry me.

I’m thinking about that damn photo, and thinking about taking it down, replacing it with a black field, because when I look at it, I remember that what I’d felt when we drove across the mountains and forests and plains and cities of this God-forsaken country, how I felt like the last woman alone left on Earth with the only man in the entire world, and that hurts, Dave, you can’t imagine how much that hurts.

#

May 2009

I gave you my dad’s old 35mm before we graduated, and we went out into Carroll Gardens to practice shooting. You didn’t load the film right—the sprocket holes hadn’t lined up. I took it to the dark room and found one long, empty strip. I still have photos of you from that day—you on top of a traffic light control box, you at the edge of the F and G train tracks, you in front of Rocketship Comics aiming your lens at me. You thinking you’d captured all these moments.

#

I try writing about things, like they’ll make them easier to say. All that comes out is bad poetry, fragments of memories.

#

Do you remember how you’d been saying that you knew distance was hard? You never said you were thinking about your parents, about the day your dad had left.

#

Do you remember our first date, not the time we met at the Waverly, but our first real date? Film Forum was showing Sans Soleil. You left the theatre in a haze.

#

I can’t seem to describe a sun as a sun unless it’s radiant. A spring is not a spring unless it’s limpid.

#

I remember the first time you said, I love you. It wasn’t when you thought, not at the top of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, but in your sleep when you came to stay the night in the dorm where I RA’d.

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January 2008

I follow my friends to your place for a party, a rent party they called it. There you are, thinking you’re so smooth, but you’re drunk off your ass. Handsome in your own awkward kind of way, and not stringy like all the beanied bearded hipsters. At least you’re not dangerous. At least I’ve got my friend around me.You ask if I’m Jewish, and I think that’s an odd kink. I want nothing to do with you; I’m looking to hook up with another girl. I’d broken up with Arianna a few days before, but I won’t mention that. And you’re still here, acting like a schmuck. The music’s playing, some David Bowie cover band. You pour me a beer that’s ninety percent foam, grinning at me the whole time.

A few minutes later, I witness you making out with someone else. (Did you forget you’d been hitting on me?) You had the nerve to come back, trying your bungling German pickup lines (I’d told you I spent a semester in Berlin). I was a little down, and hell, you ask nicely, so I let you kiss me. We make out, and it’s nice because I can forget about my two jobs and student debt and financial aid and Arianna. I can forget, and you’ve got wide, soft lips, and the press of your fingertips just wrap me up in this second. You try to convince me to stay the night. I laugh, tell you I’ve got work in the morning (I lie). Just a little make out session, that’s all it’s supposed to be. That’s all I need. But you sober up. We talk a little, dance a little, there’s a DJ on now. When I want to go home, you offer to walk me all the way to the train in the snow. It’s not snowing, but it’s a nice flourish, and that’s how I’ll choose to remember it.

You wear your flannel shirt, and I wear your workman’s coat. The streetlights all take on fuzzy haloes and toss our shadows far ahead and behind us. You tell me you listen to electro-clash and hip-hop and folk music. I stare at the warehouses that go for blocks, the ones under demolition and the fishbowl condos taking their places. You tell me how when you hear Pete Seeger play Frank Proffitt’s “Going Across the Mountain” the banjo sounds just like a dan nguyet, how that song about the Civil War might as well be a Vietnamese song. We’re all wrapped up in history, I say, and you ask me if you can hold my hand and I say yes. A hipster dive is still open on North Fifth. A Polish bar is still open on Bedford Ave. But they’ll be closed soon. We’re racing daylight for a few hours of sleep. The warehouses end on a block of vinyl-sides row-houses and shutters shops and restaurants. I expect you to leave at the corner of the station, but you walk down. I expect you to say goodbye at the turnstile, but you swipe in. We wait on the platform and I tell you about folk-punk, which you think sounds a little funny, but say makes sense anyway. You apologize for being so forward at the party, and ask to see me again.

The train won’t be here for another fifteen, and you tell me about your future, what the next couple of years hold. The Army. I write my number in the notebook I find in your coat pocket, a fresh one with a few sketches—a dead rat, a woman holding a child, the facade of a brownstone being demolished, but the rest is still fresh, blank. It’s the empty sheets of paper which appeal to me the most. I say I’d like to see you again, but what I say is overpowered by the announcement that the train is here. It howls into the station and the doors open and I enter and you’re on the edge of the platform and I’m on the edge of the car and for a moment that’s nothing between us and you ask to kiss me and I nod but the doors close. I try to tell you that we have all the time in the world for a kiss, but the announcer is too loud, the doors too thick. Then the train takes me away.

“Japanese Poetry Never Modifies” first appeared in the Columbia Journal, November 12, 2018.

Photo courtesy goodfreephotos.com.

It was not rare to see horses on Main Street when I was growing up in this town. I was spindly and spry then, when distances were calculated by how much jerky and water to pack, when the idea of pocket-sized computers was still the realm of science-fiction, the same stuff as teleportation devices and alien invasions. Around the house an intricate network of deer trails canvased the woods like a sense of smell. I’d run them through the sagebrush and chokecherries, shivering in the shade of dense lodgepole pine stands. Still panting, I’d knock on a neighbor’s door and ask a mother if her child could go to the river.

We’d walk miles in our minds, finely-tuned to the snapping of dry branches in the needle-cast, summoning to our soft skin the possibility of predators emerging with the warmth of a late spring day. The distant sound of swift water rushing over boulders always made us start running.

Rays broke on the surface and scattered as if through a fractured emerald onto the slick stones below, shimmering off the scales of large trout and made hazy where their tails whipped up a cloud of fine silt, spooked by our careless approach. In the deeper pools heated by afternoon sun there was no place for our bodies to know their own boundaries. It was a richer kind of air through which every motion rippled to the bank and returned to us, but slower, expanding.

Where the May and June runoff cut the bank from beneath a large cottonwood its roots reached exposed like tentacles into the water. By mid-summer we could entwine our arms in them and float on the surface cutting the gentled current with our heads as we looked to the bottom and into the shadows, hoping the fish might not mind our company and maybe even glide along the length of our bodies. We would bask on the smooth, day-baked stones, let the sun dry us, scratch the sand from our scalps and feel clean, even a little magical walking home.

In late summer my father would wake me before dawn with his large hand on my shoulder, the smell of coffee drifting in behind him. A quiet blue light through the trees laid our shadows down before us on the trail, fishing poles sprouting from our heads like antennae. Sleep still in my eyes, I imagined being led to the river by some dreamed extension of myself, one who might rather do anything than trick a fish into swallowing a hook just to turn it back to the current, stunned and bleeding. Tearing barbs from their mouths and throats then holding them like trophies while they mouthed the air was a suffering I learned to fold into layers of pride. I’d ask why we didn’t keep them and was told there was no need.

The temperature dropped sharply near the river as soon as it could be heard. My skin raised with the chill and my heart sank to hear my father’s pace quicken. He inhaled the cool morning into his nostrils with pious vigor. Later, looking upstream, he welled with pride to see my pole bowed down to the weight and fight of a large trout. He laughed and shouted, “Fish on!” as he made his way toward me with the net in his hand.

————     

I knew they were Cal’s boots stomping around on the hardwood. His restless energy vibrated through the floor and into my head. I gathered my jacket back into a lumpy pillow and tried to fall asleep again. He opened the front door then stomped back, smacking me on the head as he passed with the rolled up newspaper he had retrieved then trumpeted the first few notes of reveille through it.

Every minute or so, just as I started to doze off, he’d loudly clear his throat, pick up the paper by either side and pop it as if to freshen the news before smoothing it back down on the table. I squinted with one eye and leered at him across the room with all the hungover evil I could conjure. His hair was cow-licked where his head had finally come to rest after the long night of drinking and dancing, embellishing war stories, and doing whatever we thought those stories gave us license to do.

Every couple of weeks it seemed we began making feints into blackout territory, each night a fresh chance to regain the thrill of courting death and going once more unto the breach, as Cal liked to call it. Empty bottles stood gathered together on the table. From my floor’s-eye-view they looked like a city of glass buildings. I remembered Cal upending one then musing woozily to it, “Thank you for your service,” as he added it to the skyline. I remembered dancing wildly to Louis Prima and an almost inhumanly beautiful, dark-haired young woman yelling at me and storming out into the snow—Oh, Marie! Tell me you love me. I let out a long dramatic groan and rolled onto my back.

“Where’d she go, Cal? Where’s the girl of my dreams? The love of my life?”

Even when he wasn’t reading the paper he never really listened to anybody. He ignored me and started reading out loud: “At 3:36 a.m. a woman reported a nude man at Main Street and 3rd Avenue jogging with a hammer and chanting….” In the seven years I’d known him, reading the police blotter had become something of a ritual, one which required coffee to be fully appreciated first thing in the morning. I reminded him of this. He told me to get up and make it myself.

“Wouldn’t go in there barefoot,” he added without looking up from the paper as I pulled myself off the floor.

“Why not?”

He scoffed.

I stepped into a pair of Cal’s beat-up cowboy boots by the door and walked to the kitchen. It looked like a grenade had gone off. Cabinet doors were splintered on the linoleum or dangling from their hinges, the breakfast table and chairs laid upended surrounded by shards of bottles and dishes. In a corner the coffee machine was in pieces, all of it soaking in pools of wine. My eyes rolled over the scene turning up little flashes of memory. My stomach began to turn. I knew what had happened but I asked Cal anyway.

“You happened, you crazy bastard. You went dark as the devil.”

I was locked inside my skull again, where Cal’s voice echoed absently like some tired machine switched-on and abandoned. I remembered a dream-like space where time and gravity unfixed themselves and there was nothing to give my body shape but vague, immovable objects where the waves crashed; where I wanted wild and inexplicable things; to catch a rattlesnake, kiss it on the mouth, grip it by the jaws and pull it over my head like a balaclava. I wanted to vibrate. To hum and rattle into pieces.

————

Cal and I would jog from downtown calling cadence like the ghosts of soldiers, released to haunt everyone’s dreams on those snowy, sleeping streets. We would call on the emptiness to recognize us, to embrace us as its own: Mama, mama can’t you see…what the Army’s done to me? We’d wake up and drink coffee and read the paper like we’d aged a hundred years overnight.

Cal said we needed to quit blowing money on hangovers and buy a couple horses already. I could usually count on this train of thought after a night of dragging our drunk bodies around town. “All my old tack’s just gatherin’ dust in my aunt’s barn. Bet she’d probably cut us some slack on a couple geezers. Get us started anyway. Get us outta this shithole and into the wild anyway.” He’d dream us there and try to convince me it was what we were put on earth to do. That one cool morning we’d saddle those horses and disappear like phantoms into some blue shadowland, as if somewhere just beyond the horizon a paradise was waiting to be reclaimed. “We’ll sell everything and just go. What’s the song say? Rob the grave of the setting sun.”

He’d pop the paper as if to set it all in motion. I’d go along, too sick and tired to pretend like I had a better idea. Not to say he didn’t have something. Cal had vision. If anyone did, he had the drive to turn back the clock, or if not, at least smash the damn thing and start from scratch. He accused the world of trying to pull one over on him, trying to wash his brain clean of some ancient instinct. He knew better though. He could see it all happening right before his eyes. And he’d be damned if so-called progress was going to catch him sleeping. He’d roll a fat joint and lay on his back on the hardwood floor, blowing clouds of smoke at the ceiling, picturing exactly how he was being screwed out of his destiny.  

————       

In a sterile, over-air-conditioned conference room Cal pictured a three-point-plan written on a dry erase board. He could hear the whisk and thwack of an aluminum pointer striking the whiteboard under each number as a buttoned-down agent eyes one of the many pale faces around the table. “One,” said the agent with detached authority, “Disenfranchise.” Cal saw him swat the board under the next word, scan and lock eyes with a different face. “Two,” he shouted this time, making his victim pucker and quiver, “Romanticize.” Then a thwack and a new face for the third and final pronouncement: “Commodify.”

The room nodded in obedient assent. “It’s that simple, men. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” He then led them in a three-count, swatting each word down the list for punctuation and lastly under the slogan written above them all, which they uttered in solemn unison. I heard Cal’s voice before I walked in. He was laying on the floor, chanting at the ceiling: “Kill the Cowboy, save the boots!”

      ————

When Cal came home from areas he often referred to as the “wild west,” he felt everything harassing him, closing in on him, telling him he was too late. “Too many goddamn people on this earth. Zombies,” he’d correct himself, “and their kiss-ass little cyber-lives; big-money buyin’ up the whole goddamn valley, pricin’ out real goddamn people; fuckin’ movie-star wannabes turnin’ working ranches into playthings….” He’d work himself up and have to roll a joint. Though he would never admit it, he was paralyzed with fear. He saw the way of his father and grandfather, his birthright, the way of the cowboy “going the way of the Indian,” as he put it. He laid on the floor throughout the day exhaling thick clouds at the ceiling and rubbing his temples. Images of conspiracy and betrayal loosened and drifted from his mind. Like Judas, he thought, feeling suddenly a new, special kinship with Jesus.

He pictured a resurrected Christ clinching a thin cigarillo between his teeth and squinting through the shadow of a sharp, felt brim. He saw the hand of God drawing the cold, heavy steel from his holster as he considered a man in a business suit kneeling before him, shielding the sun from his eyes. Arrayed in that righteous light, thumbing back the hammer and tenderly touching the muzzle to the man’s impure lips, Jesus smiled—Cal smiled. “Kiss this,” they said.

————

When I came home I burned my uniform with all its ribbons and badges. Made a ceremony of it and everything. Cal considered it an act of treason and shunned me for months. But, for better or worse, I was bound to him. And him to me. Without Cal’s kind of animal sensitivity and callous justice, I might not have made it home at all.

————

We put it behind us, both desperate for an old kind of familiarity, even if a false and decidedly immoderate one. I had developed lofty ideas of self-deconstructionism, that I was somehow dismantling something broken inside my head. And I did truly believe this. But after a couple bottles of wine it became tiresome and all I had was bleary aim at something near pleasure. I could at least hit the present moment, it being a pretty big target. In it I surrendered to a sense of time and gravity backing their screws out of my bones. Every motion seemed fluid, intuitive, rippling out from my body toward some mystical integration, but ultimately retuning a kind of lazy hypnotism—the kind of magic you long to believe but also loathe for the weakness that longing betrays. That was the general, dull ache of it. Things that could never truly be, maybe never were at all. Out of place. Out of time. But we soldiered on through the illusion, allowing the selves we remembered being to manifest friction for traction.

————

It was a Friday night. Every Friday night art galleries on main street opened their doors and offered complimentary wine to anyone who entered so long as they pretended to care about the stuff inside. Cal and I used to make it our duty to impose and make sure that no wine went to waste. We filled and refilled plastic cups as if hydrating for a mission. Once loose enough, we’d liberate bottles from the table and walk around with them, standing in front of Western landscape paintings, probing the air for volatility.

“Me. Oh. My,” Cal would say, adding a little whistle. “A damn sight better than the real thing, you ask me. Who in his right mind would ford that river horseback in real life? You know there’s rattlers in there will swim right in your saddlebag and take a nap, and you never even know it till you reach in there happy as an idiot for the wineskin…then fffft, ffft fft…,” he struck my forearm, shoulder then the side of my neck with his fingers as fangs, “It’s goodnight, Irene, goodnight.”  

I’d hum and turn the price-tag, speaking with a degree of dismay, “How could you live with yourself knowing someone else walked out of here with this beauty?” Then feigning a scan of the gallery for someone to talk to, I’d say, “I must have it.”

The night would go on like that until we reached a kind of critical mass, finally just walking out the door, bottles in hand, whistling, humming, leaning into a kind of warning buzz.  

      ————

Some mornings after a night of unraveling Cal and I would meet in a coffee shop to spool back into the form of something socially acceptable. We’d read the paper at a corner table and psychically loom. The walls were almost always hung with big glossy photographs of wildlife. Under each photo was a little wooden placard with a title and price. Above Cal’s head was a photo of a herd of bison. Hungover and slightly nauseous, I sipped my coffee and stared at it osmotically.

I looked down at Cal. His head was lowered to the paper. Not moving his eyes from an article he took a sip from his mug and made a sound like he was expelling steam.

“Did exactly what I knew they would,” he said without looking up, after a minute going on, “Abandoned their tanks and guns…our tanks and guns…burned their uniforms and ran away like babies from the boogeyman.” He loudly folded up the paper in disgust and stared off toward the front windows. “You can lead a horse to water,” he said to himself, raising his mug again. “Fucking cowards.”

I looked up at the photo then down at Cal. Nothing mattered all of a sudden. I felt the urge to throw my coffee in his face, walk out and never think twice about anything ever again.

Cal had his visions. I had mine.

The feeling surged then dissolved. I looked back up at the photo and imagined us just out of frame sitting our horses, Cal’s eye laid down the barrel of a rifle. Very near us the photographer stood aiming his camera down the slope. Cal tested the wind then reached to make adjustments to his sights as the photographer made adjustments to his camera. Seasons altered when I blinked. The river valley below flashed white and frozen then vibrant and lush, full of grazing bison, then hazy red as if lit by a smoke-veiled sun.

Cal spun his horse a half-turn then kicked up his legs and spun his body the opposite way. He laid his barrel across the horse’s hindquarter, lowered his body behind it and wrapped his legs around the horse’s neck. Chinning a mocking glance at the photographer then looking down at the heard, he wagered he could shoot more of them. They both squinted with one eye, fingertips poised.

I couldn’t discern the explosion of gunpowder from the snapping of the shutter. They were simultaneous and unmitigated. Cal seemed to levitate above his horse, purring with the recoil and instantly, expertly retracting the bolt with the meat of his palm, extracting each cartridge with a shimmering ting, then racking the bolt forward, slightly adjusting his aim and firing again. His zeal was as lethal and endless as his ammunition. The stampeding herd was swallowed up in a cloak of dust but Cal continued shooting, now indiscriminately, wildly into the cloud until finally spinning on his haunches back riderwise, sheathing his rifle and trotting down the slope.   

Streams of blood merged into pools, gathering momentum through dirt for the river, then dripped viscous over the bank and into the current, carried down-valley, frothing over boulders and swirling into sun-warmed eddies. Our horses emerged on the other side as if dipped up to the withers in rusty oil. We made camp atop the opposite plateau.

I saw our fire spitting embers up at the night. I saw Cal’s face warping through the flames, a mesmerized glimmer there. I saw him get up, walk to his horse and reach into his saddlebag for the wineskin.    

I wanted to tell him he was nothing, tell him to swallow his tongue and get out of my head. But I drank my coffee and agreed. “Fucking cowards.”

————

We rolled cigarettes and sauntered from one art gallery to the next, getting drunker, whistling and humming obnoxiously. Cal hurled a wine bottle like a grenade over his head and didn’t look to see where it shattered. All glass started to pulse with fragility. From the street the galleries looked like snow-globes, I thought. We watched them sip their drinks and attempt to shake their evening into something special. Cal and I joined them. I overheard someone suggest that the price-tag dangling from a bison skull was “irrelevant, really.” I laughed out loud. Everyone seemed to be laughing. I drank deeply from a bottle and laughed again. A laugh I hardly recognized.

From the sidewalk I peered back inside through my reflection in the window, suddenly paralyzed. They swirled their cups. A weird light shifted through the window onto them. I saw a race of aliens discussing a different skull: “This,” one said, cupping it like a wineglass, “this was one of the snow-globe dwellers. They were the first to be eradicated or relocated. They seemed to possess no memory nor useful skill to contribute to the re-cultivation of these once fertile lands.” The alien swirled it and took another drink. “We were baffled, and quite frankly horrified, to see them building their settlements on the richest soil in the valley. Even worse, they hunted large creatures for the size of their crowns, not the yield of their sustenance. They tricked fish into swallowing hooks on strings that they might enjoy the suffering and fear transferred to their hands, just to rip the hook from their flesh and throw them back to repeat the ritual.” Exhaling sharply then making a motion to drink but balking, the being continued, “In fact, we have discovered evidence that their economy relied heavily on these ‘sports,’ as they called them.” They all drank and another chimed in, “Where they got the food they actually consumed is another story entirely.” Their long antennae wobbled as they shook their heads and sipped from their cranial vessels, “Savages, I tell you. Real savages.”

Apparently, there was one more gallery, though I couldn’t really say.

————

The last thing I remember is standing in front of a hundred old machine parts—gears, springs, brackets—all tack-welded into the form of a giant bison skull. Its hollow eye-sockets glowed with electric lights timed to change every few seconds from white to green to red. I looked around and saw everyone taking photos of the sculpture with their phones then bow their heads. Their faces glowed piously, bathed in the light of their screens.

I saw them growing undead, praying as though from that liquid crystal had whispered a promise of immortality. I saw the ghost within it baiting them, desperate for them to vacate their own minds that it might take up residence and power there. I saw them offering their knowledge and memory, their lives as tribute.

I saw horses and a long, cold winter. I saw ribboned stacks of paper bills, photographs, paintings and furniture piled high in the center of a room. I saw fire in the floor, fire licking at the rafters. I saw blood rising to my skin in a vacuum ravenous for it, inhaling me as if for the marrow in my bones, as if to extract from my body that which my dreams had promised it.

I saw white then green then red.

————

The judge gave me my own private cell and some time to think about my life choices, as he put it. Miraculously, the only book I could get my hands on when the library cart rolled by was The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch. Jim Loney is my age, estranged from his community and going “gently insane” on his drunken descent toward “noble, inevitable self-destruction,” as one reviewer suggested. I had to laugh. I read it in one sitting. Then I cried. Simple tears at first as I reluctantly turned the final pages, feeling that the resolution would be far too costly. Then involuntary, spine-binding weeping to the edge of suffocation and back. An hour, maybe two, three before the waves subsided. Rolling over, I mouthed silent, unknown things at the ceiling, staring holes through it. I traced forms of animals on the naked cinder-blocks and wanted to die.

The night before I was released, I dreamed. I stood under bright stars at arms-length from a fire. I reached in with my hand and held it there, entranced by the impossibility of not being burned. There was a metallic clink followed by a voice. “Will is fate,” it said. I turned to see him bent to the ground with a hammer in hand. Around his wrists were manacles attached to a length of chain rooted in stone. He set the hammer to mark his aim then raised it above his head and swung it, sending the sound into the night and a splash of sparks to the ground. Without looking up he said, “Until it breaks,” and marked his aim again. He punctuated himself with the slow but deliberate rhythm of a simple machine made to mark its own rate of function: “Will is fate…” clink… “Until it breaks…” clink…. And on and on, chanting through the night.

I turned back to the fire and felt the memory of stepping into it. There was a vibration each time the hammer struck. The light began to pulse. A step closer brought a roar like waking up at sea in a terrible storm followed by a deeper vibration, a kind of rhythmic thudding and a drone of voices. As I stepped fully into the flames figures appeared to be weaving themselves into each other, their bodies bound up in one form of writhing then another, their desperate faces mouthing the air, their arms and hands hitting me unfeelingly as I pushed my way through. Everything mounted into a violent, unbearable wave of anguish. I was knocked to the ground and began scrambling furiously. The thudding grew in my hands and knees, in my stomach, vibrating everything into one densely concentrated center until it could no longer contain itself. Light flashed from the core of an explosion, consuming everything. Then darkness. Silence. I felt the coolness of night as if directly on skinless muscle.

I woke up and stared at the ceiling, something inching its way from my stomach into my throat and finally over my lips, so delicately that even I could not quite make it out. Though I understood. Kill the soldier, save the man.      

————

Cal picked me up. He rolled around the corner of the jail in my 1986 Land Cruiser. The old leaf spring suspension had long since lost its spring and took all bumps under the tired, squeaking protest of its joints. From a dead stop it coughed up a little cloud of exhaust and could putter up to sixty-five mph given a long enough, flat enough stretch of highway. I smiled to see it parked at the curb.

Cal waited for me to move but I just stood there and stared at him through a fog of breath. His hand went up as if to ask if I was getting in or not. He eventually got the picture, opened his door and circled around front to the passenger side, lunging toward me, shouting “Shotgun!” in my ear as he passed. He didn’t even have a driver’s license.

In fact, I wasn’t sure if Cal existed at all. As far as I knew he had gone completely off the grid. In his mind, veterans of our stripe were all on a secret government watchlist. He believed the state was not so obtuse as to train us to abandon empathy, kill on command, send us to war, and then simply release us back into the world with a pat on the back, an unlimited prescription for drugs and a suicide hotline card without at least keeping an eye on us, see if we could still play the game without getting too wise. Cal had it all worked out. When he smoked he became very lucid, almost telepathic, he claimed. He’d lay on the floor blowing thick clouds at the ceiling and intercept conference calls from the Pentagon between a handful of politicians, a data-storage gate-keeper, and a spooky DoD agent going on about “the imperative to track and, when necessary, guide liabilities as they are released back into the mainstream.” There would be unofficial requests for sensitive information and off-the-books transactions.

Cal would close his eyes, point to both of his temples and see top-secret memos appearing in encrypted email inboxes regarding a surveillance operation to acquire location- and activity-intel on veterans who meet signal criteria. He’d start listing them: “…combat…college…debt-free…single…,” as if straining to receive each word which, according to him, constituted a probability of ideological disillusionment and sedition sufficient to red-flag an individual for life. According to Cal, one of us was on the fast-track to being “disappeared.” He’d relight his joint and blow smoke, occasionally mumbling another paranoid stream of thought: “If credibility is established by credit…and credit is debt….” He’d take a long drag and ash in the big planter pot then keep going: “…and debt is forced labor, and forced labor is the mechanization of humans, and…,” and on and on.

He tapped out a short couple of beats on the dash board. “The Colonel’s looking for guns,” he said to the windshield, waiting to see if I’d respond, then continued, “I told him we’d meet just as soon as I could spring your sorry ass.” What he meant was hired guns. The Colonel was actually a retired Army Colonel who by whatever nebulous network of connections was eager to put together a private security team to head back into high-conflict areas. His types of teams ran defense and often offense for god-knows-who, doing things that made for long redactions in official reports. The one certainty was the money. “A hundred fifty Gs for six-month’s work, boy.” I could tell by his voice Cal was already there. He never really left. “Fuck it,” he said, “I’ll text him right now.”

I don’t know why I didn’t tell him not to. The cold, clean air drafted through the window and I was just glad to be feeling and breathing it. I couldn’t summon the energy to negate anything that was going to happen. He plugged the auxiliary cable into his phone as he read the Colonel’s text. “Sanctuary. One hour.” He cocked his head at me, “There it is. Let’s get a few freedom beers in you, partner.” He scrolled down his screen and selected Oh, Marie by Louis Prima, rolled the volume knob, drummed the dash with his hands and yowled as the cymbals and sax really kicked in, “Once more unto the breach!”

————

I righted the table and chairs, found a broom and swept all the glass, mopped the floor and fastened the cabinet doors best I could back on their hinges. Cal sat at the table with the paper, occasionally reading out loud something that twisted up in his mind just right. I finished putting the kitchen back in order, poured myself a glass of water and sat down across from him. Without looking up he said something about meeting the Colonel again to iron out the details, sign some papers for clearance. It hadn’t registered to me that a decision had been made, as though I was simply caught up in some kind of entropic undertow. I didn’t even know how many days I’d been waiting to get spat out and wash ashore. But there I was. He told me I better go warm up the beast.  

On cold mornings, because the cable was broken, I had to pop the hood of the Cruiser and manually wedge the choke closed with a stone that had sat in the console for years and just so happened to be the ideal size, apparently waiting for that very purpose. We cut tracks through a couple inches of fresh snow, hit main street and headed downtown. The sidewalks were empty. We sipped coffee at our usual table in the corner and waited for the Colonel.

Every few feet on the walls were different glossy photos—a silhouetted elk, spotted whitetail, nesting blue herons, rainbow trout. Above Cal’s head was a photo of a single bison, its eyes like polished obsidian squinting against wind-driven snow directly into the lens. Written beneath it on a little wooden placard was the title and the price: Winter Hunt, $290. It was number four of twenty-three prints. I scratched out the math on a napkin and said the amount to myself. Cal asked what it was. Ignoring him I looked around the shop counting the photos with similar placards and did that math. “One hundred thousand, fifty dollars.” I sat there waiting for whatever else was rising to the surface.

Cal sensed a shift and switched to recruiter-mode. “Don’t get weird on me, son. We’ll be out of this sorry shithole by tomorrow. There’s a zero-six-thirty to Seattle, Seattle to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to a nice desert paradise, eighty-five degrees. Masters of our own destiny again.” He kicked my chair to get my eyes off the photo. “Hey, you listening to me? Don’t forget you’re getting paid to get the hell out of this phony-ass town to do some real shit again. It should be the easiest decision you ever made.”

I stared into my coffee and spun the mug a half-circle by the handle and muttered it back to myself. “The easiest decision.”

“The easiest. What’s there to think about?”

“You ever wonder why it’s easy?”

“Christ almighty. Is your head screwed on? I just told you why.”

“I don’t think I need easy. I don’t need a way out of here.” I sort of rolled my eyes around the coffee shop then leveled them across the table. “I need a way out of here,” I said, reaching across the table and tapping Cal’s temple with my finger. He grabbed my wrist and stared at me, then through me as he let go. He wasn’t there anymore. I stood up sharply, knocking my chair over. A couple heads turned to see what was happening. I picked up the chair, gathering myself upright, then pushed it back under the table and inhaled slowly. “Thank you for your service, Cal.” I apologized to no one in particular then turned and walked out the door.

     ————

The Cruiser stuttered faithfully into action. I pointed west and drove until all signs of civilization faded but the road itself and a few old ranch houses. I drove for an hour, then two, in silence except for tires on pavement and crisp air whistling through a crack in the window. I knew where I was going. Soon the road turned to frozen dirt and up ahead cut through the crest of a ridge at the base of a giant V in the earth before descending sharply into the river valley. I could hear the glimmer in my father’s voice telling me I’d better hold onto something as the truck accelerated toward what looked like the edge of the world.

Even though I knew what was coming my stomach would rise into my throat, out of my body it seemed, and stay suspended somewhere above in a moment of perfect weightlessness before rushing back into me like a flood as the wheels received the full weight of the truck again. With a big youthful grin he would gently apply the brakes and, taking in the view, exhale as though to slow down his heart. I let myself believe that was the memory which accompanied him over the edge when his heart finally slowed to a stop.

The width of the valley was marked distinctly by sheer plateau walls like far-reaching bookends. It spanned maybe a mile at most and was never so narrow that you could throw a stone from one side to the other. The road sort of disintegrated into a primitive two-track used occasionally to hay cattle and check fences. But there were no cattle to be seen and all the post-latch gates were laid open. Where the way intersected the river I turned left paralleling it upstream through dormant, snow-dusted grass and sagebrush. In the narrow sections of river the water was frozen solid like frosted glass and I wondered how thick, if it could be driven across without breaking through or getting stuck. A couple of times I passed large stones and nearly stopped to hoist them from the bank down onto the ice but decided to keep going.

Eventually the road curved out into the field and then back toward the river-crossing. I held the wheel at an angle and the slight pull felt like being in a slingshot. Depressing the pedal and bracing either side of the wheel my head hit the roof as I sped over a sharp dip at the bank. Ice shards and water instantly cascaded over the hood and windshield. I instinctively ducked and held my breath, pinning the accelerator to the floor, feeling each stone under the tires claim a little more momentum. And like a beast whipped to the brink, hissing plumes of steam and coughing, the vehicle limped up the bank on the other side. I managed to coax it to the foot of the escarpment, where it sputtered to a halt alongside a small juniper. There was no sense in trying to start it again but I tried anyway, turning the ignition over and over until there was nothing. I opened the door, stepped out and closed it, reluctantly accepting I was stuck there.  

When I was just a boy, standing very near that same place, I’d look up the steep slope to the base of the cliff with dread anticipating the burning in my lungs and thighs, the terrible thirst and having to claw through the crevice at the top. Somehow everything I’d seen since in no way diminished that feeling of dread. I started hiking.

Halfway up I kicked through the snow a bit, more for the memory than anything. In the summer if you dug around in the talus you could sometimes find tooled stones, pieces of spear or arrowheads, even bison remains, bone shards. I was so much smaller then, when the world went on forever yet seemed closer somehow. Peering up to the top of the cliff I would shudder to imagine an entire herd leaping one after the other from the edge and plummeting toward me, the frantic adrenaline in their eyes, the earth heaving under the impact of their massive bodies. Young men would peer panting from the edge down to the bloodied arms of women expertly stripping those bodies of their hides and carving the meat from their bones. They would be all around me as I made my way up the slope to the base of the cliff wall.

The only way to the top was through an opening there wide enough for one person. It led through the stone where water had eroded its way for thousands of years through weaknesses and where very little light penetrated. Acute claustrophobia held each breath just out of reach as I inched my way up and through, relieved only in the assurance that at least in the winter, rattlesnakes lay dormant, brumating in their dens, their hibernacula. In my mind they were coiled tightly together, purring through dreams in the buried warmth of the earth around me. My skin ran flush with a surge of heat then shivered in the last shadow as I pulled myself finally from the hole at the lip of the plateau. Catching my breath, I turned to survey the valley. Behind a thin veil of clouds the sun was soft and low on the horizon. I stepped back from the edge and picked a couple of rocks from beneath the snow. Flinging them underhand I watched them spin silent in the air and tumble down the slope. I threw one half-heartedly at the Cruiser before sitting down and staring out across the valley.

It seemed there was nothing in sight to indicate when I was. It was all time and no time at all. I plucked a sprig of sagebrush, rolled it in my fingers and held it under my nose, inhaling its sweetness, cool like mint in the back of the throat. I scratched up a small handful of icy snow, compressed it in my palm and sucked the moisture from it. Tracing the river upstream I saw sun-baked ground and fine clouds of dust rising along the banks behind horse-drawn travois, the sinew-lashed lodgepole bowed under a winter’s rations. I saw naked young men and women washing blood from their bodies where the current was swift. I felt everything slow and waited for darkness.                     

A handsome couple strolled arm in arm down Central Park West. The man, tall and athletic with a thick, well-brushed mane, wore a black, fur-trimmed cloak over an Armani smoking jacket. The lady, slim but curvy with lustrous blonde hair done in a complicated braid, wore white mink over a low-cut black Prada gown. Though bedecked in high-heels, the lady adeptly kept up their brisk pace past tourists, joggers, baby-strapped mothers, and other assorted humanity either living in or making their pilgrimage to the world capital of wealth and culture. Curious eavesdroppers would have been able to hear snippets of the couple’s conversation as they passed.

Did you see who Angelica left with last night?

You mean the French gentleman? What’s his background?

Apparently his family owns the Laurent-Perrier champagne house. Why else would she look at him? By the way, what’s on the playbill tonight?

Let’s see, there’s Handel, Ravel, Mussorgsky, and of course Beethoven.

Is that the best Alan could come up with? Which Beethoven are they doing?

The Fifth.

How uninspired! We can’t be staying for the entire show, surely? I’d like to change before Camilla’s soirée. Oh look, is that Dmitri and Sveva over there?

They continued across the piazza, stepping past a beggar at the base of the steps before going up and into the packed lobby of the Lincoln Center.

The beggar’s name was Daryl Jack. He started sleeping in his car two years ago; after it was compounded by the police he began sleeping outside. At first he stayed in North Harlem, then gradually worked his way down Central Park and the Upper West Side—much greener panhandling pastures. The last two months his main turf had been the prime territory around the Lincoln Center, which he worked along with his friend and ally, Mikey McAdams. The two men had met at the Saint Ignatius soup kitchen and hit it off right away. They found that they had been in the same infantry division and had both been to Iraq for the same deployment. They joked about the division Sergeant Major Fat-Ass who had called out Private McAdams more than once for uniform violations—dirty boots, crooked beret, badly shaven face. Private Jack had got to know that senior NCO much more intimately during his second Article 15 hearing when he had been accused of smoking marijuana on the night shift. No one had actually seen him smoking or found any weed, but he had the misfortune of already possessing a disciplinary record—drunk on duty and fighting with a white sergeant in his platoon. The case was sent up to the division commander who quickly recommended Private Jack for a Dishonorable Discharge from the U.S. Army. Three months later he found himself back at the Washington Heights housing projects he grew up in. For a while he didn’t think about work and drank away the little money he had left to his name. By the time he got around to looking for a job he found that nobody was interested in a high school dropout and former infantry grunt with a bad record.

Daryl Jack and Mikey McAdams took shifts pulling alms duty in front of the Center, while the other one set up camp across Broadway near the edge of the Park. Daryl had already developed his go-to gimmick—a big Louie Armstrong grin with bobble-headed nod. He supposed it made people feel safer and happier, which made them more generous on the whole. Somehow, Mikey, a former supply sergeant’s assistant, had recently scored costumes for both of them that brought in even greater returns. A jacket with tails fit for a butler and a tattered top hat for the tall, wiry Daryl; a threadbare tweed jacket and deerstalker for the short, stocky Mikey.

The first day after sporting the new (old) threads they raked in a combined $37.35, an all-time record. That night was an unforgettable bash for the “Baghdad Boys”, as they had taken to calling themselves. They each splurged on burgers and fries at an all-night joint; they chugged their way through a couple bottles of Olde English malt liquor; after midnight Mikey found a local pusher to score a few grams of herb. They parked themselves in some tree-cover a stone’s throw from Tavern on the Green and lit up a sizeable blunt. It was life itself they were celebrating—tonight they felt good, no matter what tomorrow would bring. Around 3 am, they located a prostitute near the pond and spent most of their last earnings on a two-for-one bargain trick. 

The next morning the bright sun was not kind to the two revelers who had camped safely through the night without being spotted by police. Parched mouths and pounding headaches limited their mobility until park security finally zeroed in and sent them packing. Daryl dragged himself vaguely westward, towards the Center. Incredulous passersby looked on when he stopped to lap up a stomach-full of water from a public fountain on the way out of the park. He found a good marble step on the shady side of a Deutsche Bank branch, where he spent the next twelve hours alternately sitting and dozing. He exchanged few smiles and even fewer words for the better part of the otherwise crisp autumn day, his energy still sapped from the previous night’s blow-out. Darkness fell and he peered into his upturned hat set out in front of him; near emptiness is what he saw. A few coins that totaled $3.51. He cursed to himself and then to some of the few walkers in the area, who exited the scene warily glancing over their shoulders. “Food or booze?” he thought to himself. “Let’s go see what Mikey’s got going on.”

Daryl remembered his friend telling him about a new rendezvous point, further up the west side. Apparently there were some new gangs trying to work the area and it was better to stay one step ahead of them. Daryl joked that those suckers would have their hands full if they scrapped with the Baghdad Boys, but Mikey thought avoidance was the best strategy. He had heard those other boys were playing for keeps. Daryl dragged his skinny body up block after block, keeping to the middle of the sidewalk, mostly looking down at his feet. Couples coming from the other direction had to suddenly split up and jump to the side as Daryl ominously and unrelentingly advanced. One man reacted too slowly and got shoulder-bumped, after which he berated Daryl in an angry but ultimately non-threatening manner.

Daryl turned left at 82nd Street and entered a shuttered construction site. As he negotiated a broken chain-link fence he heard the sound of glass and someone screaming inside the building. He continued without speeding up or slowing down through the doorway, where he saw Mikey holding a broken bottle surrounded by three dark figures. 

“What’s going on here?” Daryl asked Mikey. They all looked up at him, while simultaneously a bald man took the opportunity to stick a blade into Mikey’s blind side. Mikey howled.

Daryl watched his friend struggle to stay upright. Daryl felt rage take control of him. He grabbed a length of metal piping that was lying in the rubble around the entrance and ran towards the unknown trio. Two of them split up to handle his onslaught while the knife-man covered Mikey. Daryl swung the pipe at the nearer of the two men. The man tried to dodge but was nonetheless caught offguard by Daryl’s ferocity and sunk to the ground after taking a crunching blow to the shoulder. The second man came from behind trying to stick his own knife into Daryl, who swiftly brought the pipe down on an over-extended arm to a loud cracking sound. 

Meanwhile, Mikey was attempting to fend off the original attacker with his bottle but had proved too slow. He received another quick counter-stab to the upper back and dropped the bottle, after which the bald man immediately pounced with a final thrust to the chest. Daryl witnessed this last action just after dropping the second man to the ground. Mikey’s eyes widened and then rolled back as he buckled and hit the ground. The last man remained relatively calm as Daryl, in full berserker mode, closed in on him. The man narrowly avoided Daryl’s first swing and made a long gash down Daryl’s arm with his blade. Daryl’s second strike connected and knocked the man back. As he stumbled Daryl continued the assault with a wild overhead swing. The man violently lurched upwards with his knife and caught Daryl across the face just as Daryl brought his own weapon solidly down on the bald head of this unknown combatant. Daryl knelt beside his friend while the man twitched unconsciously nearby. The two others had fled the building at some point during the climax of the battle. Daryl reached out for Mikey’s hand, now lifeless on the cold ground.

Daryl awoke in the back of an ambulance, and then later in a hospital ward. After being patched up he was interviewed by a detective. He told the whole story, including the party the night before and his and Mikey’s shared service in Iraq. The detective didn’t say much as he jotted down notes, but the next day a social worker stopped by and offered to help Daryl get his life back together. She spoke of the range of opportunities there were to earn his keep honestly, like helping a construction clean-up crew, for example. Daryl told her to get lost; he wasn’t cleaning up for anybody. The social worker left a card in Daryl’s jacket pocket with her name and number. That night Daryl exited the building and walked back onto the street without anybody noticing or taking account of him. The nasty scar on his face didn’t make it easier to beg, but some people still took pity and gave.

By the night of the concert a week later, Daryl had been pondering his life for the better part of the day. He watched well-dressed people and happy families walking past. Where had he gone wrong? Why hadn’t he been born into money, or happiness? He had never known his father. His stepfather drank and often beat him, until he and Daryl both got too old for that game. Daryl had friends, but never the kind that a mother would have wanted for her son. They always seemed to get into trouble together, with Daryl typically catching the blame. Mikey was the first one he could remember who actually cared about Daryl as a person, who gave back as much as he took. Now he was dead, and Daryl didn’t even know why. He started from his trance by the sound of high-pitched laughter and looked up at a particularly beautiful couple that had just brushed past him. He imagined that the man and woman were mocking his ugliness and squalor as they floated up the steps into the opulent sanctuary above. He looked down at his upturned hat on the sidewalk—total emptiness. “Goddammit all to hell,” he said aloud to himself in a raspy voice. “I’m gonna jump in the river.” 

He struggled to his feet and shuffled around the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 65th Street towards the dark waters of the Hudson. At the edge of the sidewalk at the end of the block he glanced left and saw two men coming out of a door and jumping into a large white van parked on the curb. The engine started and the van lurched forward onto the road just a few inches from Daryl’s face. He didn’t notice this close call; he was looking intently at the still slightly cracked open door. There was no one else on the sidewalk. He turned back and crossed the threshold. There was no one inside the corridor in which he now found himself. He had entered a rear service entrance of the Lincoln Center, the mysterious palace outside which he had spent so many futile hours manning his post. He never connected the geography or even the purpose of the building itself to his own situation. He walked aimlessly down the corridor, like an escaped zoo animal on a temporary reprieve. He stopped short of a junction ahead and instead tried the handle to a side door, which was unlocked. He entered and found scattered pieces of orchestral and theatrical bric-a-brac: chairs, music stands, a set of kettle drums, unmarked wooden boxes, folding set backdrops, bundles of heavy curtains, a fake marble statue, and an old couch, beside which someone had left a half-empty box of chocolate chip cookies. Daryl made for the box with the quickness of someone who hadn’t eaten all day. Having devouring its contents, he was then content to lie back and take a moment’s rest. He had almost forgotten the comfort of reclining on a soft divan—he closed his eyes and entered a timeless, dreamless sleep.

DA-DA-DA-DUH. Daryl rolled off the couch and jumped to his feet after being awoken by a thunderous sound just above his head, the likes of which he had never before heard. His instinct told him that it couldn’t be human in origin. He squatted at the foot of the sofa, holding his quivering hands to his temples, hounded by incessant horn calls above and all around him. He rocked back and forth, more conscious than usual of his nearly permanent state of headache and hunger. “Is that you, God?” he said aloud looking up at the shaking ceiling. The cacophony continued unabated, seemingly oblivious to his question. Inchoate rage bubbled from his brain and down his spine, eventually taking control of his whole body. It was of a different species altogether from the emotions surrounding the recent murder of his friend. This rage was directed towards the world at large, to the heavens, to his fate, which had never cut him a break and now was pounding him over the head, literally, in mocking, pitiless tones. He gnashed his teeth and pulled at the unwashed curls of his hair and beard. A collage of wordless images and scenes passed through his racing mind, stoking his hatred: his mother, his stepfather, his sanctimonious half-brother, all the white cops who ever harassed him, shopkeepers who watched his every move even when he wasn’t shoplifting, the self-satisfied army recruiter who lied to Daryl and unconcernedly modified records to facilitate his enlistment, the black drill sergeant at basic training who always singled him out for extra duties, the other drill sergeants who laughingly went along with it, his racist squad leader, who in Iraq constantly uttered the phrase “sand nigger” in Daryl’s presence, and escaped punishment while Daryl got busted down and docked one month’s pay for fighting, the fat sergeant major who called Daryl a “worthless piece of shit” to his face during his Article 15 hearing, the baby-faced captain who barely looked at Daryl as he calmly signed chapter papers and said “That’s your problem, sport,” when Daryl asked what he was supposed to do outside the army, the rich bastards and their gold-digging women who never even threw him a dime, the constant hordes of tourists who didn’t know there was more to New York City than lower Manhattan, the gangs that roamed Harlem and further afield, the bald man, who could burn in hell.

Daryl collapsed and bent over double in front of the sofa, not exactly relaxed but at least mollified for the present. Lyric string arpeggios above sounded like chords of despair. The heat of his anger subsided as he realized, unconsciously at first, that the music was now softer and sweeter. He began to weep. Mysteriously, Daryl’s anger at his own fate transformed into a profound sorrow for the fate of all living things. He extended his own feeling of doom to everything else. He had wanted to kill himself tonight, to end the tragic joke of his life. He understood now, instinctively, that everyone else around him and everyone he had ever known would perish just like him, no matter their fortune or station in life. Somehow, though he remained in the same hunched position, a change was happening inside him, unbidden and inexplicable. The time of his tears and anger seemed ephemeral, and now he reentered the flow of time’s stream. Spontaneously, his fingers started tapping to the surrounding rhythm. He started swaying in time to a braying theme that sounded like the hunting horns of some dark deity. An elephantine passage of low strings moved almost imperceptibly slowly upwards, from darkness to light, like leaving the underworld for the solid earth.

Daryl leaped to his feet as a thunderbolt struck and charged him with its primordial energy rather than smiting him. A wall of sound louder than anything he had ever heard—a shrieking fanfare worthy of the gods. The mighty New York Philharmonic was more overpowering than the Chinook helicopters, the tank columns, or the 155mm howitzers that used to buzz, grind, and explode all around his plywood hut in Baghdad. He raised his arms and waved them vigorously as if he were conducting the unseen orchestra. He hummed along to the music as he perceived it, eventually howling as the melody carried him away faster and faster, a runaway train, building to a fire-breathing cadence that left him gasping for air at its triumphant conclusion.

A security guard entered the room after the finale and took a moment to make sense of the dark, wraithlike intruder with bloodshot eyes. Daryl, opening his mouth and speaking to another person for the first time that day, asked, “What was that music?” The guard, looking at him with either pity or indifference, said, “Beethoven.” “BAY-TOV-EN,” Daryl sounded out the vaguely familiar syllables to himself in a hoarse voice. He tried to think when he had heard this name before. After a moment he said, “I thought it was God.” The guard chuckled and said, “Plenty of folks around here probably think they’re one and the same.” He took his arm and gently led him down the corridor towards the exit. When they reached the door, the guard said in a conspiratorial voice, “Listen, I don’t usually do this—I’m supposed to wait for the police, but, to tell you the truth, I think it’d be better off if you just disappeared. Don’t try anything like this again though.” Daryl, looking down at the floor, reacted with neither surprise nor gratitude, but shuffled slowly out of the building towards the road and the river. He felt a small piece of paper deep in his jacket pocket, which he turned over slowly. Suddenly he raised his head, looked the guard in the eyes for the first time, and asked, “Can I use your phone, brother?”

The morning of day three, Kelly decided to go out on a jet ski. She’d been resistant at first for all the usual reasons. But the accumulated effect of watching other vacationers roar around on the water, the insanely beautiful tropical backdrop, and listening to Dan complain about her unwillingness to try new things finally broke her. It was for her own good, this trip down to paradise. That’s what everyone said, and what she told herself. Looking out onto the water, however, she’d felt nothing. As though the blast that had ripped open her leg had taken something besides blood.

Dan smiled when she made her wishes known and said, “told you, it’ll be fun.” Then they walked down to the jetty to catch the 11am trip. Kelly wore a one-piece under mesh shorts and a yellow t-shirt, Dan wore a bathing suit and a unit t-shirt from the 82^nd. The shirt, which Kelly had bought with some encouragement from her first sergeant, featured a grinning metal skull with wings that said, “Death from Above.”

She’d met Dan at crossfit, and she’d given him the shirt after they started dating. Dan had never served, but the shirt suited him. It brought up bad memories for her, but seeing it on her man made the shirt seem less menacing, more like an affectation.

When Dan had left her at the bar last night to chat with an older gentleman and his younger wife—but mostly the younger wife—Kelly had remembered the shirt, how it hung on his shoulders. To be so hard on the outside, so sculpted, made her feel like she couldn’t trust him. He was undependable inside, soft, but, she thought, that was the point. His violations the errors of a faithful dog kept inside too long, or of a baby, helpless to avoid filling its diapers with the effluvia after a day’s feasting. He had come back to her at the bar when another guy bought her a drink. She’d made sure not to return the new guy’s attention, and Dan’s ego (light as it was) hadn’t even been bruised.

At the beach, a resort employee wearing a blue shirt with “Chris” embroidered in white thread checked the names of guests against a list he had affixed to a clipboard. He was tall and well-built, and for some reason he reminded her of an Eastern European Staff Sergeant from the maintenance platoon. Dan introduced them, shaking Chris’s hand and grabbing his elbow while looking in his eyes. “Got room for two more?” he said.

“Sure,” said Chris. “Which house do you have?”

“We’re in the ‘Prince Eugene,’ up the hill,” said Dan.

Chris scanned the list he held on his clipboard, pausing halfway down the second page. “Dan Fuchs and Kelly Browski. Know how to swim?”

“Practically born with webbed feet,” said Dan, laughing.

Kelly pointed toward the lagoon’s middle. “How deep does it get?”

Chris scratched his head. “Not too bad—maybe twenty feet around the middle? Thirty?” He looked at Dan. “Thinking about diving? It’s much better further out, on the reef.” He saw Kelly’s leg, then looked away quickly. “Wouldn’t recommend going into the water if you have any cuts or scrapes… you know. Can attract the wrong kind of attention. Anyway, you’ll want to catch the dolphins, they should be around here somewhere.”

Dan shook his head, looking down at her with an expression. “Jet skis should be plenty for us today. Maybe I’ll head out to the reef tomorrow.” The “by myself” was implied.

They dragged Kelly’s jet ski into the water, then Dan grabbed his own and pulled while she pushed, wanting to help. Chris and the other guests were already in the water. Dan brought the engine to life with a roar and joined the larger group. Kelly mounted hers gingerly, settled into a comfortable position. She ran her hand down the scar on her right leg, tracing its fresh, raw lines. Without thinking, she itched it, and blood welled up.

“Shit,” she said, wiping the red on her thigh. She debated bailing on the event, then imagined what Dan would say. She fired up the jet ski and sped out after them.

The lagoon was huge. Three hundred feet out from the shore the bottom had already vanished in the blue. Kelly supposed if it was as deep as Chris said, she didn’t want to see the bottom, see the life swarming beneath the waves, looking for a big shadow, graceful serpentine undulation. The logical antipode to her mantra as a paratrooper with the 82^nd — “Death from Below.” Ahead of her, someone shouted—Chris was on a jet ski, pointing. A group of dorsal fins broke the surface of the water. They’d spotted the dolphin pod.

She drifted to a stop, admiring the graceful animals, their subtle rhythm. They seemed so carefree and happy. Of course, life outside civilization was more complicated than a video snapshot of photogenic mammals grinning, they were just animals. For them, life was a ruthless competition for food, sex, sleep, and safety. Maybe what looked like fun to her was a chaotic mess of anxiety and barely-contained violence. She’d heard something about infanticide and murder among dolphin pods, but Christ, at least they didn’t attack humans. Who cared what savage acts they committed against each other?

She moved to join the group, then shut down the engine. Ahead of her, Dan was talking with two college-age girls. They were pretty, which, with Kelly’s injury and the secondary effects it had had on the rest of her previously balanced system, meant they were prettier than her. He was sitting up straight on his jet ski, with his chest out, watching one of them talk—the more attractive of the two. She wondered whether he’d explained his military themed shirt—whether he’d told them he didn’t want to talk about it, or told them it belonged to his girlfriend. The attractive girl laughed and pointed at the dolphins. Dan was laughing, too.

Kelly sat still for a moment, gave herself space to feel what to do. If she went over now, she’d arrive clumsily, she’d be jealous. In pulling up to Dan, she’d intrude, or worry about intruding, in that way she had of being intrusive in overcrowded social situations. Things would require an explanation, which Dan would furnish, introducing her as his girlfriend. The girls would greet her perfunctorily, and then stare. She’d feel awkward about her body, her legs, forced by bullshit society and their expectations to feel bad about her greatest source of pride: her service. Dan would make the appropriate qualifications. Kelly realized that she didn’t want to ruin everyone’s good time. She looked out at the sandbar that made the lagoon possible, and headed there instead.

Kelly had grown up in Connecticut, on a typical Long Island Sound beach. During exceptionally low tides, a sandbar connected the beach to a nearby island. This semi-permanent bridge had a little trail of hardened sand at the very middle, a crust of safety above the mud below. Her dad had warned her to stick to the sandy part, and sink up to her ankle or worse. That if she were too heavy she’d break through, and the mud was bottomless. Clams lived in the mud—normal clams, unsafe to eat from decades of chemicals spilled into the water, and razor clams, native to Connecticut. The razor clams were so named due to their resemblance to a nineteenth century barber’s straight-edge. When Kelly was eight, she had walked out to the island during summer and broken through a patch of thin sand into the mud beneath. A razor clam had cut her and she’d bled for an hour. This was one of her most vivid memories from early childhood. Panicking as her parents reacted to the sight of the cut, the red mixed with dark, rotting brown.

Nobody noticed her absence. The dolphins jumped through the water, frolicking and spinning in the hot midday sun. Kelly decided to cruise with the jet ski before succumbing to the inevitable despair of social maneuvering. She revved the engine and headed out toward the sandbar. Forced herself to enjoy the sense of mechanical power, though she knew how many ways that sword cut, forget about it, just try get a sense of the lagoon’s boundaries. Kelly bounced on the waves, hesitantly at first, then with abandon. As she got closer to the sandbar she could see the bottom. It was like the shore, not deep at all. Actually pretty safe. And the sandbar was wide. Unlike the murky water of the Atlantic northeast, with its lurking threats.

Five minutes of this left her soaked with sea-spray, and although her wounds burned and tingled, the pain reminded her of childhood, and life, and her unlived future. She remembered the simple pleasure of tearing around dirt roads on a bicycle, wet from exertion and alone, blissfully independent. Kelly let the engine idle as she drifted up to the sandbar, and slumped forward on the handlebars, watching the sea beneath her. She remembered parts of a dream from last night, and wondered if the other guys in the truck would’ve liked this place. Portmanteau was always talking about the water—from Mobile, Alabama, with a slow, deliberate drawl—he and Rafe, bullshitting about what they’d do when they got out. Get buried, that’s what they did, that was the sum of their human potential, no more youth, no vacation. Barely worth the time it took to remember their names. And here she was, floating in warm, quiet luxury. Two feet of water, maybe less. She could feel the bottom of the craft scraping against the sand.

It was horrifying, the feeling. The lightest of touches on the sand, the machine was no longer floating but almost resting on the ground. Fuck that. Kelly gunned the engine and sped into deeper water. After twenty seconds her panic subsided, and she realized that she’d moved far from the rest of the group. They were 500 meters away, now, just a series of black dots, still following the dolphin pod. She hated the jet ski now, everything about the experience made her skin crawl. She turned her craft toward the group, no longer worried about the consequences of her arrival.

As she turned, the jet ski’s engine sputtered and died. Kelly drifted to a stop near the middle of the lagoon, facing the group. No chance of capsizing, not with this ingenious contraption. She checked the gas meter—still nearly full. She tried starting the engine again. Nothing.

“You’ve gotta be fucking with me,” Kelly muttered, like she was back on deployment. “Cheap goddamn resort piece of shit jet ski…” She beat her fists on the the plastic engine cover. Nothing. The group was so far she couldn’t hear them, which meant it was doubtful whether they’d hear her even if she yelled. She stood up awkwardly and waved her arms. No reaction.

Kelly sat down again and looked around. 500 meters from shore, she’d never make that swim because she’d never leave the jet ski. Exactly why she hated doing this type of shit. Her wound was oozing blood again, dropping her life into the water like a sacrifice to the old ones beneath the waves. Grateful for the one-piece, she took off her shirt and stood up again, waved it in a circle. Maybe a lifeguard would notice or something. After a couple minutes, a commotion among the jet ski group gave Kelly hope that they’d seen her. Three riders sped out from the main group, but cut to her left—heading further out, toward the sandbar. She sat down, quivering with anger. She couldn’t wait to tell those lazy irresponsible bastards a thing or two when they got over here. Oh yeah.

Except, she wouldn’t. It wasn’t really their fault, they were just college kids. Maybe she’d hunt down the mechanics and give them a good razzing. Nothing to do but sit at the moment, she’d try again in a minute or two. Movement out of the corner of her eyes caught her attention, and she looked over the side of the jet ski for the first time since it lost power. The sun was hitting the waves and the tiny objects suspended below, sending shapes and shadows into the depths. Here, the water was deeper, darker—this wasn’t 30 feet, it must be more like 50. She blinked. A deeper shadow among the others swam in the depths, slow, unconcerned. Or maybe it was just a trick of the light. She looked again—no way to be sure. Now it moved, now it didn’t. Should she look again, confirm her worst fears, see the hammerhead or the tiger shark or the bull shark or whatever they had down here in tropical fucking heaven? A goddamn pack of sharks, a hundred of them, the big ones, twenty-footers, ready to explode up from the deep, cresting through the surface, a storm of teeth and hunger, and take her legs, everything this time, right at the torso? Dan was still too far away. He’d left her alone, just like he had at the bar last night, just like fucking Portmanteau and the rest of them had when it counted, marching off to Valhalla and leaving her adrift.

Kelly made herself a part of the jet ski, hung on to it for dear life, melded into it, gasping for breath, squeezing. The jet ski was hot, the waves, warm. She forced herself to look down. Nothing. Just the way sun hit the water at that depth. Why keep living this way, goddamnit. Why pretend that this was any better than just fucking doing it. She looked again. No shark. Come on. Beneath the unhealed wounds on her leg, wounds that would never heal, fully, a deeper hurt stung now, aching, weeping.

Carefully, deliberately, she let go of the small watercraft, and slipped in. At 500 meters it would take her fifteen minutes to swim ashore, and someone would notice way before then. Her legs throbbed like mad as she began to kick toward the beach, and she imagined the tendrils of blood flowing out behind her, searching for whatever destiny awaited.

When I was a child, and my father had just begun to be noticeably strange, my mother took me to the zoo. It was July, and hot. The lions were thin, their manes as brittle as straw. Monkeys tumbled in a canopy of ropes, pausing to pick at each other’s hair. They ignored us. The parakeets seemed lifeless, tucked into layered bark. After hours of this, our wrapped sandwiches eaten, our feet sore, my mother suggested that we leave.

“Please, can we stay?” I scuffed my thick shoes on the walkway to slow her down.

Her dress seemed too loose in the cooling wind. “The crickets are tuning up,” she said. Strands of hair dropped on her cheeks.

“Just one more thing, then,” I begged. I was thinking of the meerkats in their artificial desert, a painted sky behind them. I wanted to see them one more time. A sentry always stood at attention on its hind legs, making sure no harm came to the rest.

“The buffalo,” my mother said, touching her rounded stomach.

As we crossed a little bridge over an expanse of land, my mother gave me a nickel, and I slipped it into a metal stand that resembled a parking meter. A pair of enormous binoculars perched on the stand, the lenses opaque without the click of the coin and the tick of the meter. I strained up and felt the crick-crack of my corrective shoes, the ones my parents made me wear so that I wouldn’t walk pigeon-toed.

The lenses blurred until I moved my eyes into just the right place. Then the view through the slits became clear. There were the mighty buffalo, grazing in what appeared to be deadened grasses – what at the time I thought of as prairie, not understanding that the prairie didn’t exist anymore.

I squinted one eye, then the other, watching the buffaloes’ fluffy bent heads in the stalks. Despite the binoculars, the buffalo were distant, as unrealistic as moon craters in a telescope. The sun warming my back seemed a closer friend.

“See the buffalo?” my mother whispered. “They don’t belong here.”

I pulled away from the binoculars and blinked. My mother wiped at the sweat beneath her nose then gripped the railing. I heard the tick-tick and put my eyes back.

But I didn’t get a good look before the minute was spent and my mother held out a white-gloved hand, her forefinger smeared a light pink where it had run against her upper lip.

I twitched my face to indicate that I might cry, turning my left foot inward.

“No more nickels,” she said, glancing at my toes. “No more time.”

The following is an excerpt from Jennifer Orth-Veillon’s work-in-progress, The Storage Room. Here, she intersperses real letters from her grandfather (italicized), an American soldier who fought at the Battle of the Bulge, with her own imagined accounts of the stories behind the letters.

The Battle of the Bulge, which ended 74 years ago on January 25, 1945, was the largest and deadliest battle fought by Americans in WWII and the second-deadliest battle in American history.

All photos provided by the author. – WBT Editors

January 12, 1945
Somewhere in Belgium

My Darling,                                                 

You are probably sore at me as you read this. I’m sorry. I write as often as I can, and even then, Uncle Sam doesn’t handle the mail service over here like he does at home. I admit I laughed at the way you gave me hell in one of your letters. In fact, I read the letter to the boys.

To bring you up to date: we are fighting with the 7th Corps in the north who are using the pincer maneuver. “Pincer” is just like it sounds—a military tactic that actually “pinches,” meaning we flank the enemy on both sides and press in. We pinch them. It works beautifully. We are planning to trap some Jerries in the drive.

I hate missing holidays with you. Did I ever tell you about our Thanksgiving Day in Geronsweiler, Germany? It was Roosevelt’s best T-day yet. Jerry had an artillery observer in the town, and we hit him hard. Still, we took a pounding for the several days we were there. We were stationed in a central building that the Jerries bombed so regularly we timed our trips to the john according to their schedule.

Often, I daydream about you. Sometimes it’s so real that I can almost feel you in my arms. Dreaming of you is one of two things I do other than work. The other is dreaming about good food. Incidentally, the Christmas cookies and peanuts arrived in good shape.

The November wave of muddy battles around the Siegfried Line that carried Brillhart and the Railsplitters, the 84^th Infantry, east in December 1944 turned to ice at the Belgian border. They had to blink to keep their eyeballs from freezing, but the cold muted the smell of rotting. A few Christmas lights hung in some little town squares, softening the browns and greys tracks from tanks that stained the new-fallen snow. Frozen mud and dirty snow, brown and brown-grey stains dominated the colors of the Bulge landscape, blurring the contours of quaint villages with pointy church spirals and red clay roofs so they almost looked intact after the intense bombing.

Unfrozen mud could swallow bodies and fill holes, but against the backdrop of snow that spanned the flat fields and streaked the Ardennes, nobody could completely disappear. The cold preserved the dead in seconds, the look of horror or peace seemed almost chiseled on their faces by the precise hands of ice. The bodies reminded Brillhart of sculptures he saw in the Paris Tuileries Gardens and he caught himself studying corpses as the snow dusted their bloodied clothes. Wounds frozen in time. The snow would never stop falling, blanketing the bodies, until spring turned the statues into fertilizer, humus for revitalizing the battle-ravaged soil.

Brillhart and his men shuffle-kicked and stomped their way through the Ardennes forest moonlit snow towards a Belgian farmhouse in the distance. Translucent smoke poured from its great stone chimney. The more the soldiers pounded the ground, the less likely that Brillhart, the battalion surgeon, would have to cut frostbite away from their feet, with amputation the eventual outcome. The thermometer registered thirteen below Celsius. They had to find a warm place for the night or freeze to death by morning.

I am sorry you cried at Christmas. I felt a little low myself. I can imagine the menu and it must have been wonderful. You should see me – I look like a coal miner, judging from the slack in my pants. But don’t worry. It won’t take long to get my figure back once I start eating your cooking.

Snow! When I was a kid, I always loved the snow. It’s nearly a foot thick in the fields here. There’s less in the forests, which are beautiful but show battle scars. Belgium is a beautiful country. The Belgian people are simple and homegrown. They live quiet lives and never seem to be in a hurry. All along the way they gave us delicious apples. You want to fight to help these people. Already, they have been invaded twice by the Boches — we are here to prevent a third.

Over their thick wool uniforms and insulated helmets, Brillhart and the other Railsplitters were still wearing the long white winter underwear to camouflage themselves in the snow. During the past few days of the Bulge, wearing long underwear on the outside of their clothes became protocol. The disguise had helped them win the last yards of the town of Marche-en- Famenne, a three-day fight. The story told through the ranks was that, a few nights prior, the Railsplitters, wearing the outer layer of long, ghostly underwear, spotted two Germans cowering behind leafless trees in the winter forest lit by the full moon. Hunching over in the dark, the GIs first thought they were frightened bears. “Hände hoch!” one of the battalion sergeants had called, apparently mangling the German order with his strong Texan accent. The Krauts must have heard them coming but made no effort to run or fire. They raised their hands without protest as the Railsplitters surrounded them. Both Germans–now prisoners– had officer status. What were they doing alone in the woods in enemy territory? Rumors surmised that Krauts were tired and wanted to get caught by any ally before they had to confront the Russians again— American POW camps were said to be more humane. The two captured Germans had led the entire ghostly American battalion unnoticed away from five enemy squadrons and into the heart of a strategic Belgian village.

The rest of the Krauts didn’t see the GIs coming at them from all sides and were forced to capitulate. Brillhart tried to get the American generals who implemented the rule to honor the insignificant private from his company who came up with the idea, but his superiors refused to admit that a boy who hadn’t been to military school or even college was that smart.

White soldiers on white snow. A small town, big victory. A thousand men lost. The Bulge was far from over.

My birthday, Jan. 6, was spent in a town that I can’t name – but I had French-fried potatoes (with salt!) and fried chicken (with salt!). I also heard a Kay Kiser radio program. What a treat! Kelly – the guy I told you about before – is still a Lieutenant. I found out why he wasn’t promoted to Major: apparently, he hasn’t got the guts, brains, foresight or desire. Personally, I have no respect for Kelly, but I play along to get what I want. Then there’s the translator, Urban – we call him “Burpin Urban”—who asks to be evacuated every time he has some damned minor ailment. The whole regiment will rejoice if he gets really injured and leaves.

We get decent food from time to time, but what we really want is a bath, clean clothes, and a shave. I am glad to hear you are working on a scrapbook of our relationship. I wish I could send you something for it.

Brillhart and his men reached the farmhouse with the chimney. As he prepared to knock at the door, he realized that the orange light of the hearth would illuminate the blood and dirt stains on the white underwear covering their uniforms. They would look like murdered ghosts rather than American saviors. Brillhart instructed the men to shed the outer layer, then knocked. A toothless man with a hollow, dark-stained mouth answered. He uttered something Urban couldn’t understand and slammed the door shut. Brillhart’s stomach squeezed with hunger at the brief blast of heat and glimpse of the stove. He ordered the men to put their frozen C rations on the ground in front of them as a peace offering.

A string of obscenities rose from the men. Goddamn frog. Goddamn Belge.

Goddammit, there was booze in there. Brillhart kicked at the door with his boot.  Urban was a wiry nineteen-year-old with chronic indigestion and a Canadian mother. He tried to talk to the Belgian man when he re-opened the door, but the man shouted, waved his hands in the air, and slammed the door again. Brillhart kicked harder, shoving Urban in front of him. The Belgian opened again and gestured wildly. He held up all ten fingers, made fists, held up two more, and pointed to his crotch. Brillhart looked at Urban, his eyebrows raised. “What in the hell is he saying?”

Urban, useless, shook his head. “I can’t understand this accent, Doc. I get one word out of ten.”

The Belgian man held his hands to his chest in the shape of a woman’s breasts. Still speaking quickly, he pointed to his crotch again and thrust towards the door as if he was taking a woman from behind. Then ten fingers, fists, and two more. More thrusting.

Oh! And I’m glad you like the perfume I bought you at Guerlain. Tell Aunt Bessie she’d better stay away from it, that cow!

The further along you get with the pregnancy, the more I wonder about whether you are taking care of yourself and if you are being careful. I wish I could have seen you at Christmas. We would have had so much fun together—shopping, packing, mailing presents.

Belgium at the present is wrecked with war. I don’t know what kind of Christmas they had, but the people don’t seem to mind. They realize that there must be some destruction in liberation.

“What’s he saying, Doc, that he’s a woman?” shouted Lt. Kelly, the short redhead Irishman from Chicago. “He wants to fuck us? What the hell? Tell him, sure! We’ll make sweet love to him in exchange for a bed and some booze.”

Brillhart turned around and drew his finger across his throat, looking at Kelly and the others. He shoved Urban forward to the door again. “Ask him to speak slowly. And ask it slowly.”

“Nous comprenons rien, Monsieur. S’il vous plaît, nous comprenons rien. S’il vous plait, parlez plus lentement. We don’t understand you, Sir. Don’t speak so fast, please.” Urban held up a can of C rations and a pack of cigarettes. He knocked the can against the house’s stone wall to show that it was frozen. The man held up his palm and said slowly “Att-en-dez. Stop.”He pulled the door partly closed but left it open a crack. Brillhart moved closer to the sliver of heat coming from the house.

“Wait, he says wait,” Urban said.

The Belgian man appeared at the door again, offering Brillhart a framed photograph. Twelve somber-eyed children dressed in white stood between a younger version of the man and a plump woman in black. Her lips were pressed so tightly that Brillhart wondered if they could soften into a kiss.

“He has twelve children sir,” Urban said, “Douze enfants, c’est ca, Monsieur? Pas de place, c’est ca?” The man nodded vigorously and smiled, revealing several brown teeth lingering at the back of his mouth.

“Doc, we can’t stay here. He’s got twelve kids. No room. No food.”

“Thank him and let’s move out,” Brillhart said. All twelve were probably sick and undernourished. He had dealt with enough depressing scenes over the last days and couldn’t fathom caring for anyone else without a few hours of sleep.

Brillhart felt his men’s disappointment and reminded them to keep rubbing their hands together to keep blood flowing.

“Son of a bitch.”

“Merci, merci Monsieur. Au revoir. Bonne nuit,” Brillhart said, mangling the few French words he learned.

“Et merci. Merci à vous, nos sauveurs. Que Dieu soit avec vous jusqu’à la fin,” said the man, bowing his head and then saluting.

The door closed. The emptiness of moonlight in the snow silenced them. Their hunger deepened, but they left the C-rations for the family in front of the house. When you talk about buying diapers for Junior, I wonder about the name we should choose for him when he’s born. I’m at a loss. I have considered every single name in and out of the family, and even some girl names just in case. Belgian names like Colette, Therèse, Jeanne, but I still can’t hit it. I think about cigarettes, too. I’ve got more than a carton left, but I give so many to civilians. They need them more than I do.

Still stomping and kicking at the snow, Brillhart felt the heat at the bottom of his veins dwindling. His blood was slowing. Little knives of cold dug in. He was minutes from frostbite. Nothing could stop the necrology of frozen tissue.

When the Railsplitters first arrived in the region, he found the rolling mountains of the Ardennes comforting. They brought back pleasant memories of snow-covered hills in Kentucky after football practice when he would walk home to the wood stove and hot food. As the star of the team, he ran miles, back and forth on the practice field, crushing himself against other players and smelling dirt as he hit the ground. After practice, he stayed in the hot shower longer than the others, feeling the gentle pull of his muscles recover. He knew that he wanted to spend his whole life studying the body’s power. Back then, all he knew of war were the medals his grandfather won in 1917 from the Meuse-Argonne. His grandfather was strong and quiet although he cried at odd times.

While poor, he was a nobleman in the coal mining town. Everyone respected him. Before the Bulge, it had never crossed Brillhart’s mind that his grandfather saw things like uncoiling intestines.

But within days of the Battle, the Ardennes appeared squat and bulbous under a gray sky that faded or darkened according to the amount of smoke rising from arms fire and shelling. Only at night could Brillhart see a few stars. Now, in leading his freezing men in search of another house, Brillhart decided he wanted to live in an isolated, beautiful place like pre-war Belgium, alone with June and Jr., away from everyone, away from the cities and people. He would build a beautiful Belgian stone house from the rubble.

Since you always ask, I’ll tell you about the old farmhouse in Belgium we stayed in. It was typical of Belgian farmhouses in that the barn and house were located together, but the Belgians are very clean people. It was clear that Jerry had used the house as an aid station a few short hours before we arrived. Fresh piles of dirt indicated that a few dead Jerries were buried outside.

The men almost passed by the next farmhouse. There were no lights, and no smoke rose from the chimney, but it was quiet. Brillhart switched on his flashlight and shone it across the stone walls. Bullet marks dotted the façade, but no other sign of significant structural destruction was visible. He knocked on the door, prepared to wait, but the it swung open. The men stepped inside and swept their flashlights across the rooms.

As their eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, they saw soiled gauze, empty morphine ampoules, discarded scalpels, and shards of disinfectant tubes littering the floor. Sofas, chairs, and a piano with missing keys had been pushed towards the wall and the large kitchen table had been dragged into the center of the living room. The top of the table was slick with frozen blood and icy bits of flesh.

“All clear Doc,” called Kelly from the kitchen. “Not even any dead ones lying around. Think they’re all outside already, buried and frozen, so they won’t stink us out. God, I love German efficiency.”

Though it was a hygienic disaster, the house would do for the night. Brillhart and his men decided to light a fire in the stove, eat, sleep a little.

The soldiers found enough logs stacked in the small barn adjoining the house to make fires in the kitchen stove and in the living room fireplace. Slowly, their hands and C rations thawed. A few portraits hung on the wall, but the subdued eyes and high-buttoned collars inspired little empathy from the hungry men, who were more concerned about the unpleasant taste of canned rations. The flames revealed details of their physical condition— all the fat chiseled from their cheeks, chins peppered with dirt and stubble, eyes like dull moons. They looked to Brillhart like the coal miners limping into a diner in Loyall, Kentucky after days underground. Brillhart remembered thinking that no amount of sunlight could erase the miners’ ashen pallor as they drank coffee and ate toast with pork gravy. The color was stain, not dust.

Every meal for Brillhart and the medics had become a guessing game since the labelling disintegrated in the wet snow. Tonight, they opened three cans of meat and potato hash, two meat stew, four meat and beans, and five cellophane-wrapped fudge bars. They added two instant coffees and nine pressed sugar cubes. Except for the chocolate and sugar, all had the same soft, morbid taste of over-salted metal. They had eaten the same range of things for almost two months. It calmed but never vanquished their hunger.

Kelly stubbed his cigarette out in the viscous film of meat hash left in one of the cans. “Well, that was disgusting, as usual. Anyone want to go with me to find the cellar? They’ve always got something stored away in those basements. Maybe even booze.”

Urban followed him. Brillhart stayed upstairs and smoked one of his last cigarettes.

Kelly’s trip to the basement reminded Brillhart of Christmas when he and some other Railsplitters had spent the holiday with a Belgian family in the town of Comblain La Tour. During the meal, Monsieur Colson, the father, recounted the town’s proud history. It was famous for its picturesque houses along the quais of the river Ourthe, and for its steep granite cliffs, called Le Rocher de la Vierge. After dinner, when Brillhart thought he had eaten and drunk everything the family had to offer, Monsieur Colson stood up and announced he was going to the cellar for the rest. He disappeared and then re-emerged with one arm full of dried sausages. In the other, he carried a bucket sloshing over with a thick dark red liquid. “C’est du boudin. C’est du sang. Pour le nouvel an.” He set it in the middle of the kitchen, rolled up his sleeves, and pulled out strings of sausage links. “Blood sausage. For New Year’s.

As he stared into the bucket of blood, Brillhart his eyes swirled. In the messy pail, he saw intestines spilling out of downed men. Blond curls belonging to a private he lost back at the battle at Geilenkirchen in December swirled together with the intestines. His vision blackened and he fainted, falling off of his chair to the floor. He came to as Kelly pinched his cheeks and announced to everyone that Brillhart had never been able to hold his liquor. He hoped that Kelly would come back from the basement in this deserted house with something more appetizing than blood sausage.

In the basement of the house, we found two girls— one around 18 and the other 8 – and a smaller brother who was blind and badly crippled. Jerry had locked them down there. They hadn’t eaten for four days, it was very cold, and upstairs, the parents had been shot dead. The mother and father were still in bed under the covers. We brought the kids upstairs and gave them food and hot coffee and blankets.

“Doc, you’d better get down here,” Kelly called from the top of the basement stairwell, breathless. Urban panted behind him.

The soldiers’ flashlights made a flickering kaleidoscope of yellow dots as they thundered down the stairs, then formed a bright circle around three children, two girls and a boy, propped against the far end of the basement wall. Pale and shivering, tears traced lines down their fear-pinched faces, but they didn’t move. The younger girl whimpered as the men moved closer.

Brillhart pointed to the red cross on his sleeve and then to the sleeves of all the other medics as he approached. He motioned to Urban, who said, “We’re doctors. We’re here to help you. Don’t worry” and then, “Nous sommes médecins. Nous sommes là pour vous aider. Ne vous inquiétez pas.” Despite their tears and dirty faces, he noticed the two girls were beautiful, with heart-shaped faces and thick wavy brown hair. They huddled around the boy. Brillhart elbowed Urban in the back when he fell silent. “Keep talking, Goddammit. They need to know they can trust us.”

Urban jumped and repeated “We’re Americans. We’re allies,” several times.

Finally, the girls unlocked themselves from around the boy and the young girl looked at the men with a faint smile. Nous sommes Américains.

The eldest girl began to get to her feet as if to move toward them, then fainted, her hand sliding down the wall as she hit the floor. The other two children bent over her, screaming, Germaine, Germaine! 

“Sh, shhhh. It’s ok.” Kelly moved forward and gently slid his arms under Germaine, while Brillhart took her feet. Despite the fullness of her face and lips, her body was almost emaciated. She seemed to weigh almost nothing. Together, they made their way up the stairs. Urban stayed with her as she recovered in the kitchen while Brillhart and Kelly went to get the other sister and the boy, who could barely walk.

Brillhart put more C rations on the fire and melted clean snow for drinking water. The children brought the food and water to their mouths in swift, jerky movements, and it was gone in minutes. The men searched their bags for more cans. Brillhart saw a bit of color return to the childrens’ faces and realized they were more beautiful than he thought. With a bit of regained strength, the girls looked tearfully around their devastated house.

Brillhart felt grateful when he learned the boy was blind. At least he couldn’t see the blood and dirt covering his family home, or how the lace curtains had been torn from the windows, probably used for tourniquets.

The younger girl, Colette, sprang up from the table and ran toward the stairs leading to the second floor.

“Non!” Germaine cried. She lunged forward but teetered and gripped the table for balance. “Please, stop her. She’s looking for my parents are up there. She can’t see that.”

Brillhart caught Colette and lifted her up as she kicked her legs in protest. He set her by Germaine, who enveloped her sister with her arms. Colette shuddered and buried her head in Germaine’s shoulder.

“Maman, Papa,” she sobbed.

Germaine, who had begun to cry again, dug her lips into Colette’s hair and muttered quick, soft French until she calmed. Brillhart dug in the rations and pulled out all of the pressed sugar cubes that the men used to make the terrible coffee somewhat drinkable.  

“Look,” he said, holding a cube up to Colette’s face. “It’s magic.” He stuck out his tongue and placed one of the white squares. He pulled his tongue back in, scrunched his face for a few seconds, and stuck it back out. The square had transformed into a smaller, rounded lump. He stuck his tongue back in again and repeated the process two more times. Finally, the sugar cube disappeared and his clownishness had drawn a weak giggle from Colette. He offered the box to the girls, who mimicked him. He gave one to the blind brother, Jacques. He had steadied them enough for now. He would give them the chocolate at the next outburst if necessary.

While Jacques and Colette sucked and played with the pressed sugar cubes, the older girl, Germaine, who spoke excellent English, stood in a corner out of earshot of her siblings and quietly told Brillhart the story of the last few days. The Jerries had arrived in the middle of the night, kicking open the front door, waking the whole family, but it was too late for them to hide. The children ran to the room where the parents slept, and they hugged each other in fright as the soldiers climbed the stairs. The soldiers kicked the bedroom door open, ordered the children out, and shot the parents. They made the children take them to the cellar. The Jerries were tired of their own rations too. When they found nothing, they locked the children inside. That was four days ago.

According to Germaine, the cellar had done little to muffle the sounds of battle that raged around them and of the makeshift hospital the Germans had made in their home. Shelling shook the house for hours at a time and the children were sure they would be buried alive when the walls caved in. The screams they heard came in waves, followed by silence. “Either they died, or the morphine kicked in,” Brillhart explained. Germaine had heard someone calling for his mother.

The scene was a tear jerker. Unfortunately, I’ve seen things like it several times.

What can you do? Curse Jerry and carry on. When we left, we notified civilian affairs and made sure the children had some food. And then we looked to our next job.

Brillhart made a bed out of the Army blankets next to the dwindling fire in the stove for the children, who had barely slept while locked in the cellar. Germaine sung to Jacques and Colette until they closed their eyes.

“It’s a miracle,” Germaine said. “I can’t believe they’re sleeping. Thank you.”

“You should sleep too. We’re not going anywhere right now. It’s safe.” Brillhart handed her the blanket he was going to use for his own bed. She wrapped it around her shoulders. Colette whimpered in her sleep. Germain placed her hand on her sisters head to soothe her and then closed her own eyes.

Once the children were all asleep, curled in their blankets next to the stove, Brillhart went upstairs, harboring the stupid hope that the mother and father had somehow suffered only surface wounds, and were still alive. When he found them, he understood why Kelly overlooked the scene. He was surprised to find the parents’ room neat, untouched, except for minimal bloodstains on the floor and the pungent odor of decomposition that they had all gotten used to. Under a pristine white blanket two figures, a set of shadowy lumps dappled with moonlight appeared to sleep.

Once, when his father had rare a day off from the railroad and slept the whole night at home, Brillhart woke before sunrise and tiptoed to watch his parents sleeping. They snored in soft, cacophonous bursts. His mother’s snore was deep and throaty, while his father exhaled shrill, nasal blasts. He watched them hopefully, willing his father to get up and go outside to the pond with him to catch the early-biting fish.

That morning, his mother awoke to her young son standing in the doorway of her bedroom. Instead of shooing him away, she lifted the covers, and Brillhart crawled over her into the warm space between his parents. He pressed his back into his mother and let the snoring lull him back to sleep.

When he pulled back the blankets on the bed in the Belgian farmhouse in Marche- en-Famenne, Brillhart was relieved. The gunshot wounds on their heads were dried. The blood had drained from the backs of their heads into the pillows and mattress. The Germans had made a perfect, thorough shot. Madame and Monsieur Jacques Bourguignon. A mother, a father asleep with the knowledge, Brillhart hoped, that their children had been spared.

It had only taken a few months of combat for Brillhart to understand what he now called German logic. Unlike the French, the Germans were exacting, methodical. When he checked German medical bags left on the field, he found them to be impeccable, well- stocked, with clean instruments. The tanks, the weapons, the burp guns fired precisely. The Germans spared no one, not even animals got in the way of the mission or the order.

Few traces of life sprouted back after their destructive path. The rumor was, though, that they were also tired. Americans were fresh from two decades of peace. It was their main advantage.

Brillhart couldn’t understand why the Jerries had let the children live. This bedroom looked like someone had tucked the parents in. If the parents were trying to protect the children or vice versa, some kind of struggle must have ensued. Sheets on the floor, nightstands knocked over blood and brains everywhere. Someone had taken care to clean up, to recreate a peaceful diorama. Given his take on German behavior, the scene both dumbfounded him and made perfect sense. He placed the covers back over the couple’s head, went downstairs, and ordered Kelly and Urban to take the bodies to the barn outside before the children woke up.

I read your letters over and over to make them last longer. It is darned nice of you to write so often. Mother never writes, but I guess she is busy with her sister and can’t find time. I should be in bed right now, but I wanted to write to the dearest person in my world.

A few hours later, in the kitchen, they were awake, hovering over the stove to keep warm. Jacques plunked away on a piano with a few keys missing. Colette was the only one still sleeping. Brillhart and his men talked intermittently with Germaine.

In 1914, the girls’ father had stopped trusting Germans after losing his entire family to the first World War. As soon as Hitler annexed Austria, the father dug a hole in the basement floor, barred it with a wooden plank, and covered it with dirt. Day after day, he filled it with his hunting rifles, ammunition resistance, yards of dried sausage, pork fat, dried potatoes, jars of apples, bottles of beer, and candles. He was determined to see his family survive the second coming of the Germans. That’s why, at first, the children weren’t worried when the Germans locked them in the cellar. But when they tried to get to the supplies, they found that the ground was hard and frozen. They didn’t have the strength to dig all the way through.

“Why didn’t you tell us when we were serving you that horrible army crap?” Kelly cried.

Germaine shrugged her shoulders and blushed. “It wasn’t that bad.”

In minutes, the GIs were chopping away with axes they found in the barn. Within two hours, pork fat and potatoes sizzled in a heavy pan. Apples bubbled beside them. The soldiers drank the thawed beer and gnawed on the sausages, giddy that they outsmarted the Germans with this treasure trove of food. Thanks to their father, these children would survive on the surplus through the rest of the war. Colette started to cry again and run to the stairs, but Brillhart brought her back and gave her chocolate, which she had never tasted. The novelty quieted her briefly.

For the second time, Brillhart entertained the idea that June, his wife, might give birth to a girl. If so, he would name her Germaine. Jacques felt his way to the piano and played a song resembling Yankee Doodle Dandee on the remaining keys. Blind and crippled, he seemed the least affected by the parents’ death or perhaps he was just used to other people taking care of him so he trusted the soldiers. Brillhart, Kelly, and Urban laughed as the boy sputtered the words to the song. How did he know? they asked. “Papa taught it to him and told him to play it as soon as the Americans got here,” Germaine explained.

“Well, shit,” Ramsey, a medic from Georgia said, “Your Pops had his damn head too far up north. Shove over boy, let me play you the real song.” Ramsey sat next to the boy and pounded out Dixie. Even with the missing keys, Ramsey managed to render an accurate version. After hearing it that one time, Jacques replayed it perfectly.

“He’s a goddamn Mozart,” Ramsey said.

His sisters smiled shyly “He can do it with almost any song,” Germaine said.

The GIs all sang the southern hymn of Dixie together and then returned to the food.

After more apples, potatoes, sausage, beer, and coffee, Brillhart sat down and talked to Germaine again. Germaine told them how Monsieur Bourguignon had put away money for at least one of his children to go away and study something other than farming. Since his only boy was blind and crippled, he decided Germaine would be the best educated of his two girls. The schools nearby didn’t have a spot for her, so instead, she spent six months in Amsterdam studying to become an English teacher, which explained why she hardly needed any translating from Urban. She had a second cousin in Amsterdam, who lodged her in exchange for housecleaning and goods from the farm in Marche-en-Famenne that Monsieur Bourguignon brought once a month.

The mention of the Netherlands made Brillhart remember the package nestled under his coat. He had been carrying a slightly-torn Dutch comic book that he found in another house weeks ago. He understood none of the words – he just knew it wasn’t German – but the pictures of the animal characters made him smile. He ruffled Colette’s hair and pulled it from his leather satchel, spreading the pages out on the newly-clean kitchen table. Colette seemed transfixed by the critters jumping over the pages and giggled when Brillhart snorted like one of the pig characters. When she pointed to a horse, he neighed and stuck his upper teeth out. She giggled again. Germaine leaned over the table, too, smiling at the comics and at her little sister.

Brillhart announced that he would return in a few minutes. Germaine nodded and waved. He heard Jacques still puttering away at Dixie on the piano. He couldn’t see the children’s faces when he said goodbye. Perhaps the first overwhelming stirrings of fatherhood. Germaine, Colette, and the boy almost felt like his children, as if he owned them, as if they owned him. If he could wrap them up and send them to June, he would. They would love America. He envisioned a bustling household full of the adopted French-speaking children and his own. Germaine could be the nanny and go to school. He pictured the crippled boy sitting in the sun by the pool he hoped to build one day. Water exercises would be good for atrophied legs. If he stayed with them any longer, he might stay forever. Brillhart kept walking.

When he reached the main road, he saw the line of surrendered German soldiers, many carrying litters of wounded. They filed past Brillhart as he went to the battalion station in the center of town. Kelly would have yelled obscenities at the prisoners, but Brillhart kept his head down.

That afternoon, the Railsplitters moved on to another town, another battle. A few days later, they came back through Marche-en-Famenne. Brillhart had let civil affairs know about Germaine, the two younger children, and the dead parents. Brillhart walked into the center of Marche-en-Famenne taking photos for June, though few of the buildings rising out of the icy rubble remained intact. The Town Hall with its Romanesque and Gothic facades, the Mosan church and belfry, made of red brick with ornate white trimmings, and the classical columns of what had been a bank, represented Old Europe. This was what June would want to see. This was where she dreamed that Brillhart ate and slept each night. He tried to aim the camera so that it didn’t capture the hungry townspeople or piles of broken homes. Sometimes, without taking pictures, he let the camera linger in front of his face to hide his eyes that searched everywhere for Germaine and the children.

He paused in front of a modest, partially-caved-in church and observed a small cemetery with a group of civilians gathered by tombstones that had been knocked sideways by shelling. A priest crossed his hands over the bodies of the dead before closing their makeshift caskets. Brillhart recognized, among them, Germaine’s mother and father. Next to them was a hole that Brillhart knew had taken hours to dig in the hard ground. He looked into the crowd for the children but still didn’t see them. He hoped they were drinking Red Cross hot chocolate and eating doughnuts under warm blankets.

Today, I saw townspeople burying bodies in a churchyard. Amid the rubble and ruin, a small group surrounded a priest who was quietly conducting the ceremony. Some of our boys helped to dig the graves. The parents from the farmhouse were among the bodies.

There is so much ruin. It’s hard to imagine the Belgian people regaining the quiet lives they once had. And at the same time, it’s easy to see how this destruction feeds all our hatred of the Germans. It makes us want to kill more, and take fewer prisoners, to grind every German deep into the soil. Sometimes I am afraid of how you will react when I return. I hope and pray that you’ll still know me, but that the memory of this ruin will stay vivid enough that we will never let the German or any belligerent nation get a foothold again.

We thoroughly enjoyed the cookies and the Readers Digests you sent, as well as the tuna fish, knackers, sardines, and saltines. Thank you. My darling, I must stop now. I have a big day ahead of me. I will try to write more often, but regardless of how busy I am, I’m never too busy to remember you and the things we’ve done together, to think about our plans for the future. I love you more every day. Brillhart.

I went home to Jersey only once since the enlistment. I had to see my Ma. Back in the summer of 2011 I finished Basic and Advanced Individual Training for Cav Scouts and thought I’d officially become a real patriot now. The son of Filipino immigrants transformed into a proud, government-paid U.S. Soldier. A real Soldier, though, I was not. Drill sergeant said that me and the rest of my squad back at A.I.T wouldn’t experience anything too bad in Iraq or Afghanistan by the time we got in it. The War was almost up. When we deployed overseas, it would be like a vacation to Thailand, too easy. “Y’all are the lucky ones,” she said. “You’ll never see anyone die violently in your lives. You can thank Obama for that.” Joke’s on her, though. By the time I was thirteen, I’d already seen a few dead people in my life. My Pops for example. I don’t need to speak on that, though.

I showed up to Newark airport looking like a civilian, not in my ACU’s or my shiny class A’s like the Budweiser commercials have you believe we all come home looking like. Only pogues wear their uniform at the airport. Nah, I wore a grey fitted tee that felt snug and showed off my brown, ripped arms, and some boot cut jeans I picked up at the Fort Benning PX that were too baggy. It was like I was stuck in the early 2000s. Still, I had this image that Ma was going to be real proud of this new look on me. What I expected was love and admiration for the work I accomplished, the money I made, and the simple truth that I did it all on my own. Grown man now, no Pops needed, no bullshit. But when she saw me at the pickup gate with my assault pack and my Class A’s in a garment bag, she stayed in her ’93 ruby-colored Corolla as if she were a goddamn cab.

Woman who popped me out almost twenty-one years ago wouldn’t even get out of her car. She unlocked the passenger door to let me in and only glanced at me once before she drove off. Ma was about five inches shorter than me, a light-skinned woman with black hair that stopped at the back of her neck. She always wore light turquoise blouses, even when it was shy of being cold as hell. In the winter she’d switch between three turquoise hoodies all the time and never anything else, even if the heat was on blast. Two cars in front of us, this college-aged Latino boy was coming out the gate with his mother, girlfriend, and whole extended family in tow like a Pharaoh had just arrived. I wondered about that dude for half of the ride until Ma spoke up.

“Have you eaten anything, Jason?” First thing she said to me.

“Pretzels–”

“What?”

“I had pretzels on the plane. They gave me that and a Sprite.”

“Sugar they put in those sodas will kill you. Do you want to have your heart burst so young like your father?”

I had no answer for that. The main thing on my mind at the time was this: Big Jason Zobel was back in town, looking the part of a Cav Scout. There was a time when I did the whole college thing for a stint—even tried ROTC once—but enlisting turned out to be the smartest thing I ever did. When I completed Basic I went on Facebook and posted my graduation photo. My Facebook Likes lit up (104 to be exact) from a mix of people I never talked to before: high school people, Ma’s side of the family, and even this one girl, Rebecca, who I crushed on all of my junior year but who never gave me a second glance in the hallways of Saint Barnaby High. Rebecca didn’t just like my pic–she commented. She did more than just say, Congrats! She added: “You look so handsome, Jason.” You best believe I saw that shit and sent her a message. I asked if she wanted to chill at Flannigan’s Pub the day I got back to Jersey. Rebecca messaged back, “sure, let’s hang,” and yo, who am I to turn her down?

“You have to eat, Jason,” Ma said. “I’ll cook adobo for you at home.”

I tried to turn the radio on, but she told me not to touch the dial or the air con. She claimed it would kill the battery. I tried to explain that that wasn’t how cars worked.

“Those crooked mechanics changed my oil, and now half of the things don’t work,” she said.

“This is an eighteen-year-old car, Ma. That’s what happens when things get old.”

Ma immigrated to the Land of The Free in the middle of the Philippine dictatorship: President Marcos, military crackdowns on dissidents, drug violence in Manila—all kinds of shit. When I was about seven, she told me about a dude who owed this other dude a bunch of pesos and was straight up shot on the street. Not to say my family’s blood country is Apocalypse Right-The-Fuck-Now but I’d trade Jersey smog over getting gunned down for bad debt. I’m fifty grand in the hole since I dropped out of undergrad and I ain’t paying shit because Uncle Sam said he’d wash it all away if I went off to War in some place he felt like sending me to. Some men have the option to get their slates cleaned after pushing enough paperwork; others have the option to run away from it and never look back. I chose to give myself up to a cause—if you could call it that—and if I get lucky I’ll never even deploy. If I did, I’d deserve what I signed up for. Right?

When we got home, Ma ordered me to pick up groceries since there were no chicken thighs and vinegar in the apartment for the adobo she promised me. I would’ve said sure and gone off, but I got distracted by the horde of boxes stacked throughout the living room. They stretched from the front door all the way to her shrine of the Virgin Mary facing the parking lot. It was a warehouse. One side near the living room couch was stacked with cardboard boxes labeled by QVC, Amazon, and a bunch of stores I’ve never even heard of before. Cases loaded with questionably-made jewelry cushioned by styrofoam packing peanuts; old hardcovers from libraries across the country that rotted at the spine; vinyl discs from bygone musicians I didn’t even know. A brown maze of receiving and no shipping.

Before Benning, Ma had checked out a bunch of books from the library on entrepreneurship and reselling crap on Amazon to turn a profit. She got really into it, first time I’d seen her happy in years. I didn’t stop her. Her ‘business’ had gone on for so long, I almost felt guilty whenever she told me to just wait until “the money comes in.” But we’re both still waiting.

“Where did you get all of this stuff?” I said.

It had been a little over six months since I drove a civilian car, so instead of going to the Wal-Mart five minutes down the road, I plotted for the Target in Lawrenceville, a good half hour away. Some alone time was in order. First, I went to the Wawa for gas, a hoagie, tall can of Monster, and a pack of Marlboro Reds; wouldn’t be a trip home without the essentials. Pops used to smoke a pack of Reds a day, they turned his heart black. Course he never knew about it until it was too late to quit. Unlike some fathers who change and give it up the day their child is born. I figure if Pops could live until the end of his days with tobacco and bad diets, why shouldn’t I?

All him and Ma used to talk about was me being independent and successful one day because they were hard-working immigrants, but what did that mean? When I dropped out of college and told Ma I wanted to enlist, she pretended like she didn’t hear. Instead she avoided me by praying to Momma Mary’s statue plus her whole holy gang. Sometimes she’d leave me for hours at a time: lost in prayer or driving to different churches throughout the county as she never stayed at one parish for too long. I’m amazed I got through high school without asking for her help—like SAT prep, or which college I should go to, or how to interview for a job. That kind of small shit that adds up to big shit after a while. Sure, physically she was there, and she signed checks and authorized payments on bills (sometimes with my money), but on life advice or what I should be doing—she was a ghost.

As I drove, I tuned the radio until I landed on a public station. Two British women were in the middle of a discussion about troop drawdowns in Iraq and what that meant for Afghanistan. I tuned it up to a sound that was slightly short of max. They spoke in gentle voices about the history of The War on Terror. They sounded as if they were reviewing a television show, and not their topic: the wedding massacre in Mukaradeeb by coalition forces. One of them asked, What happens to our children during a time of War? out of nowhere. The other lady paused for a bit and that’s when my fingers turned the knob left, right, and back again before I tuned it off. I struggled to pull one of the Reds out of the box, but I yanked it out and smoked it until it was a brown stub.

—

When I got back with fifteen or so bags of groceries wrapped around my fingers, Ma was still on her laptop. As I stocked the groceries, she called me out.

“What took you so long? You’re putting miles on my car.” She clicked away without looking up. “Took your uniform out. So dusty! I cleaned it up a bit.”

My blue Army Service Uniform was unpacked, hung up on the frame of her bedroom. She wanted me to explain it all to her. Last time I’d worn it was for the AIT graduation party.

Ma stood by me and touched the uniform’s lapel. I explained what every trinket stood for: the name tape, the rank, the flimsy ribbons I sort of earned just for being a living soldier. Ma’s head shook once. Twice, maybe? There was a semblance of recognition I needed—balance, I guess. Part of her eyes got really big then super small, staring at the cross and silver on my upper left chest. When I told her it was a marksmanship badge, meaning I was a good with a rifle—the badge that I’m proud of the most, being a small town Jersey boy with no history of handling a gun, let alone an assault rifle—there was no wow or pause to congratulate me. She asked: How did I pay for this (out of my government stipend) and when do I wear it (things graduation, weddings, or military funerals.) Ma wasn’t too pleased with that last statement. She went straight to bed. I put the ASU back and took her car keys.

“I’m going out, Ma,” I called.

“What did you say?”

“I’m going out. See what’s changed around town for a bit.”

“Do not destroy my car.”

I arrived at Flannigan’s off 295 in Ewing shortly after 1800. By the time I got there, happy hour had started, an hour before Rebecca would show up.

Flannigan’s was a remnant of a New Jersey bar that once was—a replica of what could’ve been a local’s hub straight from a television sitcom, but the idea was scrapped after years of just trying to get by. Bartender didn’t even look at me when I sat in a corner section, far from the Rolling Rock lights and the empty crimson red booths cushions that sunk and tore where your ass was supposed to be. Last time I came around, I was just shy of finishing off high school at eighteen. They didn’t have a guard at the front checking ID’s, it was up to the bartender, but everyone in school knew that no one checked; it made ‘em more money that way. Now the staff changed, the only person still around was one of the regulars: a crusty-looking bald dude with blue eyes and dry skin. Didn’t recognize me though. I ordered a High Life on draft and finished half of it before five minutes passed. The bar’s floor hatch opened from below, and a white boy about my age with a short blonde crew cut emerged. He wore a fitted black tee with the pub’s logo on the front and back.

“Kowalski, can you go back and bring up two more Miller kegs,” the bartender said as he changed the channels from ESPN to Fox News, “they’re tapped out.”

The barback didn’t say a word as he marched back down. I tried to listen to his voice to make sure it was him; but when he came back around to face the door, we stared one another down. Ben Kowalski was a junior when I was a freshman and he used to harass me and other kids in school for the fun of it. We were on the wrestling team together but never got along as I was the most out of shape in the group, chugging behind while he led the team in sprints, suicides, and up-downs. Outside of the sport, he’d pick me out in the cafeteria and chide me, asking if I needed any food today or he’d say something to his group in the hallways whenever I’d pass by, something that made them laugh when my back was turned. It went on for a few months until he got a DUI one semester and he couldn’t act a fool anymore, he’d become one.

At the bar we scanned each other for signs of life’s wear and tear. The Marine was three years older than me, but looked twenty more.

“No shit,” Ben said as he leaned against the bar. “Hey sir, I thought you were trying to be an LT? Least that’s what Facebook said.”

“And I thought you were in jail for selling pills,” I said.

“Murray’s dad helped me out on that one. The Corps a hand in it too.”

“Good for you.”

The two of us slapped hands and hugged, like all that past didn’t make a difference. Ben had developed into a sturdy, wood-colored deck of a man, polished with pink along the edges you can expect—the neck, the ears, and the side of arms. Once he got that DUI, he spent his senior year brawling with people over his ex-fiancé and doing pills with a couple of other oxygen thieves who were either in AA, in jail, or on house arrest now. Sometime after he signed up for the Corps and deployed a few months later.

Ben was getting off work in a few, so I told him I’d wait around. Rebecca was late anyway, I figured she was stuck in traffic or something. I thought about texting her or sending her a Snap, but I didn’t. On the TV, a Fox News reporter in Manhattan said that a former Marine fractured his skull at a California Occupy Wall Street Protest and when I finished my third High Life, the bartender shut it off and called them all a bunch of communists who got what they deserved.

It was Ben’s war anniversary, and also around the time he got out of the Corps, so he was thrilled to tell someone about it. After four years and two deployments on him, he got out so he could work a second shift job at Flannigan’s and third shift at the Buffalo Wild Wings on Route 1, slinging boneless fried chicken and watery beer.

“What about your G.I. bill?”

“What about it? Who needs college?” Ben said.

In the Marines, his role was in signal operations between the various services. He claimed to be a master of the phonetic alphabet, and when I called bullshit, he bought three shots of whiskey and drank them in a row—waited five minutes for it to settle—and proceed to utter each letter backward and forwards, twice. It was like putting together Legos for him.

I was so impressed I offered to pay for the shots, but he kept saying no, no. “It’s OK, brother,” Ben said. “Too fucking easy. It feels like tricks like that are the only thing I’m good at anymore.”

I bought us a round of Miller Lights and he talked about Afghanistan, his last deployment. “We dropped so many rounds on the enemy, but I never got to see any of it up close. Pissed me off. They’d relay back to command how many targets they supposedly took out, or the LT’s on the ground would radio back if they could engage a fucker, and I was pretty much the link between the green light and the action and—” Ben stopped to take out a Marlboro Red and offered me one too. “It was all indirect, never up front, you couldn’t see them. I know I got ’em because I’d hear the report on the comms or watch the video a few days later. Every shot hit home. One minute a dude is running for his life in a poppy field and then out of nowhere…his remains are painted all over the flowers. Yeah. Yeah. It was fun. Hey man that’s sick you went enlisted man, you’ll fucking love it and then hate it a few days later. What did you sign up for in the Army?”

I told him about the cavalry.

“You went Cav? Cav? Why the fuck would you sign up to be a bullet sponge, homeboy? You should re-class and go M.I. They got the hottest chicks in the Army. Bar none.”

I offered to drive Ben home but he said, “I’m Good to Fucking Go.”

He got in his green Jeep and swerved out of the parking lot while I waited past twenty-three hundred for Rebecca to show up, except she didn’t. She didn’t text or nothing. About an hour in, ex classmates from high school came into the pub and passed me by—they looked at me, squinted, and walked away. Few people remembered me, can’t blame ‘em. I only had about two hundred or so friends on Facebook, perhaps eighty percent or more of them I didn’t even talk to. It could’ve also been the beer and Ben’s shots that must’ve given me some kind of funk for people to keep their distance, but by midnight the buzz went away, and I started sipping on another light beer minding my own until this brunette approached me to say hi and she called me Eduardo, and when I said I wasn’t him, she apologized, turned, and went to her friends by the pool tables. I finished another pint and drove to Ma’s with the windows down. The night’s chill pressed against my face and tickled my scalp. A Statey followed my ass on Route I-195 from Trenton to Robbinsville until it zoomed around me to pull over a speeding Camaro. An ambulance roared by in the other direction. Where it went, God knows.

I got home a quarter past one. Five thick red candles flickered along the apartment’s window sill. The Venetian blinds swung in a lazy, steady motion, guided by the wind. I unlocked Ma’s the front door and listened to the soft murmurs of prayer in a mix of Tagalog and English. She was in a nightgown, her knees pressed against the carpet, praying to the Virgin statue; tiny candles lit around Mary’s ceramic feet like beggar children. Her eyes remained closed as her index fingers clutched the red rosary beads, her lips lost in the movement of The Lord’s Prayer. She didn’t stop or look over until I locked the door.

“You took my car without permission,” she said.

“You said I could take it.”

“No. I asked where you were going,” she took a deep breath and turned back to the statue. “Come here. Pray with me, Jason.”

My walk must’ve been awkward, gaited even, but I got on my knees next to her. It must’ve been the smell of candles that had me all fucked up still. It had been a while since I’d done this. I tried to recall how to pray and what to pray about; Hail Mary, or Our Father, or The Apostle’s Creed. They all sound the same. Ma tapped my closed fist. “Pray,” she said.

Prayer is an eerie and intimate feeling with another person next to you. When Pops was still around, we went to Saint Barn’s as a whole family. We knelt in the rows at the front, not too far off from big Jesus himself looking down upon us. We recited the rosary, bead for bead. When it was done, Ma went up to the rows of candles and lit one up for her sister, another for her home in Manila, and another for Pops. Come up, Ma said to me, and I lit one up for my future, whatever that looked like. Another for Ma. Another for Pops. The light glowed in front of me as if it were a power that only I could hold; a thing that I could control.

After extinguishing the candles, I helped her to the bedroom. Her body felt grainy against my shoulders, light in weight but uneven and hard. I laid her down upon the mattress, stacking the pile of self-help magazines and business textbooks on her bed to the floor. As I tucked her in, she grabbed my wrist.

“When are you leaving me, Jason?”

“Soon. Back to Texas. Army life. Afterwards, maybe I’ll deploy. I don’t know.”

She rubbed my wrist. “You’ve always had dry skin problems,” she said, “you need to put on some lotion. My boy. God, you’re my only boy. My only boy is going away.” Her hand flowed down onto the bed in a slow, fluid, motion like a fat droplet of Georgia rain water off an up-armored Humvee’s roof. I closed her bedroom door with my body upright, my neck tight and my eyes salty with sweat from the whiskey or the candles or I don’t know. In the darkness of her warehouse, I sat on the couch and wrapped my left hand around the straps of my assault pack and tapped my fingernails against my knee with the other.

Too often your mind wanders back to those places where God has turned his face away. For example: the prison your platoon guarded in Baghdad in the early months of the war. Displaced Iraqi families were making new homes under the comforting shadows of your machine guns and you kicked soccer balls around the dusty yard with delighted Arab children like you would have had they been your own nieces and nephews.

But they were not your nieces and nephews, and at the end of the day they would sleep in jail cells stained and streaked with the blood of their countrymen, tortured and executed by now-deposed Saddam Hussein and his two crazy sons. When you walk down the narrow hallways, peering through iron cages, you marvel at the claw marks in the walls, made by human claws, and at the shoestrings and bootlaces and belts, broken and frayed, tied to the window grates where the doomed had tried to hang themselves, where desperate people would now be grateful for the shelter.

As you lounge on the roof of the prison, baking within the overwatch position on the roof—which is just a makeshift tent rigged from ponchos encased in sandbags with cheap folding camping chairs you’ve purchased at the PX back in Kuwait—smoking shisha from a hookah in the heat of the afternoon sun, you begin to better understand why you are there.

Marwan, the Iraqi kid from across the way who’s been acting as an unofficial translator, tells you more of what you’ve heard on CNN and Fox News and read in the New York Times and Stars and Stripes. The torture and the death. The rape and pillaging. The opulent wealth and endless greed.

One late afternoon, after you’ve been in place for a few days and the locals start wandering over to barter, or look on curiously, a couple of girls come to visit. They look to be in their late teens and they don’t have their heads covered. They come asking for cigarettes, or Pepsi, or something of which you wouldn’t have thought that’s the thing they’d be looking for after having been invaded just a few weeks earlier, but they do and they stick around to chat in their limited English. One is blonde, probably dyed, and they are unafraid to talk to American soldiers, they ignore your weapons and body armor, and they ask things that every girl would ask a soldier, about your wife or girlfriend and if you have children, that kind of thing.

Marwan has seen this before. Maybe with the Marines in the weeks prior. “Turkish,” he says, and makes a face. “Prostitutes, I think.” They invite you for tea in their apartment, on the tenth floor across from the prison. That’s high up. You have an image of yourself spiraling face first to meet your death from blunt cardiac trauma while Turkish whores rifle through your wallet, your squad leader gingerly rolling over your smashed head with a gloved hand and wondering where your BDU pants are.  What his after-action report would sound like. You think that this is not a good idea.

“Come on, man,” says the PFC most enamored with the girls. “We’ll go and come back before anyone knows.” The girls follow the debate with hopeful expressions. For tea, they insist. Yeah, right.

You do think about it. The logistics of it. One up, one down. Cover me while I cover you, that kind of thing. What the hell, right? You could all be dead by morning. You don’t even know what you’re doing here besides babysitting an empty prison rapidly filling up with displaced Iraqis.

But the Turkish girls go home, much to the disappointment of the PFC.

The shift is over, but because there is nothing else to do but sleep, this is where you stay. The next team takes up positions in another spot, eating the good parts of their MREs and tossing the remainder to the kids below. You smoke hookah until the sun goes down, Marwan heads back to his apartment, and eventually you drift in and out of a fitful sleep on a poncho liner underneath the stars for a couple hours before waking up to drink water and rinse the dust off your face and out of your mouth and eyes again. Some of the guys are sleeping in the trucks still, but you and your team will sleep on the roof because it’s both easier and minimally more comfortable, at least at night when it’s about thirty degrees cooler.

This is a strange place for a prison, you decide: behind a government complex and smack in the middle of a residential street. You suppose Saddam Hussein had them everywhere, so probably people just forgot they were there. Until the invasion when he gave the order to empty the prisons and release all the prisoners, and the inevitable chaos that followed such a directive when criminals, psychopaths, dissidents, and whoever else were now back out in the street. You wonder what condition these prisoners were in. Did they just stagger out, the ones that could, blink into the sunlight and fall back down onto their knees into the sand in despair? Did they dash from their cells and out the prison gate into the apartment complexes and beg passersby for a bite to eat, some money for a taxi, or a cellphone to call their loved ones? Did they just run outside and murder the cellmate they hated, or track down the guy sleeping with their wife and kill him amidst the chaos of the American invasion or join in on the citywide looting sprees with their countrymen? You wonder these things for a while, smoking cigarettes on occasion to pass the time.

You stare at the now vacant Ministry of Information building, hulking, towering above the prison yard. What kind of government information ministry has an onsite prison? You think it would be like if the Voice of America office in Washington D.C. had its own prison behind it for anyone accused of crimes against it. Voice of America dissenters all locked up and forced to listen to Armed Forces Radio deejays and shitty Brittany Spears pop music on a loop twenty-four hours a day. The horrors, you think. What if, though? What a weird fucking place, you answer your own question. That’s the only answer.

You think about “Baghdad Bob,” Saddam Hussein’s comically misinformed Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, who spent the last days of the war broadcasting that the American infidels were committing suicide outside the city gates while American tanks rolled down Baghdad’s streets. What’d Bob do in his off time? Stroll casually through the backyard prison kicking at the cell doors of prisoners and late-for-work newscasters, calling them imperialist dogs and commies and stopping occasionally to administer the usual electric shock or to rip off a fingernail or two? Where’s old Bob now? Where is that crazy fucker?

What’s Baghdad Bob going to do with himself now that there’s no war to rattle on about? You picture him hosting Iraqi Jeopardy in his retirement, some sultry Iraqi swimsuit model flipping clues on the game board. “Weapons of Mass Destruction for $200,” he announces to the audience, his signature black beret still plastered to his head.

You wonder if Baghdad Bob had a fancy office, all gold and gaudy and plastic-treed, with ornate massive chairs like at Uday’s palace where the platoon first was camped out. You think maybe you’d like to go look for that office, kick your boots up on his desk, take a picture with his favorite beret on or something. Maybe tomorrow.

“Where you wanna go?” asked your buddy Jay from home, another sergeant who’s come up the ranks just a couple years before you.

“I’m just going to go to see what kind of cool shit’s left behind that the Marines didn’t get,” you tell him. “You know, like flags and uniforms and bayonets and shit. Stuff to send home.”

“Yeah, let’s do it then.”

And so the two of you go in the morning. You stack your rifles in the overwatch lean-to—bringing pistols only; you want to be light and unencumbered–and tell the specialist on watch you’ll be back in a bit.

This is how soldiers die, you decide. Boredom, the age-old killer. Boredom and curiosity and kleptomania combined. You’re still going to go in, though.

When you step inside the exterior door to what must have been the basement loading dock, all you first see is what looks to be an abandoned storage room, desks and furniture tipped over, papers scattered everywhere, nothing too exciting. Because it is dark and there are few windows on this floor, the two of you alternate using your high-powered Surefire flashlights as you sweep the corners of the room, peering into the shadows, stepping gingerly over spilled boxes of binders, files, gas masks, breathing canisters for gasmasks, and piles of other stuff you can’t quite make out.

“This is pretty fucking stupid, man,” you whisper to Jay who grins and whispers back, “So, fucking go back out, then,” nodding in the direction you just came. But you don’t. And you know neither of you will. The two of you are going to the top of this thing, and you both know it, stupid or not. And so, you sweep left to right, right to left, Surefire flashlights in your left hands and Beretta 9mm pistols in your right, wrists and backs of your hands together in the traditional police “ice pick” grip, and the two of you move slowly shoulder to shoulder, back to back, toe to heel, trying not to make a sound.

There are definitely people still in there, though. Or close by. You can hear other voices somewhere else around the building, muffled, but human nonetheless. Considering the population of displaced persons now living in the prison cells next store, you wonder if there are displaced persons doing the same thing you are, looking for cool shit to steal, or maybe food.

Yeah, you think if they’re displaced persons, then they’re probably looking for things they can live off of, food and water, things to sell maybe.

Unless they’re Fedayeen hiding out still, or wounded Ba’ath Party Ministry officials biding their time, waiting for the right moment to escape. You feel the hair tingle on the back of your neck and the muscles in your forearms tighten and the flexor tendon connecting that muscle to your trigger finger twitch. If someone comes around that corner screaming “Allāhu akbar!” you’ll be prepared to double-tap that motherfucker and hope for the best. You flick the safety off the Beretta and look at that little reassuring orange dot that says it’s ready to do its job, and you hope that this is one of the days when it doesn’t jam.

Jay does the same and you say “Shhh…” with your pistol barrel to your lips instead of an index finger, but it comes out as more of a nervous “Shhh…” giggle and he suppresses his own nervous laugh.

“We’re fucking assholes,” you say under your breath.

“Yeah we are,” he smirks.

It occurs to you briefly that any one of the boxes or drawers or corrugated metal filing cabinets that you’ve just kicked open might have exploded in your faces, and you might be nothing more than a pink mist clinging to the thick morning air right now if you kicked the wrong box, and then you see it and any thoughts of tactical awareness evaporate the second you glimpse that red, white, green, and black fabric wedged between the box of photographs and flipped over desks.

You will have no thought whatsoever that those photos of men women and children are most likely of prisoners who have been tortured or killed while you’re hurriedly pushing aside the only evidence of their existence with the hopes that you will get your greedy little dirty mitts on the discarded colors that represent their homeland.

But you don’t give a shit about that. You want your souvenir. You kick that box of Iraqi humanity right the fuck out of your way, and you pull that Iraq flag out from under all that shit and hold it up. “Jackpot. Look at this thing,” you say and it’s intact other than the line of successive holes singed around the edges where it appears that a Marine or some other fucker went full auto with a small caliber rifle.

“Damn, son,” Jay shakes his head, “Fucking jackpot.”

“Don’t worry, man,” you say, “We’ll get another one.” And so, the two of you clear all twelve floors left to right, right to left, ceiling to floor, floor to ceiling—looking not for enemy fighters, or hidden caches of weapons and evidence of the Saddam Hussein’s regime of tyranny, but because you are looking for garbage quality mementos like flags and unit insignia and bayonets that the Republican Guard has discarded to send home to your colleagues in suburban Connecticut.

When you get to the top, the sun is blinding, the blue skies are clear, there are only a few burning buildings in the distance, and the effect is surreal. You have a butt pack fall of Iraqi flags, Republican guard insignia, and other Iraq military paraphernalia in your U.S. Navy-issued Kevlar vest under your Connecticut National Guard-issued flack vest and you’re not dead.

It’s a beautiful day in Baghdad, you think. “Good morning Baghdad!” you scream into the wind doing your best Robin Williams in Vietnam impression. Jay laughs and points to an abandoned anti-aircraft gun emplacement at one of the corners of the rooftop, and the two of you gleefully climb into the gunners’ seats completely forgetting to check the thing for booby traps. You get up to set the timer on the camera that you brought with you and the two of you take celebratory photos sitting in Baghdad Bob’s anti-aircraft gun on the top of his wrecked and looted and bombed-out office building. Just a couple of buck sergeants hanging out on the roof like fucking tourists.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here, man,” Jay says, and so the two of you descend the twelve stories in a much less guarded fashion than you climbed it.

Years later when you are home again and you have dragged that same Iraqi military shit around since that day in the Ministry of Information building well over a decade ago, you will wonder why you still have it. Why you still schlep it from place to place, apartment to apartment, state to state, and country to country so many years later. You will want to know what it means, what value it has, this box of war tokens still smelling of smoke and dust and fear and stupidity a decade and a half later.

But you won’t know why you hold onto it, of all things. The footlocker that holds those things that you took so long ago is the only thing that you would never part with of all your earthly possessions. You think that these are the things that should be buried with you when you finally go. That this should be the rule: whatever remains of any war ought to be buried with whoever has been a part of it. That maybe this is your final penance, to be buried with your stolen Iraq War paraphernalia. Your dinars and your insignia and your bayonets and your flags. Bury it with you, and you with it; and bury the war, and forget you and it and your part in stealing it. Forget your part in a dirty war.