I swore I would never become a soldier like my mother.

She called it a blip, a few months out of an otherwise enjoyable career with the Army. No one saw the blip coming. Both of my grandfathers served in the military, but their wars stayed cold. My mom’s reserve unit, Seattle’s Fiftieth General Hospital, with 750 personnel, was too big, too expensive deploy, the very reason she’d chosen the unit. Aft er three years as an active-duty Army nurse, she wanted to start a family. The Fiftieth promised stability; for them to deploy, it would take World War III.

On Thanksgiving weekend of 1990, my mom got a phone call. She had been receiving practice calls ever since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, drills to make sure the phone tree was accurate, to keep everyone prepared. This time, the call wasn’t a drill. The unit was put on alert for deployment orders. My sister, brother, and I were asleep, so we didn’t see the white-faced shock when Mom answered the phone. We didn’t watch her crumple into Dad’s arms when she told him or see the shock mirrored in his own face as questions of her safety, the family’s well-being, single parenthood flooded his mind.

Mom and her hospital unit wouldn’t receive orders right away. They would spend Thanksgiving with their families, worrying and hoping—hoping World War III would dissipate with the holiday weekend; hoping their orders would leave them as local backfill for active-duty soldiers who deployed or send them to Germany, the unit’s assigned overseas operating location based on the Cold War model; hoping their orders would be short.

None of these hopes materialized. Mom’s orders were for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for an undetermined length of up to two years.

I hardly recall the Army’s presence in our family before Desert Storm. The Army slipped in and out one weekend a month and two weeks a year when Mom put on green clothes and went “camping.” Sometimes we ate hotdogs and pretended to camp too. With that Thanksgiving phone call, though, the Army consumed us. I had just turned seven, my sister, Shavonne, was eight, and my brother, Matt, barely two. Suddenly, we were no longer a regular young family. Mom had always been the center mass around which we all orbited, and now our gravity fi eld had shift ed. In preparation for the deployment, she took frequent trips to the local Army base, sometimes for days at a time. Big green Army bags piled up in the living room where we used to build puzzles and pillow forts. Instead of driving to school with Mom, Shavonne and I went to daycare with Matt early in the morning when Dad left for work. Neighbors stopped by our house to drop off funny-tasting casseroles. They said nice things like, “We’re praying for you,” and “Let us know if you need anything.” I just needed my mom. I was restless in school and gymnastics practice, anxious to get home and hug Mom and hold onto her forever.

Before she left for Saudi Arabia, I told my mom I hated the Army. “Oh sweetie,” she said, “I know it feels like the Army is being mean, but it’s the Army’s job to go help people. A bad man invaded another country, and we need to go help the people there and get him out.” With that, she redirected my hatred to Saddam Hussein. The Army wasn’t taking Mom away; a bad man was making her leave. Shavonne and I even learned a song about that man and how much we all hated him. We sang the song over and over, and Mom laughed the hardest: 

Joy to the world, Saddam is dead!

We barbequed his head!

Don’t worry ‘bout the body

We flushed it down the potty,

And round and round it goes . . .

I don’t remember this, but my parents tell me that before she deployed, I asked Mom if she could die. I imagine myself climbing into her lap. In my mind she’s wearing the soft blue bathrobe she had when I was growing up. I’m clutching it, nuzzling into her brown permed curls. Mom wraps her fuzzy blue arms around me, and I can feel her heartbeat, strong and serious. She gazes out through her thick-framed glasses, her eyes light like mine above the long, sharp nose and freckles inherited by Shavonne. Mom purses her lips. She’s thinking about my question, about my life—all our lives—without her. She’s thinking about the briefings the hospital unit received, the expectations of chemical weapons and massive casualties, the potential for an attack on Israel and an ensuing holy war of nuclear proportions. She’s thinking this might be a suicide mission. Mom pulls me closer and strokes the top of my head, trying to memorize the feel of me. She’s weighing her need to protect her child with a desire for honesty.

She answered my question: “I’m going to do the best I can to come back to you as soon as I can.”

“Don’t tell her that!” my dad said. “Tell her no!” But my mom couldn’t lie.

Just before she left, Mom wove Shavonne’s and my hair into double French braids, like she did when we had soccer or T-ball games, the only thing that would keep my thin hair and Shavonne’s unruly curls in place under helmets and through trips up and down the fi eld. These braids were special, though. They held the memory of Mom’s touch: her gentle fingers brushing across my scalp, the nail of her little finger drawing a part down each side, her soft breath on the back of my neck. I wanted to keep the braids forever. I promised Mom I would. It would be our connection while she was gone, and every time I looked in the mirror I would think of her.

Mom deployed right after Christmas. Christmas has always been my favorite holiday, and the occasion carried extra weight in 1990 because we had Mom with us. The Christmas morning snowfall seemed magical to us kids but made a treacherous drive for our relatives, who commuted several hours for everyone to be together. I don’t know if our house has ever been so full; it’s funny how war brings people together. We had an epic snowball fight with my cousins, opened presents, ate roast beef and mashed potatoes and gravy, and took pictures around the Christmas tree, just like every year.

A few days later, we watched Mom board an Army transport bus. She waved to us through a grimy window until her pale face was lost to camouflage and dust and distance. On the bus she was surrounded by other moms and dads, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and a single twenty-something medic. The medic had no family to wave to through the grimy window, but he saw us: a man with red-rimmed eyes standing next to two girls with double French braids. Both girls clung to the man and cried. In the man’s arms was a small boy. The young soldier couldn’t hear it, but the boy repeated, “Where’s Mommy going?” over and over, long after the bus rolled out of sight.

“Looking at your family when we left was my war moment,” the medic later told my mom. “Seeing how heartbroken they were.”

My memories of Mom’s deployment blur into a fuzzy background, punctuated by snapshot images of clarity. I remember cheese quesadillas, “cheese pies” I called them, cooked in the microwave. A neighborhood mom who watched us aft er school served them to us while we waited at her house for Dad to pick us up. One day while there, I got the stomach flu. The neighbor tucked me into a nest of blankets on the couch with Gatorade and a bucket, but I kept getting up. I walked to the hallway and threw up. I threw up in the living room. I kept walking, looking for my mom.

As the days passed, oil slickened my hair and my precious braids started to unwind. I remember an angry fit of protest, and an ultimate compromise. Every few days the gracious neighbor cleaned and re-braided my hair. It looked exactly the same. But it wasn’t.

I cried every night in bed aft er Mom’s tape-recorded voice finished reading a bedtime story. I saw the school counselor for a few weeks. I don’t recall her name or what she looked like or even what we talked about, but I remember staring out her window at the snow-crusted ground. My classmates were at recess, throwing snowballs, having fun. For the first time I did not feel normal.

We were the only local kids who had a parent deployed. Neighbors took turns babysitting and delivering meals. A yellow ribbon hugged the big maple tree in front of our elementary school. When she returned, my mom would cut the ribbon off to a whooping chorus of cheers from our classmates. But while she was gone it hung there, through rain and wind and snow. I saw the ribbon every day, and I hated it.

We lived for weekly calls from Mom, letters, occasional pictures, anything to let us know she was safe. Each trip to the mailbox was its own tiny Christmas, marked by expectation and, too often, when no letters came, disappointment. At one point, Mom sent Shavonne and me matching T-shirts with pictures of camels wearing combat boots and gas masks. I still have that shirt, a child’s size small, buried in the back of a drawer. Dad pointed out Saudi Arabia on our office globe. Mom was there, inside the little star that represented the capital of Riyadh. It didn’t look very far away.

We watched news reports every evening on TV. Headlines that spring covered topics that interest me now as an adult: an escalation of violence in Sudan following the imposition of nationwide Islamic law, an historic meeting between Nelson Mandela and Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Haiti’s appointment of its first elected president, the controversy over Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s assisted suicides, the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In 1991, I could focus only on the war. My world expanded exponentially when Mom deployed; I wasn’t yet ready to stretch beyond the Middle East. Besides, the Middle East was everywhere, dominating TV, radio, and newspaper reports. In a letter home Mom noted that we were probably getting more news of the war than she was; TV was censored in Saudi Arabia, and she didn’t have free time to watch anyway.

In the States, we witnessed a new era in broadcasting, the first time war received real-time coverage from reporters on the ground. They showed awesome footage of planes taking off from aircraft carriers and terrifying shots of exploding missiles. All around were people in camouflage, but not the green and black my mom wore on Reserve duty. These uniforms were brown like dirt. There was a lot of dirt on the news when they talked about the war. I thought it must be hard for Mom to stay clean. I had never watched the news before. Sitting on the couch, my legs curled beneath me, I got my first exposure to the industry of which one day I would be a part. As a public affairs officer I would be there, against the dusty brown backdrop of war, ushering reporters, directing camera angles, providing talking points to the people in camouflage, filtering conflict for the families back home.

Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm represented a new era in warfare too. Mom was part of the largest reserve component ever activated in support of an armed conflict, and the first involuntary call requiring reservists to report to active duty since the dissolution of the draft. In total, the government activated more than 227,000 reservists. The Army provided the bulk of personnel, nearly 140,000, with around fourteen percent in medical specialties like Mom’s hospital unit. Mom was also part of the largest contingent of U.S. military women ever to deploy. By war’s end, 40,000 women had served overseas, almost as many as had been on active duty during the height of America’s last large-scale conflict, the Vietnam War. Desert Storm saw two American women held as Prisoners of War, and thirteen killed in action.

Sometimes on the news they talked about people dying. At recess one day I was by myself, as I often was during that time, wandering along the edge of the concrete basketball court, when my class bully sauntered up to me. “Hey, I heard about a lady that got killed in the war,” he chided, “Do you think it was your mom?”

I hadn’t heard about the lady. Had she been on the news the night before? No one had called to tell us something bad had happened. Wouldn’t they call? But what if they had called; what if Dad answered and didn’t want to tell us before school? What if they knocked on our door but no one was home? Maybe the bully had seen a news report that I’d missed? The thought of never seeing my mom again overwhelmed me, and I sat down on the concrete and cried for a long time.

While Mom was gone, we made up games to make time and distance not seem so massive, to trick ourselves into feeling like we might have some sort of control. For “When will Mom come home?” the whole family—my dad, sister, brother, grandparents, and I—scribbled our return date guesses across the calendar. My sister’s prediction, March 12, 1991, was the earliest, three and a half months aft er Mom’s departure. The rest of us hoped but doubted she was close.

As March arrived, we only got a couple days’ notice that Shavonne’s guess was exactly right. As suddenly as war had swooped into our lives, it ended. We let ourselves be consumed by frenzied preparations for Mom’s homecoming, spending hours tracing letters and gluing glitter onto bright sheets of poster board. There were trips to Party City to buy trunk-loads of yellow ribbons and American flags. We must have alerted the relatives the elementary school, my Girl Scout troop, the whole neighborhood, and Mom’s college roommate, because hordes of them showed up at McChord Air Force Base outside Seattle on the morning of March 12.

Together we stood behind a chain link fence, a crowd of hundreds, watching the empty runway. Shavonne and I held signs and chattered with our classmates. Matt, too young to understand where Mommy had been or why, just knew that this was the day she was coming home. He coiled his tiny hands around the fence and rocked back and forth, back and forth, eyes glued to the tarmac. His expectant little face, framed by a puff y black and red jacket, became a popular clip on local news segments.

I don’t know how long we waited before we heard the drone of an approaching aircraft . The crowd hushed. We twisted our heads frantically and shielded our eyes from the sun. A dark speck emerged on the horizon, and we erupted into a cacophony of cheers. The dark speck got bigger and turned into a place that drift ed slowly across the landscape. As it inched closer, the crowd grew wild. We screamed and shook the fence. My dad scooped up my brother. Someone, a grandparent maybe, grabbed my hand. Reporters yelled into their microphones. We were supposed to stay behind the fence, but when the plane landed and the first camouflaged figure emerged, we stampeded the runway. All I could see was legs: jeans and khakis and sweats, then a trickle of camouflage moving upstream, and then a pair of legs that stopped and dropped a bag and bent and hugged and cried, and then I was in her arms and nuzzling my face into her hair and the world was whole again.

For a while after her deployment, I screamed every time Mom put on her uniform. Then, gradually, the Army faded into the background again, one weekend a month, two weeks a year. The blip, Desert Storm, followed us all like a shadow, not unpleasant, but always there.

We were extra thankful on Thanksgiving when the phone didn’t ring. We got teary-eyed whenever Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” came on the radio, an anthem for Mom’s unit. For years, our schools asked Mom to give Veterans’ Day speeches, and Shavonne and I modeled Saudi Arabian clothes she’d brought back as souvenirs: black draping capes and veils that covered everything except a square around our eyes, similar to the burqas I’d see eighteen years later in Afghanistan. I loved being a part of Mom’s experience, if only from under the veil. I liked to twirl and see the fabric billow around me. Mostly I liked watching my mom.

She talked about how difficult life was for women in Saudi Arabia. “They have to cover all their skin, even when it’s really hot outside,” she said. “If they don’t, the police can arrest them! And they aren’t allowed to drive!” Even as an American, Mom said, she couldn’t go certain places because she was a woman. She told our classmates about the armed guards on the hospital buses and around the compound to help keep the doctors and nurses safe. Mom shared that she was afraid at first to take care of Iraqi prisoners, but she learned that they only fought because their families were threatened by Saddam Hussein. I thought how brave she was and how lucky I was to have a mom who was more than just a mom, but also a soldier, a healer, and a hero who helped save people from that mean man. After Mom finished speaking everyone clapped for her, and I beamed under my veil.

I didn’t know how painful those events were for my mom. I didn’t realize she struggled diving back into her roles as wife and mother and everything else we heaped on her. She didn’t discuss her terror at nightly air raids, or her aching loneliness, or her doubts about her ability to handle combat. I didn’t know she carried trauma with her every day, even aft er she returned home. I didn’t understand her earnestness when we made a family pact that no one else would join the military, because one deployment was enough.

She found the Siamese cat tied up in a plastic bag in bushes behind Target. She can’t believe what some people do. Her boyfriend, Teddy, still asleep, rolls onto his side. He manages a gas station and gets off at six in the morning. Husband, Katrina calls him. Marriage a ceremony neither can afford and perhaps the fragility of their lives warns them against. Tweekers both of them but clean now. She looks out a window at the cracked street still wet from the calm night. A block away, the silence is being nibbled away by cars on Interstate 805, soon to be a madness of rush-hour traffic. Not long from now Katrina will awaken to other noises. She wonders what those will be. Some traffic, sure, this is San Diego. Every city has traffic but maybe she’ll hear birdsong, too. Waking up to birds as she did as a child. Imagine. She and Teddy recently found an apartment through the housing authority. Of the nearly 8,500 homeless people in San Diego County, more than 700 live in vehicles. Almost 500 emergency housing vouchers became available in 2021 to address housing insecurity worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Katrina and Teddy got one of the vouchers, but it took them nearly a year to find a place. One landlord told her, All people on Section 8 have bedbugs. She felt he was just lumping her into a stereotype. In her opinion, there’re the bums who are content being homeless, and then there are people like her and Teddy who are working but don’t have a place to live.

The landlord who finally accepted their application rents apartments on Loma Way. She offered Katrina and Teddy a two bedroom with brown linoleum floors. Much better than that cheap brown carpet so many apartments have, especially with cats. Katrina checked it out on Google Maps and thought it looked like crap. But the photo she saw was old. When she and Teddy met with the landlord they found that all of the apartments had been recently remodeled and freshly painted. Nine hundred and fifty square feet. Beats the thirty-two square feet of the Winnebago and the leaky roof. When it rains, water pours into the bedroom and kitchenette. Teddy will shove her to one side of the bed so he can stay dry, her body pressed against the frayed particleboard of a cabinet. The other day, her mother called from Utah and said a foot of snow had fallen. Tell her we got a foot of rain inside, Teddy said. When they were using drugs they draped tarps over their tent to keep out the rain. One night, Katrina had to be life-flighted out of a riverbed near the golf course behind Fashion Valley Mall because of flooding. She was detoxing from speed and shaking so bad she couldn’t climb out ahead of the rising waters.

The landlord did not hold the history of drug arrests and convictions against them. As long as you tell me the truth before I do a background check, you’ll be fine, she had told them. They can move in two weeks. Hard to imagine having a place after living in the Winnebago for a year. No, eighteen months. A year and a fucking half. She and Teddy didn’t sleep much when they lived on the street before the Winnebago. Afraid who might walk up on them. Katrina knows three people who died, one stabbed, two OD’d. Bad stuff. If you make someone mad they can hide anywhere and come for you about just stupid stuff. Could be a guy touched someone’s backpack. People are nuts about their packs. This one dude took a guy’s pack because he owed him money. The pack had his heart meds and he died that night of a stroke. At least that’s what the paramedics said. Scary out there.

Robin stirs, opens one eye and watches a man walk past her car wheeling a garbage can. He picks up pieces of paper with a trash picker, peers at her, glances away and moves on in a desultory fashion suggesting that the sight of her provided only a temporary diversion from the mindless tedium of his task. She sits up, opens both of her eyes wide, squints, opens them again allowing the morning to sift around in her head until it settles into the beginning of yet another day, then she pulls the door handle, gets out and stretches. She wears a faded, green sweatshirt and gray sweatpants. Short, stocky. A wrestler’s build. Her brown hair falls around her cheeks. She holds a hand over her eyes against the sun. No clouds. Down the street toward The 805, a sign promoting Hawthorne Crossings shopping center shines in the sun as do the names of stores listed beneath it: Staples, Cycle Gear, Ross, Book Off, Dollar Tree.

The staff at Cycle Gear throw away bike helmets like confetti. The slightest dent and scratch and they’re tossed into a dumpster. Robin has seen Teddy collect them to recycle. Teddy’s out there, a hustler. He says he even finds Rolex watches but he’s got to be bragging or lying or both, right? C’mon, Robin tells herself, selling just one Rolex would get him off Othello. But he and Mike keep the tweekers away. Othello Avenue is quiet for the most part but if someone parks here to get high, those two are on them and get them gone, they sure do. Robin doesn’t know Katrina and Teddy well, or Mike for that matter. Talks to them but not all the time. What’s the point? Get to know people and then they leave. Katrina and Teddy aren’t staying. If all goes well, she won’t be far behind them.

Robin has lived in her VW for about a year. Stick shift. Saving for a new clutch. She has a clutch kit but needs someone to install it. The car is her everything. It’s a mess of Burger King wrappers and coffee cups but it ain’t horrible. She’s not a packrat like Steve. When it becomes a mess, she cleans it and when it turns into a mess again, she cleans it again. Like her life. She works as a caregiver for a grandmother and her two-year-old granddaughter. The child’s mother lives on the street turning tricks for crack, a toothless, emaciated figure peering wide-eyed into the slow trolling cars. In four weeks, Robin will move in with a man who needs in-home care 24/7. She has known him for eight years. Not well but they talked a lot over the years. A Polish guy, Harold. In his sixties, maybe seventies. He lived next door to a mutual friend. He sorted mail at a post office before he retired. He wanted to be a cop but, he told Robin, in those days the San Diego Police Department wouldn’t hire a Pole. Injured his hip on the job and it’s given him problems ever since. He’s in Carmel Mountain Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center now. Comes out in about four weeks. She’s ready to move in with him, ready for a room of her own. She’ll sleep a lot the first couple of days, she’s sure.

The median home price in San Diego County has surpassed $500,000 and the median monthly rent is almost $2,800. Some studios downtown rent for $2,000 a month. With prices like those, Robin feels grateful for the arrangement with Harold. It won’t be her place but it’ll be better than living in the VW, and she’ll still have time to help the woman with the grandchild. With two jobs, she should do all right. She used to clerk at a day-old bread store for four years until she screwed up. Was going through a divorce.. Was going to casinos and losing money. She stole one hundred dollars from a cash register at work one afternoon. Got caught, got fired. Then one night at a casino she lost what little money she had left and in her fury she punched the window of a slot machine and broke it. Damn window must’ve been pretty wobbly because she did’t hit it that fucking hard. Prosecutors charged her with a Class A misdemeanor for destruction of property. Had to pay $1,800 for that little bitty window plus the one hundred dollars she owed the bread company. People in charge don’t play. Stuff follows you. Background checks screwed her when she put in job applications. She left her apartment with only her clothes and took to the streets. When she got tired of being in her car, she pitched a tent in one of the many canyons around the city. She tried to think of it as camping, but she missed her bed.

Mike sits in the driver’s seat of the Chrysler, left elbow out the window like a bored taxi driver waiting for a fare. His blonde hair falls to his shoulders. One side of his scruffy beard skewed from sleep. Heavy set, he looks much younger than his sixty-one years. Thick body, his belly spills over his belt buckle. His black shirt, speckled with dandruff, stinks of his unwashed body. The stale air within his vehicle carries his funk. He rolls down the passenger window and feels the breezy crosscurrents. Steve appears in his side mirror walking up from behind the Chrysler, a skinny little dude the same age as Mike, T-shirt and jeans sloppy with wrinkles hanging off his body. He pauses, pokes his head in, Hey. Mike. Says he’d gone to Target for coffee and dropped his phone but someone found it and gave it back to him. Pretty lucky, huh? Stressed him out. Feels exhausted. Gonna take a nap. See you, Mike. He walks to his RV, turns to face Mike again as if to fix him there. Mike makes a face, folds his arms and looks down and shakes his head. Steve’d lose his arms if it they weren’t attached to his shoulders. He’s OK. Harmless. Suffered a head injury in a motorcycle accident, or so he says. Might have TBI. Mike considers himself lucky that he doesn’t have it. Or maybe he does. He can be forgetful. When he was in the army, a tank hatch cover fell on his head. Dropped him like a stick. He receives VA disability, about a $1,000 a month.

The other day, he saw Katrina, and she told him that she and Teddy had found a place. They don’t talk much but if he splurges on a pizza, he’ll offer them a slice. Steve and Robin, too, if he has enough. Good for them. So many homeless people. Mike keeps his head down, minds his own business. If he sees someone shooting up in their car or loading a pipe, he writes the license plate number and calls the cops. They show up eventually. He tells the tweekers, I know what you’re doing. Get out. He doesn’t yell at them. That’d be a good way to get a gun in his face. Teddy always backed him up. Now, Mike just might have to settle for calling the police and leave it at that.

Every morning he drives four or five blocks, gets something to eat. He has received tickets for being parked in one place too long. Five of those and the city will tow him, and then where’d he be? Carl’s Jr., it’s close. Gas costs too much to go far. He has up-to-date tags so he’s good there, and insurance, he’s got that too. It’s hard to get insurance being homeless. He lies. Gives the DMV an old address. They don’t check. He loves to cook but can’t in his car, of course. He warms soup at a 7-Eleven. McDonald’s, Denny’s, Jack in the Box, they’re not too expensive. His doctor says he has high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes. Blood pressure off the charts. Well, doc, I eat nothing but fast food. At Costco, he gets grapes, cherries, and water. Bananas, too, but on hot days after hours in the car they begin to turn brown and spotty. In cold weather he’ll buy up to six bananas. If he eats one a day, they’ll be gone before they spot.

He worked as a home healthcare aide for his old man for thirty-eight years after a driver ran his dad off a highway in Arizona. It was 1979. The old man had dropped Mike off at a boy scout jamboree near the Grand Canyon and got hit on his way back home. Never did catch the guy. Mike was something like a junior in high school at the time. Yellow paint from the driver’s car etched into the old man’s passenger door. He flipped into a ravine. His headlights tunneled straight into the night sky. He broke about every bone that could be broken and remained in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix for a year. Came out a paraplegic but he didn’t quit living. He met a woman from San Diego, got married and moved with her to California. Mike stayed in Arizona, married his high school sweetheart and joined the Army. Bootcamp at Fort. Lewing, Washington. Served three years on the DMZ in South Korea. That was enough. Came home, got his wife pregnant. He worked at KFC, Jack in the Box, and Jiffy Lube. Bounced from one job to another. Eight months later, he and his wife divorced. Young love gets to be old love and then no love at all after a while. He had gotten into speed by then. The old man told him to come to San Diego. Mike had nothing keeping him in Arizona, so he moved, settled next door to his father in Oceanside. In 1986 he began taking care of him full time after the old man’s wife left him. Like father, like son. Shot speed with his sister, who lived in Santee, a suburb.

The old man died in October 2018. Eighty-nine years old, three months shy of ninety. Had dementia in his final years. He served in Korea during the war, won a Bronze Star, three clusters. Before he got dementia in 2011, he volunteered at the VA. Mike didn’t know about the medal until he sorted through his dad’s things. That sort of bothers him. After so much time together, they shouldn’t have had secrets. He thought they were as tight as Siamese twins. Guess not. Goes to show. He’s not sure what but it does. The old man never talked about the war to anyone so he didn’t deny Mike anything he hadn’t denied others. And he never confronted Mike on his drug use. Fair’s, fair. But Mike wasn’t anyone else. He cared for him for decades even when he was high. So much for family. Caring for the old man for so long, Mike didn’t have much job experience. No résumé that’d count for shit. By May 2019, nearly a year later, almost out of money, he moved into his Chrysler. He’s not using drugs now but his sister still is so he won’t stay with her even if she offered to take him in which she hasn’t. He stares out his windshield at Steve’s RV. Steve has two grown sons. They aren’t offering him a bed. So much for family.

Steve stirs from his nap as the draft from a passing car rocks his RV. He has so much crap he can’t open the side door. To get out, he wriggles through the sliding window that separates the cab from the back of the RV squinching his nose, and while still on his stomach, sprawled across the driver and passenger seats, his legs bent, toes balanced against the driver’s window, he opens the passenger door and crawls out to the sidewalk. Loose tennis balls and a fishing pole, follow him. He bends and tugs at his belt and a man walking pat glances at him and keeps going.  Steve picks up the pole and tennis balls and drops them on the passenger seat. He went fishing the night before, caught one small fish, and threw it back. Watched it swim crookedly to the bottom and felt bad he had hurt it.  He decided not to fish again giving up a diversion that began in his childhood. Loved the rhythm of tossing the line, reeling it in. Kind of hypnotic. Almost disappointed when a fish took the bait and broke the spell. He was born in San Diego but spent a big part of his childhood in a Fresno ranch house. He just saw it after God knows how many years, decades really. Super cool. He had driven his niece, Nicole, to Washington state where her husband was stationed in the Navy. She had been visiting friends in San Diego and needed a ride. When the bottom fell out of his life, Steve lived with Nicole for a time in Liberty Military Housing – Murphy Canyon until her husband was transferred to Washington. His keeps in touch with his sons, Jacob and Gabrielle. Gabriele is in the Air Force in New Mexico. Jacob lives in University Heights, San Diego. Computer guy. Steve uses his address for mail. Jacob lives with his daughter, Scout, 7, and his girlfriend. Not enough room for Steve, at least that’s what he assumes. Jacob gave him one hundred dollars one time. That was nice. He wants to believe his boys have faith in him. He doesn’t pull alarms. He doesn’t complain.

Steve was on his way back to San Diego after he’d dropped Nicole off when he decided to stop in Fresno and check out his old childhood place. More developed now, nothing like it was in ’69 when he was kid. He had pulled over and just looked at the low-slung brown house, closed his eyes and his memories played out like a movie. He took a bus to school,  walked down the long driveway when it pulled up. Cows nearby strolled in their heavy, head-bobbing way, pausing to pull at grass, and chickens wandered fields. That night as he slept in his RV, someone stole the generator he had strapped to the bumper. In the morning, when he realized what had happened, he shook his head with the innocence of someone who could not fathom how such a thing could happen anymore than how he could comprehend inadvertently injuring that fish. He continued his drive back to San Diego and Othello Avenue.

The morning progresses. Emaciated weeds grow through cracks in the sidewalk, vine-like and pale green. Palm trees sway. The noise of children and women drift from the Target parking lot. Gulls bob on currents staring down at the confusion below them and a few alight on the hot pavement of Othello Avenue snagging a speck of something before flapping their wings and rising again.

Katrina starts work at ten in the morning, stands behind the counter of the Häagen-Dazs store in Fashion Valley Mall and opens a box of paper cups. She wears a black T-shirt with the Häagen-Dazs logo and she ties her long hair in a ponytail. This is her time, the early hours. Gets more done working by herself, restocking for the afternoon and evening rush.

You have chocolate? Someone asks, poking their head in the door.

Of course.

I’ll be by after lunch.

I’ll be here, Katrina says.

She has worked part-time at the store for about a year and earns about $1,600 a month. A customer, a four-year-old girl named Sophie, recently asked her to be her best friend. Katrina smiled and agreed. Another asks for pumpkin ice cream, a combination that sounds disgusting to Katrina. She has gotten to know a hairdresser and her three daughters. Another customer said he’d miss her when she told him she had applied for a job at the Target store where she and Teddy park. It would be a wonderful opportunity to work there and so convenient. Even after they move, it would be closer than Fashion Valley and better pay with benefits.

She finds a stepladder and climbs onto the bottom rung so she can reach a box of styrofoam bowls from a shelf. Raising her arms, she arches her back. Her body curves, her shirt and pants tight to her body. A man pauses by the door and admires her. She grins. It’s good to be noticed. Good to feel attractive. Good to like herself, her figure. She pulls the box and sets it on the counter. Reminds herself to call her mother. She normally does every morning but she was running late today.

Katrina was born in Orem, Utah, and moved to Huntsville, Utah, when she was eight. She liked Huntsville, a small, quiet town. No weirdos. As a little girl she could hang out with friends in a park at night and play hide-and-seek near their elementary school. Rode their bikes. In the winter they met at the ice-skating rink. Father a diesel mechanic. She has two brothers in Washington near the Canadian border. Can’t recall the town. Another one still lives in Utah. Doesn’t hear from any of them.

Her senior year in high school she met a guy and got pregnant four months before graduation. She doesn’t know what she liked about him. He was cute: she was in love.  They were young and she thought he was perfect. Even when she realized he wasn’t, she stayed with him. Her parents had divorced and  she didn’t want her kids to grow up like that.

Stupid, she says to herself.

He didn’t work, sold drugs and introduced her to heroin and pills. In 2016, they divorced. She kept the kids until her mother informed the Department of Social Services about her drug use. Katrina had tried to hide it from her, but she knew. She saw her hanging out a lot with a crowd that looked like they hadn’t bathed in a month. Katrina didn’t allow her to see the kids because she didn’t want her mother to see her. So, yeah, she knew. Her ex-husband’s aunt ended up raising the children. A blessing, Katrina thinks now. They’ve done better without her. A twenty-year-old son joined the Marines; her eighteen-year-old son is about to graduate high school, and her thirteen-year-old daughter joined the girls’ eighth grade wrestling team. She hasn’t spoken to them in two, three years. The last time they talked, it didn’t go well. Pissed off at her for leaving them. They’ll come around. She’s different now. She writes letters and sends gifts, tries not to beat herself up. Does it hurt? Yeah. Does she feel bad? Yeah, but she can’t change the past. Guilt makes her want to get high. She’s no good to them high. That’s how she lost them. A lot of tweekers don’t quit. Or they do but just for a minute. They stop and look around and all they see are the bushes and dirt where they live. They start thinking about the mess they’ve made of their lives and they get high to stop thinking. So, yeah, she feels bad but she’s happy for her children. And for herself now.

Katrina did four months in a Utah prison for theft and other charges resulting from her drug use including prescription fraud. When she got out, she met a truck driver whose route included California, Colorado and Utah. He’d stop at the Flying J Truck stop in Ogden where Katrina panhandled for drug money. The trucker bought her a sandwich from Denny’s every time he came through. They became good acquaintances if not friends and after five years, he told her if she ever cleaned up he’d put her up in his San Diego home. In 2017, she got on a Greyhound bus and took him up on it. He died a year later at sixty-two of cancer. Katrina started using meth again and stayed in Presidio Park. She met Teddy about the same time outside of a 7-Eleven, tall, skinny and handsome and high on speed. He had just done a ten year stretch for drug crimes. He kept getting busted until his most recent release from prison in January 2019 when he decided to clean up. He told Katrina he was through with drugs and had even stopped smoking cigarettes. He wouldn’t see her unless she also quit. She did. When they received their housing voucher Teddy told her to leave him, that she’d have better luck finding a place alone. His extensive prison record, he said, would hold her back. Why would I leave you when you helped me get clean? she asked him.

With Katrina at work Teddy awakens alone. On his off days, he hustles with the instincts he honed scoring drugs. He found twenty-six helmets from the dumpster behind Cycle Gear one night. Abandoned shirts, pants and jackets he sells at swap meets fifty cents to a dollar. Jewelry, iPhones, he finds it all. He buys aluminum cans from homeless people, a penny a pop, and sells them to recycling centers. He has $250 worth of cans in the Winnebago. The cats squat on the sacked piles like royalty. His babies, Teddy calls them. Coils of tattoos snake down his arm and both sides of his neck. Braided hair down his back. Not like he was when Katrina met him but filled out. Buffed. A presence. He stops shoplifters busting out the back doors of Target with carts full of stolen stuff. One man yelled at him, At least let me keep the shoes! He didn’t. Teddy runs Othello Avenue.

Robin knows a lot of people, even a few with homes. There’s a woman she works with now while she waits for the postal worker to get out of rehab. She helps her raise a two-year-old granddaughter. The girl’s mother runs the streets. This woman, the grandmother, used to live on the streets. Just got a place. Everybody Robin knows needs a little bit of help, and she’s not afraid to help herself. Robin loves to work. Never once was she on welfare. Always found some kind of job even if it was only day labor. She passed those values onto her daughter, now thirty-years old living in Colorado working as a teacher’s aide. Married with two kids. Robin can go out and see her anytime but she ain’t no beggar. She’ll visit when she has money. She’s never been like the guy she sees now on the sidewalk by the shopping center, flat on his back, using his T-shirt to cover his face from the sun. No, never that bad. She always had a tent, a stove, and a good place near a highway or in a canyon when she got tired of the cramped conditions of her car. Police charged her with vagrancy more than a few times. She probably still has bench warrants from all her citations. Was it vagrancy or trespassing? She doesn’t know. Whichever, it’s not worth the time of any cop that’s not an asshole to bother her about it. She’s met all kinds of homeless people: the desperate, the meth heads, and the general trouble kind. One guy slammed her face with a rock in a Starbucks parking lot in Clairmont. Crazy. What did she do? Nothing. Still sees him jabbering to himself. Robin knows she’s a mess but she’s not crazy. A little touched maybe. Takes that to survive out here.

Steve has a 1973 sHonda CT90 in a carrier on the rear of the RV. Sweet little ride. Nice orange job. Sort of a keepsake, he guesses, from his good, younger days. He was into motorcycles as a kid. In high school, he rode a Honda Cl 175. He loved the way it turned, getting low to the road. Wind in his hair bugs, in his teeth. It was all that. Not a team sport, really, motorcycling. Just him and his bike and the road. All that. He moved up to a BSA DB350 and then a Yamaha RD 400. It was fast but heavy, it felt like he was riding a bus. He traded it for a Yamaha RD 350. Smooth better handling. Nimble. An extension of himself. His wife Sandi would sit behind him, arms wrapped around his waist. First date with her was on the last day of his senior year in high school, 1979. Pretty as all get out. Captain of the drill team. They had a history class together. Married in 1985. He scrolls through old photographs on his phone. There he is in a blue helmet showing all his teeth in a wide grin; there he is crouched low over the handlebars; there he is posing with a white Labrador retriever, his two young sons and Sandi, her mouth open with the same tooth dazzling smile he has.

Steve stopped riding after he crashed his 350 in November 1988. He was out with his buddies on California-78 and Banner Grade when they stopped for a break.. A beautiful day. One of those clear days where the sky stretches forever. The road ran into a flat stretch flanked by scrub and desert. Steve had a sip of a friend’s beer, put his helmet back on and said, I’m going to see the rest of this road. Sightseeing, staring at distant mountains going eighty miles an hour. Not paying attention. He skidded, lost control and hit the pavement striking his head, brains scrambled. He remained in a hospital for three weeks. Sandi had just given birth to Jacob three months earlier. Steve tried to return to work but he couldn’t focus on any one task for very long. He forgot what he was doing almost as soon as he began it. At home, he tried to help Sandi with Jacob. He understood he needed five scoops of formula to make his bottle but he couldn’t remember how to count to five.

He lost his job but found another as a maintenance man with a packing company. His boss wrote down what she wanted him to do so he wouldn’t forget. He was named an employee of the month one year but was laid off a short time afterward. In 2009, after years of taking odd jobs, he went on disability. Eight years later, he found a love letter to Sandi in the glove compartment of her car from another man. Steve called her all kinds of names and she slapped him and he shouted, Hit me like you gotta pair, bitch! She moved out the next day. He remained in the house until 2019 when they sold it, and then he moved in with a woman he had met on an online dating site. After two months and endless arguments, he left her and stayed with Nicole and her husband. When they left for Washington, he settled into his RV. He doesn’t know where his money from the sale of the house went. He believes the IRS took thousands of dollars for back taxes but he doesn’t know why and amid all his junk he can’t find any documentation to confirm that. He cashed out some of his savings with the idea of moving to Mexico but he thinks he left the money in a bag somewhere or did something else with it. Whatever. He doesn’t have it. He knows that much. Some days, he scrolls through his phone and looks at old family photos. He sends angry texts to friends condemning Sandi. She’s a narcissist, cheated. I discovered her dirty, little secret. He looks at pictures of his bikes like a lover. My beloved RD350.  My beautiful RD 400. My gorgeous Super Sport 750 Ducati.

This morning, he considers the mess inside the RV. He has an older brother, Joe, in Las Vegas, a retired maintenance man. Move in with me, Joe has suggested. His son, Joe Jr., runs a pest control business in San Antonio. Steve could work for him. They’ve talked about it but he can’t decide. Should he move to Las Vegas and be with his brother or San Antonio and work for Joe Jr? He doesn’t know. He feels so overwhelmed sometimes his head hurts. Today, I’ll throw away trash, he tells himself. He needs to do something.

A damp breeze tosses crumpled food wrappers across Othello Avenue. Pigeons strut, pecking at the ground. A slow moving semi-truck rattles a rusted sewer lid as it turns into the driveway of Wentworth Automotive. The driver swings out holding a clipboard and walks with a determined stride toward a door. Clouds collect in the distance above downtown .

A man pauses by Mike’s car.
Two guys tried to break into my ride.
What they look like? Mike asks.
No idea. Had gray hoodies. When they saw I was in it they ran.
Thanks for the intel.
Be careful, the guy says.
Same to you.

Mike sighs. A tweeker robbed him at gunpoint not too long ago. Ninety-five percent of the time Othello is quiet but not that day. Bastard got seven dollars, his eyes the size of dinner plates. Fucking tweeker.

Maybe it was payback for his own drug-addled days. When he was twenty-seven and doing speed with his sister, her neighbor, also a speed freak, accused him of abusing her fourteen-year -old daughter after he told her he had no dope to give. She hangs around your house a lot, she said. Maybe that’s because you’re fucked up all the time. She filed a complaint and the police arrested him. A public defender told him to plead guilty and she’d get him five years probation. You know what they do to child abusers in prison if you’re convicted? she asked him. Scared, he took the deal. He thinks now that his lawyer screwed him to make her job easier. He checks in with the police once every thirty days. Has done that for thirty-six years. Nothing else on his record but parking tickets. He can forget about finding housing and a job. A background check will take him out faster than he can say, I didn’t touch that girl. Othello Avenue allows him a kind of peace. Here he experiences no judgment.

Teddy scours neighborhoods on blue days, the days of the week when households put out their blue recycling bins. He knows the hotspots. One week he made $1,000, and he and Katrina bought the Winnebago. He was ten years old when he arrived with his mother in San Diego in 1993, refugees from poverty and civil war in Ethiopia and devout Muslims. His mother tried to steer him away from the street, but he saw drugs as a fast way to make money and followed a different path than the one she had chosen for him. He had money and women until he didn’t. Before he met Katrina, he lived for four years camped in a parking lot. He has two kids in grammar school, one son at Georgia State University. His wages are garnished for child support. He doesn’t complain. Past is past. He won’t say more. Doesn’t need just anyone to know his business. He lives for the future. He changed course, follows a different path.

The cats in the Winnebago settle on the dashboard and watch Katrina walk toward them after a coworker dropped her off from work. She opens a door and they rub against her ankles until she scoops food from a bag into their bowls. After being on her feet all day she would like to sit and relax but she knows if she does that she wouldn’t get up again. Instead she finds a broom, goes back outside and begins sweeping the sidewalk, her way of showing appreciation for being allowed to park there 24/7. Teddy found a perfectly good generator in a dumpster that she’ll use later to power a vacuum and clean the Winnebago. They purposely work opposite shifts so one of them is at the RV at all times to prevent a breaks-in. Once they move into their apartment, they’ll try to work the same hours so they can spend more time together.

When she lived on the street, Katrina spent her evenings at a soup kitchen downtown. After she quit using drugs, she stopped by to show the staff she had changed. She wore makeup, had on a perky pink blouse and designer jeans. Teeth fixed. Told everyone to call her by her full name instead of her street name, Trinny. She wasn’t that person anymore.

It’ll be so good to get off Othello. People drive down it at seventy miles an hour, tow trucks barrel ass. What if someone hit the Winnebago while she was in it? There was an accident one time in the Target parking lot. A guy’s car got smashed in a hit and run. Katrina heard the noise inside the Winnebago. The guy whose car got hit was dazed but unhurt. The airbag had knocked him almost cold. At first he didn’t know where he was. She comforted him until the police came. He was so grateful that he invited her to his beauty parlor and did her hair.

She rummages for a jar of peanut butter to make Steve a sandwich. He forgets to eat sometimes. And Mike and Robin. They might want one. She won’t be back here, she knows. She won’t forget about them, but there’s no need to return. She’ll no longer be bound by the experience that now connects them. Being homeless isn’t a group sport but they do look out for one another. So, while she’s here. While she’s homeless. Sheltered homeless, as social workers call it because she lives in a vehicle. She supposes that sounds better than plain old homeless but whatever they call it, it still sucks. A distinction devised by people who haven’t been on the street, she’s sure. She reaches for a loaf of white bread, removes six slices. After she makes the sandwiches, she puts them in a bag maneuvers around the cats and steps outside.

Thank you, Steve tells her in a breathless voice that reminds her of a child.

Thank you, Robin says.

She stops at Mike’s van.

Thank you, he says taking the last sandwich.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

I’ll be here.

Shadows spread over Othello Avenue as late afternoon progresses into evening. A clear night concealing in its depths the sounds of desolate, unsettled sleep in the cramped confines of vehicles. Except for Katrina. She looks at the clear, night sky and stares into the light of one star until its yellow glow is all she sees. Her mind clears. She dreams in that kind of emptiness. Dreams quiet dreams of a yard, birdsong, and a cute little garden. Something small. Something clean. Something safe.

Take me to the alley

Take me to the afflicted ones

Take me to the lonely ones that

Somehow lost their way

                                                                                                                                                                       Gregory Porter

The twelve-foot chain link capped with concertina wire said, Whoever you are, you aren’t welcome. The penitentiary sprawled on a barren hill in a forgotten tract in Connecticut, far from houses or schools or the next town. It was 1990, the dirt and rutted parking lot empty. Maximum security didn’t pull many visitors, and this would be my first time inside. I recognized no fear, not at first.

I remembered waiting as a boy in a lot outside another penitentiary. I perched in the passenger seat of the state car my father drove, the black 1950 Chevy with the siren and flashing light. Dad exited the facility smiling. The men inside fashioned signs for the Rhode Island Forest Service and were likely paid very little. The work, Dad said, was always good, always professional, and always on time.

Great oak trees surrounded that old place.

Here, there were no trees, no flowers, not a planted bush. A twilight overcast pressed down as I made my way to a squat, concrete-block building that appeared to be the welcome center, beyond which crouched the penitentiary, a low mean spread of menace which housed two thousand inmates. I explained to the officer hovering behind dark, inch-thick glass what I was there to do. He grunted.

He asked for a driver’s license and peered into the worn briefcase Dad had gifted, checking for anything an inmate might want as a weapon. He dropped the license into a drawer and extended a laminated pass through a small hole in the glass, and with the sweep of an arm, he motioned to a steel gate through the chain link.

Dad had been a hard man. While he never came clean about his earliest days, I realize now he was aware a ghetto kid like he had been, loose with brawlers on a drunk through Providence speakeasies, could have landed in a prison making signs. Possibly he smiled as he left that Rhode Island penitentiary because he felt lucky.

He’d floundered as a student and dropped out at sixteen to do piecework in a factory where he poured out work with speed. A threat to more senior men and making hardly any money, he turned back to finish school. And throughout the Depression, without support except an immigrant father’s scorn, Dad bulled a path through college. He worked a year and enrolled in school the next.

He died a decade before I entered Osborn Correctional.

I flinched as the steel gate clanked shut behind. I crossed a dirt yard on cracked asphalt to an officer in a head-to-toe black uniform, and I flashed my laminated pass.

“Wait here.”

His glower said, Forget it. We have more to deal with than you.

“Screw ‘em,” Dad would say, “whoever the hell they are, whatever the bastards do. Sometimes, you’ve got to stand and be counted.”

Black uniform ordered me through a second, heavier steel gate where more guards lurked behind more dark glass. My Harris tweed jacket, the worn briefcase, and the evening hour said who I was.

I’d been warned about the guards.

The second steel gate clanked shut behind me. My stomach churned. Will anyone open these doors when I want out?

There seemed to be no laughs in this dwelling, only these cold mothers and their freaking gray walls.

“Why you here?” a voice barked from behind the glass.

“I teach in the college program.”

Books won’t help thugs, Mister, I was ready for him to say.   

He gestured down the wide hall.

“Take a right down there and go till you find a guard.”

Still no waste of words.

I did what he said and took a right into an enormous, extended corridor. Voices blasted off the walls and concrete floor. Inmates exited a room far ahead, most of them bulked up bodybuilders in identical tan shirts and tan pants. They thundered toward me four abreast, one pack after another. I stepped faster and avoided eye contact.

They ran over 225. I was an Ivy League poster boy in tweed and corduroy. Their faces said, Who’s the punk? Who invited him?

What had I expected? I’d joked the inmates might have two heads and keep cobras as pets.

A woman at a party asked why anyone would teach in a prison. Wasn’t the place dangerous?

I said teacher-pals declared prison the best experience they’d had in a classroom and didn’t say more. Their conviction was absolute and I bit. They’d crossed a bridge they hadn’t supposed was there and learned something, though they didn’t say what.

Bedlam grew as more streamed from what was maybe the dining mess. Masses of them, and too many to count. They howled.

What am I doing in this place?

I showed my pass to a guard I found. I said I taught the English course. He smiled and proceeded down one more hall to a room assigned to Jacobson.

“Is this experience new for you?” he asked.

The guard seemed curious, not at all prickly. He wished me the best.

Inmates passed and nodded to the new guy. They smiled.

I thought, I must be in a different institution.

The room that was mine had an immense oak desk and a matching oak chair. I wasn’t going with that; I wanted no barricade. I took a plastic chair-desk from the front and turned it to the other chair-desks in neat rows facing the front, the oak desk and chair and the blackboard behind me.

I tried not to think what men had done to end in maximum security. Murder, pedophilia, armed robbery, rape, the worst crimes were the most likely. A section of my brain spat images of fiends.

Get a grip. You can’t teach fiends. Dad drank with Tommy Pelligrini, a man rumored to be in the Providence mafia. Tommy wore a navy suit and a modest tie. His memory seemed to quiet my mind.

I understood little, nonetheless, about the actual men I was teaching. I’m certain I looked grim. I picked fingernails and fooled with the marriage ring on my finger. Men were finding seats. I rooted in my briefcase for a pen, a pad of paper, for nothing. My back had a knot the size of a golf ball.

Would I recognize anyone? I scanned the roster.

An inmate asked a question and I gave a too brief answer. I didn’t initiate conversation like I usually did in a new class.

I glanced at my watch and a voice inside chirped, You’ve crossed scarier roads than this, boyo. A buddy remarked once on my cool in a crisis and my son, Morgen, cracked: “Dad’s good in a crisis. It’s ordinary life that gives him trouble.”

He was ribbing, though I hoped tonight he was right.

I counted twenty-three men in all. Half, I would learn, had killed someone. Most had spent their childhoods in fractured homes, abandoned by fathers whose savvy might have pointed to a better pathway.

The men sat in four straight rows, seats directed at the teacher like we had in grade school. I didn’t ask them to form a circle because I planned to hog the talk tonight. They were black men except one, everybody in a tan uniform with a buzz-cut. White people can’t tell one black person from another, a smart observer said.

The single white sat in a far corner. Outside, darkness had fallen and inside it wasn’t bright. He wore deep-ink shades. What lay in wait there?

I’d memorize their names and offer that much consideration.

Now. Let’s go.

I called the roll and scribbled a note when a man responded. One had red hair. A coffee-colored inmate displayed freckles. One was Goliath, a second a featherweight. Another wore a bandana. Still another had a sweeping scar on a left cheek.

I went one by one, up a row and down the next. I used the scribbles and named each inmate correctly. Bodies straightened. The room perked. Two mentioned how little respect they received in Osborn and others nodded.

The next would be easier, I thought. I would describe in general terms what we’d read and their writing would analyze in coming weeks: American writers from Irving to Twain to Baldwin to Tobias Wolff, with a handful of accessible poets.

I started to speak and couldn’t get the words out. My hands shook and my voice fluttered. Fear had taken a public walk. I stopped. I couldn’t teach like this.

A hand shot up three seats away. The Goliath, maybe in his twenties and close to three-hundred pounds, a football player once, I bet. He plowed holes for running backs.

Head down, he waved a hand, hesitant.

“Can . . . can I say something?” He spoke with a stutter.

“Sure,” I said.

He held a beat, reluctant to say what he wanted to say.

“You . . . you seem nervous.”

“You got that right.”

The room exploded. Laughter, every single man, belly laughter, even No Eyes behind the ink shades.

Without a prompt except my fear, the men spilled their first hours in Osborn, last week or years before. The shakes, the diarrhea, the sleeplessness, the stares into the dark, the dread, the guards, the threat they might not live.

They did their best to talk me back from where I’d shrunk. They’d been there. They understood. Don’t be ashamed. We managed. You can too.

***

I’m old. I forget names. Days are shorter and they fly too soon. I admit it was a tiny episode in a prison, years ago, hardly worth a mention.

The moment stays.

We are you, they said. We are you. These men who were like the mill kids I grew up around, only older, and in more serious trouble. Men who brought me back to my brawling father.

They weren’t foreign. They weren’t strange. For a moment, they saw me as I was. Like them, afraid. They were me.

I came from no fractured home, I hadn’t been abandoned by my father, I hadn’t ever been so continually disrespected. Yet here I was, at a bridge my father knew.

And there they were too, waiting.

my brother, the Marine

the recruiters come weeks earlier than agreed—
arrive in alloy, aluminum with authority,
military vehicle blocks our driveway
announcing to the neighborhood
they’ve come for a boy here
who will have to go—
though he sits at the top step
and cries

i follow them,
strange convoy to Staten Island’s hotel
where all the boys are corralled—
farmed for war, becoming weapons
of mass destruction
when before they picked apples
at family trips upstate

a hotel lobby—last stop before using lasers
to blow off golden domes,
silence muezzins in the crush
of ancient wage and plaster—
Hussein’s old siberian tiger left thirsty,
watches other zoo animals
being eaten by the faithful—
just like a video game

i clamp onto my brother
beg him not to go, we could run away
he didn’t have to do this—
recruiters quickly camouflage me,
am dragged outside—my brother lost
did not say goodbye
or even look at me.

my brother’s shoebox

the room across the hall is inhabited again,
home now from another tour
like sightseeing from a grand canal
where buildings are art
and storied sculptures animate street corners—
my brother returns a veteran.

i want to remember who this person is,
or at least, find out what war has done.

he leaves with friends to drink—
that is still the same,
later tonight
he might howl at our parent’s window
or jump on my bed until the sheets froth,
uncaring and rabid.

but i don’t wait for him to come home
and begin searching the room
that is his again.

it is simple to find
where people hide things—
a shoebox under his bed
that wasn’t there all these years
furrowed by sand
and almost glowing.

i open to find drugstore prints,
rolls of film casually dropped
for a high school student to develop—
silver halide crystals take the shape
of shattered skulls
goats strung and slit
a school made of clay
blasted in the kiln of munitions
“KILL ZONE” painted across its foundation—
each 4×6 emulsion a souvenir
of these mad travels,
kept to reminisce and admire.

my brother’s grenade

my brother’s room in our family vacation home
has embossed wallpaper, indigo or violet
depending on the light that filters through the mountains—
and his grenade in the closet.

i saw it looking for extra blankets,
thought it was an animal resting in eiderdown
kept by my mother in one of her tempers
but it didn’t move
and so
i picked it up.

inhumanity held beneath iron’s screaming core—
a pleasant weight,
like the egg i threw across the street
detonating onto the head of boy
who said i kissed him but i didn’t,
is it like that for my brother?—
fisted mementos of thrill?

seasoned by cedar sachets,
neatly quilted metal shimmered as i turned it
forbidden gem, his holy relic—
i placed it back in the closet and began making dinner,
said nothing.

the slender pin preserves this household
where our family gathers
unknowing a bomb is kept here—
my brother roasts a marshmallow
until it catches fire, turns black,
plunges into mouth.

There’s a solid history of stupid when it comes to fireworks at our family cabin at the corner of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and—as Dad called it—West by-golly-stand-up-and-smile-when-you-say-it Virginia. When we spent weeks of our summers there in the eighties, Dad developed his own sort of bird call: “Careful!” The mountains put him on edge.

In his defense, between the creek, the pool, the fire, the road, the wasps, the bears, and the cottonmouths—and being completely off the grid, forty-five minutes from the nearest emergency room—there was a variety of creative deaths and injuries available. We knew where Dad was when we heard “Careful,” and headed in the opposite direction with our handfuls of bottle rockets.

He always showed up a few days in, and we knew without asking he wouldn’t stay long. My grandmother and uncle had both lamented, over the years, that his trips to the cabin had become less frequent since his return from Vietnam and, back when he still drank, he drank more when he was there. He explained it in simple terms: “I went camping for a year, once. That’s enough for me.”

On her own in the Appalachians with seven kids, Mom used to hand out packets of gunpowder snaps just to get us out of her hair, and we set to snapping them on each other’s bare skin or combining several snaps into one giant snap and throwing it in the fire. My cousins liked to play “who can hold the firecracker the longest,” a game with no discernible winner.

We hadn’t grown out of it and weren’t any smarter three decades later, in the summer of 2010. Our extended households arrived by the carload in the days before the Fourth of July each year, turning the yard into a parking lot. We were there not just to blow things up but to rebuild the cabin, on account of snow having caved in its roof.

Children spilled out from their hours-long imprisonment and sprawled into the surrounding woods to make sure everything was still there: the creek, the pool, the fire, the road, the wasps, the bears, and the cottonmouths. Inevitably one of them discovered an unsuspecting toad and the cousins all fought over who was going to “rescue” it. I joined my siblings barking orders to leave the thing alone so that it could limp away gratefully, albeit bedraggled and panting. Our aunts and uncles had said the same thing to us when we spent summers there leaving hapless amphibians in our wake.

In the midst of all the unloading, my brother Asher crouched near the fire he’d somehow already built, lighting bottle rockets that would flash across the creek. Grandchildren materialized from behind boulders and dropped down from trees, leaving behind half-erected tents and protesting parents, toppling themselves and each other in their frenzy to see which uncle was going to do what next.

The extent of pyrotechnic safety was a quick headcount to ensure the littlest kids were accounted for and seated behind a boulder. Asher and the oldest nieces and nephews took their places behind the behemoth slab of sandstone we’d always called “Grandfather’s rock,” and began their assault. One after another, bottle rockets zipped across the creek and burst, miniature contrails marking their trajectory up the opposite slope and crisscrossing through the trees like a stringboard.

Each explosion drew more cheers from the younger children, and competition between the bottle-rocket-lighters led to the epic discovery that bottle rockets did in fact explode underwater. The submerged blast made a “thworp” sound like a muffled whale fart followed by a satisfying “bloop” as bubbles burst to the surface. Cheers exploded from all directions, each time.

The smoke bombs were next. The grandkids lined up, each year another one old enough to light their first, and tossed a different colored ball into the rushing waters. Tightly coiled smoke unraveled behind each one, releasing a stream of color.  The air in the valley was heavy with moisture that had nowhere to go, so the purples, yellows, reds, and oranges mixed and swirled together, creating a sunset you could walk into.

Those first few days, we filled that valley with gunpowder and with the noise of power drills and hammering. The cabin got a second story and the new roof’s trusses were up. Then on July Fourth, my oldest brother Jim started preparations for his annual fireworks show in the field across the street. With nieces and nephews fetching him tools and beers, he installed an impromptu fence, muttering to himself about safety precautions as he adjusted scraps of lattice fencing and particle board.

There couldn’t be a repeat of last year, when a mortar zipped over the heads of a dozen-odd grandchildren, over the cement pool, and exploded directly above the cabin’s front porch where Grandmother was seated. She’d clapped her hands and asked, “Have the fireworks started?”

This year, Mom planned to sit with Grandma in the relative protection of the car to watch the show.

Dad showed up at dusk and immediately harangued a group of feral grandchildren charging past, “Careful!” My nephew stopped to give him a quick squeeze around the waist then zipped off just as quickly. Dad’s arms were still raised in a startled half hug as he looked down at the little-boy-shaped stamp of mud across the front of his khaki shorts.

“Welp, that didn’t take long,” he said, brushing away the mud.

I snagged a baby wipe from my sister-in-law’s diaper bag and offered it to him. “It’s Maryland. If you’re not dirty in the first five minutes, you’re not doing it right.”

“You know, a little mud never hurt anybody.” He took the wipe and dabbed at his shorts. “We’d spend weeks in the jungle in Vietnam. You know, ate there, slept there, shot and got shot there. Got to a point where the only difference between us and the mud was that we had skin.”

He laughed and handed back the soiled wipe, which I held by the corner and dropped in the cabin’s garbage can before joining my little boy for the fireworks. He and most of the kids were on blankets on the ground, trading glowsticks.

Dad situated himself on the bench just as Jim lit the first of the cakes and occasionally during the show he’d let out an appreciative “Whoa ho ho!” More often, though, he was signaling passing cars to slow down, or repeating “careful” to any grandchild who moved.

The truth was, he didn’t much care for fireworks. He’d seen enough of them for a lifetime during the Tet Offensive, a period of time that supplied a great number of his regular nightmares and the piece of shrapnel from a mortar lodged “Forrest Gump style” just below his butt. He’d stayed in the field the night he was wounded so as not to leave his men. Together they watched the fireworks displays and shot back with their own.

The morning after the Fourth of July, I was washing dishes when Dad came into the cabin. Outside, grandchildren shrieked with glee while bottle rockets discharged at random intervals. Here and there something bigger would go off, and neighbors up and down the road answered with their own explosions. Dad didn’t speak but groaned quietly as he eased himself on to the musty couch and opened his bible, spreading it across one knee. It was a familiar pose. This time, though, he didn’t run his hand down the length of the page while he read. He stared at the book, but he never turned the page.

He’d been on patrol with his platoon north of Quang Tri when there was a tremendous boom. He told me it was like “a thunderclap on steroids.” The earth shook beneath their feet and a gigantic fireball plumed in the distance. They were sure it was a nuclear bomb, and spent the next few hours in the dripping, humid jungle convinced they would never see their homes again. A few hours passed before they learned it was the explosion of 150 tons of munitions at the ammo dump in Dong Ha, about eighty miles away. They were in the clear. Still, Dad didn’t much care much for abrupt, random explosions.

Unless he was the one doing the exploding. Later that afternoon, I joined him back by the fire with my sister Cori and brother Peter. Grandkids swarmed, all waiting their turn to light the next thing. My niece Channin batted at the military-grade mosquitos and groaned when she found the can of bug spray empty.

Dad grinned. “Eh, just chuck it in the fire.” He crossed one arm across his chest and with his other hand, he smoothed his moustache. Starting with his thumb and forefinger pinched in the middle, he ran them towards the opposite ends of the handlebars.

Channin, wary but obedient, tossed in the can. Immediately, we all took backwards strides and found cover behind trees or rocks. Cori shooed the younger grandchildren towards the cabin, promising them bubbles.

I locked eyes with Peter, the man who’d once put leeches on his ears and called them earrings, and the look on his face reflected mine: This is bad. Also, There’s no way I’m going to miss this. Dad stood off to the side of the footpath, the same amused look on his face as when he watched me parallel park: something was about to go wrong and it was going to be funny when it did.

When the can blew, about a quarter of the fire went with it, exploding logs into ember-riddled splinters on a ten-foot trajectory towards the creek. The mini boulders circling the firepit were dislodged and lolled aimlessly in the surrounding sand. After checking ourselves over for shrapnel, we erupted into frenzied cheers and applause. Dad laughed so hard his face was one big crinkle, and then he let out another one of those “Whoa, ho hos!”

Across the fire, I looked at Pete. He was grinning, and when we made eye contact again, he clenched his teeth and raised his eyebrows in a “Can you believe that just happened?” face. We were relieved when Mom rang the dinner bell.

On the day after the annual fireworks show, we blew up watermelons. Why we had declared that war, no one knew. As with most of my brothers’ absurd, and generally-just-plain-stupid ideas—like “Bottle Rocket Badminton”—it was a collective effort.

The boys would huddle together with screwdrivers, hatchets, and cordless drills in hand, discussing geometry and the laws of buoyancy. It took a lot of planning to stabilize the fruit on a makeshift platform so that, after they’d bored holes into it and stuffed it with mortars, it could float downstream without turning over and extinguishing the wick. We couldn’t do it in the yard on account of the exploded bits attracting wasps—a lesson we’d learned the hard way.

“We used watermelons for bayonet practice in Basic Training,” my dad said to me once when I was a teenager. I was doing my best to cut up a watermelon, struggling to pull the blade through its reluctant innards. His arms crossed, he leaned back against the counter and watched with his head tilted to the side, those bushy eyebrows raised, assessing my work. He told me to be careful and then continued, “They mimic the suction of a human body. In the movies, they show ‘em just hacking away at someone with a blade, but it’s not like that. There’s a lot of pressure to pull against.” He snagged one of the pieces I’d already carved and took a bite. “That’s why they use watermelons.”

Once my brothers had constructed the watermelon-stabilizing platform, we began our procession back to the creek, an assortment of cousins and siblings and grandchildren, all of us rating our favorite explosions from previous years. Whoever’s job it was to set the thing in the creek had to get away real fast, which is why we usually left it to Peter. The wick hissed in response to his lighter and we held our breath while he skittered back to shore like a water spider.

The mortar ignited, and the blast lifted the bulbous fruit into the air for a dazzling moment before the rind ripped open and fleshy pink innards plopped all over the stream and the opposite slope. We lost our damn minds. Jumping and hollering, belligerent high fives everywhere. Jesse threw back his head and shouted, “I hate you, watermelon!”

I loved the watermelon war as much as anyone else, for the pure absurdity of it and because blowing up fruit is surprisingly satisfying. Every time, though, I’d watch the chunks of watermelon careening downstream, swirling with the current, and I’d think about the suction of a blade through watermelon, just like the suction of a blade through a human body, exposing pink flesh.

The next morning, my two-year-old son, RP combed the yard for spent bottle rocket sticks, yelling “Boom!” all the while. It was his first word. Even when I stepped inside for coffee, I knew where he was from his onomatopoeic shouts.

Blankie in hand, he marched over to my Dad, bellowing, “BOOM!”  He threw his arms in the air for emphasis. Dad’s eyes lit up and he repeated the motion, answering with his own sonorous “BOOM!” much to his grandson’s delight. Finally, someone who understood.

“I’ve seen that gesture before,” Dad said, smiling. He leaned in a little closer to my little boy. “Means something’s about to go ‘boom’.”

RP stared up at him, grinning, and proffered a handful of spent bottle rockets.

“No thanks,” Dad said.

Unfazed, RP toddler-stomped off in search of someone willing to make things explode. I lingered near Dad, waiting for the story I knew was coming. It was so good my siblings and I often retold it to each other.

“So this one time,” he began, taking a step closer to me and already smiling at his own story, “I was getting dropped off to deliver supplies to some South Vietnamese troops. The pilot sets me down in this little field and the second we land, the guys on the ground start jumping up and down, yelling and doing this”—he repeats RP’s signature movement—“you know, ‘boom.’ Turns out, I was standing in a minefield.”

This was the point in the story where I would raise my eyebrows in surprise.

“I try to get back on the chopper,” he went on, “but the SOB pilot has also put together what’s going on, and he takes off.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I couldn’t stay out there in the open, it was getting dark. They’re all just watching me, the South Vietnamese guys.” He crossed his arms. “So, I take out a cigar, light it, and walk out of the minefield.”

I scoffed in disbelief and delivered the wows like it was the first time I’d heard it. Dad had even included the story in his letter to the VA requesting compensation for his PTSD and asked me to look over the whole thing for spelling and grammar. I was sixteen at the time.

Every time he told it, at this point, a shadow passed over his face. “The pilot came back to pick me up the next day and I told him I’d rather walk. I guess I can’t blame him for abandoning me in a mine field, but I do. I hitchhiked back.”

The story was finished but Dad lingered, looking at something on the ground and scratching his face in thought. “They all figured I was some kind of man of steel, those guys.” He chuckled on his way past me towards the fire.

No matter how many times he told us that story, he always left out what he’d admitted to the VA in that letter: “I still wake up shivering from that one.”

He stopped about halfway down the path and turned. “You comin’?”

By about the third day of being in the mountains, it was time for a resupply. Most of the grandkids went with my mom and sister to get the Amish Coffeecake and sage sausage in Grantsville, plus a stop at the candy store. My husband and older brothers had driven to Morgantown for lumber to install the cabin’s new stairs.

I stayed behind to get RP down for an overdue nap, then busied myself tidying the front yard, clearing away random tools, old juice boxes and the damp, discarded clothing that I found everywhere—were any of the children wearing clothes? I gathered the towels littered around the concrete pool and began folding. The jumbled terrycloth carried the sun-warmed scent of uncut grass and campfire that was Maryland.

I loved the quiet moments here more than anything, this rare off-the-grid place that allowed me—perhaps forced me—to be nowhere else. The trees were the same trees my father and uncles had climbed; my great-grandfather’s feet walked through this same grass. The valley enveloped me with a sense of belonging.

“Hello there, Sugar Wee,” Dad said, coming out of the cabin. He held a can of pop in one hand and with the other he batted away a loose slab of insulation hanging above the door. He walked slowly towards the wooden bench out by the road, stopping to give me a squeeze around the shoulders. The uneven ground hurt his leg, and with that chunk of metal wreathed in scar tissue, he did a lot of groaning when he moved around. It wasn’t unusual for me to see him stiff-backed in his chair at one or two in the morning when I came in from having campfire beers. He took Vicodin when he was in Maryland.

My brother-in-law Doug and three nephews came rounding the bend in the road, returning from one of their fishing trips at Youghiogheny Lake just down the road. A little town, Guard, sat at the bottom of it after being flooded by a dam. In dry years, you could see the foundations of old buildings rising out of the stinking mud like crustacean braille. Apparently, it made for good fishing holes. The late morning sun glinted on the poles slung over their shoulders. Their tackleboxes, swinging like pendulums, marked the air with invisible grins to match the boys’ happy faces.

Dad didn’t greet them. He whirled around and took quick, choppy steps back to the cabin. Every muscle in his face was taut as though holding fast whatever was inside him, threatening to spill out. He disappeared inside and moments later, through one of the loosened tarps, I caught a glimpse of him seated on the second floor, his head in his hands.

When the fireflies came out at dusk, the kids, pockets filled with candy, made their way back to the fire for s’mores. Dad was seated once again on the wooden bench, looking out at the street. I tugged on a jacket and brought his McNaughton-plaid scarf out to him. Even in the summer, valley evenings were cool.

He acknowledged me by scooting over to give me space, though the bench had plenty, and he thanked me for the scarf, which he spread across his lap so that he could rub the edge between his fingers. We sat quietly together. Eventually he spoke, and his words had a soft, rounded edge to them that I wasn’t used to.

“You know, my whole life I used to go fishing with my dad. Almost every day when we were here. When I first got to Vietnam and saw the streams out there, I thought about him, how nice it would be to have him fishing with me.”

I hardly remembered my grandfather. I used to stare at his waders hanging from the basement ceiling at grandma’s house, suspended in the air like some disembodied fisherman, and wonder how someone could wear boots that were taller than I was. No one had the gumption to take them down.

“I didn’t like streams so much anymore, after Vietnam,” Dad continued. “No cover. And I saw a lot of dead bodies floating in them.”

A truck went by with a boat hitched to it. We waved, and the driver raised his hand in casual, relaxed acknowledgement. I studied the rolling gravel disturbed by the heavy tires. I knew the story from dad’s VA letter. He had been on the radio and didn’t know a VC was creeping up behind him. His platoon sergeant shot the enemy soldier and the body tumbled into the nearby creek bed. I often remember this young VC floating face down in the water with his hair streaming, he wrote.

I stayed silent, giving Dad his room to speak. Another car had driven past, this one earning a “Slow down,” before he finally said, “When I saw those boys coming down the street with their dad and all their gear, I went upstairs and wept. I just—I don’t know. The thought hit me like a ton of bricks: I haven’t been fishing in fifty years.”

Laughter bounced around the campsite, but the weight of his statement settled heavy in the air between us; the space between his words steeped in grief, some sense of loss he hadn’t recognized before and was confronting for the first time.

It  made sense: Fishing was being surrounded by nature, waiting for the bite; war was being surrounded by nature, waiting for the bullet. Sitting silently in the outdoors would be torture for him. My mother told me that while hiking along the creek together, early in their marriage, Dad had looked into the dense forest and whispered, “This is a good place for an ambush.”

Another car drove by, and even though the guy waved, Dad kept his hands folded in his lap. His head was tilted up and his gaze lingered where the sky met the trees. His eyes were glassy.

He’d never hidden that he only showed up at the cabin during our summers out of obligation and that he’d rather be anywhere else. Some years he didn’t even come. I didn’t know what Dad’s childhood there in the mountains looked like and, to my memory, he’d never said a single positive thing about the place, this parcel of land that had been in the family for a century, and never tired of telling us about the time his cousin dunked him in the pool—“I almost drowned!”

But we’d all almost drowned each other in the pool, fought like cats and dogs as children. Hell, a few times even as adults. It didn’t stop us from loving the place.

The image of Dad as a little boy fishing with his father rolled around in my thoughts for the rest of the evening. It was like getting a peek at the little town of Guard when the lake was dry—it was still there, had been there our whole lives, but it had been covered over.

I had sometimes wondered what it would be like if he came to the lake with us or dipped his feet in the creek; what it would be like to take a walk with him down the road where the sun peek-a-booed through the crisscrossed fingers of trees a hundred feet high. Maybe it would release something in him, a cache of fond memories would flood back to him and he’d recaptivate the self that had explored the forests and hiked through the creek, turned up rocks to find salamanders and crayfish. But he didn’t do any of these things, and I mourned for an irretrievable part of him that I had never known.

The next morning after his cup of coffee, Dad announced that he was leaving early to beat the traffic. For most of us, packing up meant an hours-long ordeal of haranguing children, overloading trunks and backseats with soggy clothes and rumpled sleeping bags, stuffing cans of bug spray and kitchen pots in odd corners. Dad dipped into the cabin for a few minutes and  emerged carrying his red overnight bag in one hand.

A few kids had unzipped from their tents and shuffled around in the grass waiting for their cousins to wake up. He kissed their heads on the way to his truck and placed the crisp-looking bag in the spacious, empty backseat. It seemed lonely there. I wondered if he’d think about fishing on his way home, or the things that kept him from fishing. With the driver side door open, he raised his hand in a generic wave to anyone in the vicinity, then started up the truck and drove away.

Note: M.C. Armstrong’s new novel, ‘American Delphi,’ will be out October 15, 2022 from Milspeak Books. It has been hailed as “riveting, wise, and wonderful.” Please feel free to pre-order here, or purchase wherever books are sold.

—

From ‘American Delphi’ by M.C. Armstrong

“How do you tell the world that your brother is a psychopath?”

“You don’t,” my mom said.  “Get away from the screen and journal about it.”

She took this black and white notebook out of her grocery bag and handed it to me like it was supposed to be the answer to all of my problems. So here I sit, notebook and pen in hand, being a good girl while Zach is standing in the kitchen literally jumping up and down about how the world is ending and how America has more cases of the virus than any other country on the planet and how he saw a video of somebody fall off a motor scooter in Indonesia and watched the guy’s face go black before vomiting blood and dying right there by his scooter and you would think, by listening to my brother describe the story, that he was talking about a corgi or some Australian getting playfully punched by a kangaroo on YouTube. But this is somebody dying and for Zach it’s like the best thing that’s ever happened. It’s like it’s confirming all of his theories about apocalypse and totally justifying all of the whips, knives, guns, and fireworks he’s been collecting in the closet of his crazy-ass bedroom upstairs.

“Buck says the virus is the medicine,” Zach said, getting up in my face and breathing his hot breath all over me.

Buck London is Zach’s special friend. Buck’s an old man who just moved into Orchard Chase and smells like mothballs, and I can tell from Zach’s smell that he’s been spending way too much time with Buck.

“Get away from me,” I said. “You’re not practicing social distancing.”

“We are the virus,” Zach said.

“You are the virus,” I said.

“Nobody is the virus,” mom said, tossing a salad with a bunch of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, avocado and falafel (feel awful). Mom said we should use the plague as an excuse to go vegan, but there goes Zach behind her back, just standing, smiling at me as he’s shoving disks of salami into his mouth. It’s like he’s proving this psychopathic suicidal point by eating meat while mom is making a salad, and I said: “NINA!” because I call Mom by her name when she won’t listen. But by the time Nina turns around, Zach’s pretending like he’s tying his shoe and I’m taking a picture of this journal just in case he kills someone someday.

*

Mom said her biggest fear is that I end up a “twentysomething grandma” like Tanya Purtlebaugh. Mom’s entire life seems organized around making sure that I don’t end up like Mrs. Purtlebaugh, but I said “seems” because Nicole, Tanya’s daughter, did just have a baby at seventeen and Nicole’s two years older than I am and her mother is exactly seventeen years older than Tanya which makes her mother thirty-four and that’s only three years younger than Mom which, if you do the math (which I do), it’s pretty clear: Tanya Purtlebaugh is not a “twentysomething grandma.” In other words, Mom’s entire mission in life right now (and she’s succeeding) is keeping me from having sex so I don’t basically have a ME which, if you think about it (and I do), is really sad and it makes sense why she lies and covers up by blaming it all on a “twentysomething grandma” who’s not actually a twentysomething grandma.

Mom doesn’t want me to see what she calls “the elephant in the room”: Her biggest fear is actually another ME. I am the elephant. Mom is afraid she’s like the virus and has passed on all her bad decision-making to me and when I told her, in the fall, that I didn’t want to play tennis in the spring or take any “private lessons” with Pastor Gary, she flipped out because she basically wanted to ensure that I was constantly quarantined in clubs and sports and stupid boring activities where I was sweating and bickering with other girls instead of having “idle time” with boys, but look at everything now. What happened to the tennis team? Same thing that happened to track, soccer, drama, ballet, baseball, archery, karate, and everything else—canceled.

Everyone’s in their room by themselves except Nicole with her screaming mixed-race baby, but guess who’s used to being alone? The elephant in the room, that’s who.

*

“This is like a taste of being old,” Mom said as we drove to the grocery store, Zach riding shotgun, me in the back.

“Nina,” Zach said. “Please tell us exactly what you mean because I wasn’t listening.”

“Okay, Zachary,” Mom said. “I mean this is what we’ve been looking forward to all day, isn’t it? Our one chance to get out of the house, where nothing is happening, just so we can listen to some music in the car and see a few people at a store. Think about how many old people don’t have soccer practice, piano, or archery.”

I’ll give Nina credit: she made me see things differently for a second. There was an old black woman covered in a clear plastic bag in the produce section picking through apples really slowly, and I felt bad because the one place where this old woman gets to go is now invaded with danger, and we are the danger, and I wonder how long until she gives up and has some granddaughter teach her over the phone how to have groceries delivered to her front door by a drone?

“Off your phone!” Mom said to Zach as we passed by the meat shelves which were picked totally clean of everything except the meatless meats. So much for America using this crisis to wean itself off fossil fuels and diseased beef.

“Look!” Zach said.

Passing by a little mirror near the cheap sunglasses, I saw my stupid, long witchy nose. I hate my nose.

“Look!” Zach said.

“Look at what?” I said.

I put my palm up to my nose as if to smash it back into my head. We wheeled past the glasses and down the coffee aisle so Mom could get her “medicine” when Zach showed me a picture from MIMI of the socially distanced sleep-slots for the homeless of Las Vegas, a parking lot that had basically been turned into a dystopian slumber party for all these Black Americans who live in this city with a hundred thousand empty hotel rooms. But because we are America, we force the poor people to sleep in a parking lot, and there was this woman in a white hijab or bonnet standing over the homeless like she was some kind of monitor to make sure the poor were keeping their distance. Or who knows? Maybe she was nice and asking them if they were okay, or if they wanted soup. What was not okay was the way psychopath Zach was grinning as he was thrusting the screen in my face.

“Why are you smiling?” I said.

“He’s smiling because he’s alive,” Mom said, sweeping three bags of Ethiopian coffee into our loaded cart, and Mom’s answer would have been totally perfect if it weren’t for one thing: IT’S HER ANSWER. NOT HIS! MY BROTHER IS SICK!!!

*

I have a wasp in my room because my window won’t seal. But a wasp is just a bee, so his brain is as big as a flea, which means he won’t fly through the crack, and there’s a yellow jacket on the other side of the window, and he’s just a bigger bee, so he’s dumb too. He doesn’t know he just has to fly in the little slit if he wants to see his friend or fly a little higher to show his friend where the opening is so he’ll stop going crazy and bouncing off the walls. Instead, the yellow jacket just hovers and buzzes while the wasp goes nuts and it’s actually kind of funny. I think the yellow jacket is pretty much watching TV, and the wasp is his show for the night, and I guess I am, too, and it’s like the birds have stopped quarreling and are now laughing like a sitcom audience, like the birds know everything.

What do the trees know?

There goes my brother running through the grass. Wonder where the psychopath is going with his big backpack. It’s like a scene from a movie. The psychopath with his backpack loaded with knives and fireworks walking through this totally dystopian, suburban wasteland of saggy porches and American flags towards this half-moon that looks like a lemon wedge while Toast, the Kagels’ new corgador, rams up against the invisible fence with his special red cowboy bandanna around his neck, and how can I tell my brother’s a psychopath, you might ask? God. Just look at him baiting Toast by charging the invisible fence. You can totally tell Zach loves electrocuting Toast, and you know what they say about boys who are cruel to animals. Zach is totally toasting Toast so I open up my window and scream at him to stop and when I close it back up the wasp is gone.

Mom’s right. This is what it must be like to get old. I have to take my sunset walk and “get my steps in.” I walked by Aria’s house and then the Kagels. I called Toast to the edge but I didn’t taunt him like Zach. We just sort of looked at each other, mirroring one another. Toast blinked. I blinked. Toast tilted his head. I tilted my head. Toast looked right. I looked left. Then I noticed at my feet some magenta letters. Maybe they were mauve. I don’t know. The words on the sidewalk were written in this pinkish chalk and it wasn’t the first time I’d seen the graffiti. For the last two weeks the parents of all the little kids have been outside drawing pictures of daisies and birds and smiley sunshine faces with their kids, and Zach and I are too old for that, but some of the older kids have been using the chalk to say other things or to mark their times on their bike races since they’re being forced to exercise outside for the first time in their lives and they’re actually having fun with it, but this graffiti wasn’t like that.

This was different:

Go Vegan.

I walked a little farther and read in yellow:

Media Lies.

A little farther in blue:

Big Pharma Kills.

A little farther in red, white, and blue:

Government Lies.

And then in white:

Black Lives Matter.

And after that it was back to magenta:

The Truth is a Virus. The Truth Leaks. Spread Truth.

And I was like, okay. How do you do that?

How do you spread truth?

I kept walking. Now, in purple, but with the same handwriting, they said We Need Change. And I’m like, okay. Duh. But then, near the turnoff from Cedar to Byrd—right where you could see this big stack of logs against the side of Buck London’s house—there was one more phrase before I turned around and it said: American Delphi.

I was pretty much across the street from Buck’s, staring at this dark green holly bush he has in front of his house and this stuffed armadillo everyone can see on the chipped paint planks of his porch, but because of the huge prickly holly bush, you can’t really see anything else. I couldn’t tell if he was sitting on his porch in his underwear smoking a cigar with a one-eyed cat in his lap, or if he was inside on his couch looking at naked pictures of girls. I have no idea why Zach spends so much time with Buck, and I have no idea what American Delphi means.

But I am going to find out.

Viraj sat in a room behind the motel reception counter, eating a bowl of bhaat with his fingers when the desk bell chimed. He set the bowl down and opened the door. A man in a heavy green coat stood at the counter. His pale blue jeans hung off his waist and he tugged them up. He had a wide, bearded face and smiled easily, but Viraj thought his eyes looked tired. A small, leashed brown dog stood beside him and sniffed the floor. The man whistled a high, sharp note, and the dog looked at him, ears perked, and sat.

“May I help you?” Viraj asked.

“Do you have a room for the night?”

“Yes,” Viraj said.

“Do you allow pets?”

“Yes.”

“OK.”

“I’ll need to see your ID and credit card,” Viraj said.

The man reached into a pocket and withdrew a worn leather wallet held together by duct tape. Opening the wallet, he slid his driver’s license and a Visa card under a plexiglass sneeze guard that Viraj installed at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Is your dog a pet, or do you have him for emotional support?”

“What do you mean?”

“If it’s for emotional support, I won’t charge you a deposit.”

“I was in Afghanistan,” the man said.

“I see,” Viraj said after a moment. “Army?”

“No, I was a contractor. But sometimes there wasn’t a difference.”

Something in the tone of the man’s voice made Viraj uneasy, or perhaps he just felt bad for him. He didn’t know.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He examined the driver’s license. Billington, John Donald. Colorado. He entered the credit card number into a computer.

“Where are you from?” the man asked.

Viraj glanced at him but didn’t answer. Was he one of those America First people? Around town he had begun seeing “American Owned” signs in the windows of other motels. Some guests had come into his motel only to leave when they saw him behind the counter. He didn’t feel anger as much as contempt. How ignorant some of these Americans are! he thought. He was just an infant when his father, frustrated with the low salary he earned as a history teacher in Hyderabad, India, brought Viraj and his mother here to McAllen, Texas, near the Mexican border. They moved in with his father’s older brother, Madhav, who operated a Motel 6. With his contacts, he helped Viraj’s father become a manager at the Grand Star, a motel just two blocks away. The family made a home of two rooms on the first floor where they still lived. Viraj’s father always wore a dhoti and his mother wrapped herself in a sari, and they continued to speak Hindi to each other and to Viraj but he would answer them in English. After school, Viraj helped his mother clean rooms. He collected bedding and damp towels, and carried them to a laundry room, sometimes tripping on blankets trailing on the ground. His father worked the front desk. In those days, Viraj thought of the Grand Star as a warren of mysterious rooms within which anything was possible.

“Are you from India?” the man asked.

“Yes, I am,” Viraj said.

He pushed the driver’s license and credit card under the sneeze guard. The man put them in his wallet.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Since I was very small.”

When he was a senior in high school, Viraj’s father suffered a stroke. Viraj began filling in for him and managing the motel with his mother. As the months passed, the hopes for his father’s full recovery faded. Now the family patriarch spent his days in a wheelchair staring out at the parking lot behind the motel, and Viraj’s mother had to help him eat. He could speak only a few words. Viraj thought his parents would move back in with Uncle Madhav so he could continue with school. However, Madhav told him this was not possible. It is your job as a son to care for them, not mine, he said. Viraj considered attending college at night but too many guests arrived in the evenings for him to take time off. He considered other options but the routine of managing the day-to-day operations of the motel soon became as much a part of his life as breathing. The plans he had made for school assumed the vagueness of dreams he had difficulty remembering. His mother told him that when he had a family he could fulfill his ambitions through his children, as she and his father had hoped to do with him.

After Viraj turned eighteen, Uncle Madhav introduced him to the daughter of an Indian friend. They married and Viraj brought his new wife whose name was Meera to the motel where they lived in a room next to his parents. She helped his mother clean after guests had checked out. Viraj and Meera tried to have children but she was unable to conceive. He told her it was God’s will and she agreed but he knew she felt ashamed. She told him he was wasting his time with her. He took her to a doctor who prescribed antidepressants. She began spending more time away from the motel—where she didn’t say, and Viral didn’t ask. Her unhappiness was another trial. He didn’t know what to say without burdening himself further so he said nothing. When she didn’t come back one night, he wondered if she was at peace and if so, how she had found it.

“I stopped in India on a layover and spent about twenty-four hours in New Delhi,” the man said. “Not enough time at all to see it.”

“In New Delhi, no, it would not be,” Viraj said.

“Do you go back and visit?”

“No,” Viraj said. “I am the manager here now and work all the time.”

He printed a receipt for the room and asked the man to review and sign it and to write the make, model, and license plate number of his car in a box next to his signature. He looked out the glass front doors at the heavy, gray sky and saw his mother pulling weeds from a pot that had once held geraniums. Uncle Madhay had scolded him for not replacing the dead flowers. Remove the pots, he told him, or plant something. What would your father think? Viraj agreed but did nothing. He doubted his father would care at this point so what did it matter? Viraj checked-in guests. Let his mother worry about the pots.

Across the street, cars pulled into the Waffle House. Next door, people streamed in and out of the Shell convenience store. A woman and a boy walked from sunlight into shade. On slow days like today, Viraj read books about ancient India that belonged to his father. His mother would check on him and he would feel her beside him peering over his shoulder as he read. He heard his father’s labored breathing in the other room. I am fine, mother, he would tell her. After she left, he continued to read until his eyes grew tired. Putting the book down, he stared into space. Sometimes, he would go through his father’s closet, change into a dhoti and then return to his chair. He imagined being a physician in the time of the Gupta dynasty, when advances in medicine helped create India’s golden age. In another life, Viraj thought, he might have worked with the celebrated fifth-century physician and surgeon Sushruta. In another life he might have been him. Instead, he had this life.

“You’re in room 201, around to the back,” Viraj told the man.

The man nodded, leaned down and patted the dog’s head. Then he straightened up and waited while Viraj put a plastic card key in an envelope.

“Thank you,” he said.

He tugged on the leash and the dog stood.

“Did you know that from the Middle Ages to around 1750 some of eastern Afghanistan was recognized as being a part of India?” Viraj asked.

“No, I didn’t.”

“It was,” Viraj said. “There was an Afghan who died in 1576 on behalf of an Indian king fighting the Mughal Empire. His name was Hakim Khan Sur.”

“I didn’t know that either,” the man said.

He turned to leave. The dog walked beside him, its nails clicking on the white tile floor. Viraj watched them get into a dented Toyota hatchback checkered with mud, and drive toward the rear of the motel. He looked out the door for a long moment. Then he took a pen and wrote “Hakim Khan Sur” on a Post-it. He put the pen down and walked around to the man’s room. The dog barked when he knocked, and the man opened the door without removing the chain lock. Viraj noticed a green duffle bag on the floor and a bottle of water and a vial of pills on the night table. The dog sat bolt upright beside the man and growled. Viraj stepped back. He offered the man the Post-it.

“I wrote down the name of the Afghan who died fighting the Mughals,” he said. “Hakim Khan Sur.”

The man looked at it and Viraj had the impression he didn’t remember their conversation.

“Hakim Khan Sur,” he repeated. “In case you want to Google him. You can tell me when you check out what you have learned.”

“Thank you.”

“I live here with my mother and father,” Viraj said, “l like to read history books about India.”

“I appreciate your trouble,” the man said.

He folded the Post-it.

“Google him. You will see I come from a great country.”

The man stared at Viraj.

“He was a very important person.”

The man nodded. Viraj walked away. He had not gone far when the man shouted, “I can’t help you.” Viraj paused but didn’t reply or look back. He felt the man staring at him. He had been to Afghanistan. Viraj knew about Hakim Khan Sur. He thought that was interesting. He had assumed the guest would think so too, and would see they had something in common. Now, he felt foolish. He knew he would not see him in the morning.

Viraj returned to his station behind the counter. He wondered if he should read or just go to bed. He knew all there was to know about the golden age of ancient India. He often had dreams of that time as if he had lived in the fifth century, and he would remember them the next morning. He didn’t know if that was a good thing. Maybe he read too much. Maybe this evening he would just sit with his mother and father and clear his mind, accept the silence as his own, captive to the slow pace of a quiet night.

Johnny felt the oak floor tilt sharply below him. He had no idea what was happening or why, and he was frightened.

The tilt was steep, so steep that he felt himself sliding, then falling. He wanted to cry, but he was so terrified that he couldn’t make a sound. Suddenly he fell right off the floor and landed on the next oak floor right below the one he was falling from.

As he was landing on it, that floor tilted in the opposite direction, and he began sliding again, uncontrollably in that direction.

He fell again, to another floor, and that floor tilted back. His fear intensified. Finally he was able to cry out, but the see-saw tilting and sliding wouldn’t stop! Worse, the room began to spin, and Johnny was totally disoriented. The falling and sliding and spinning sensations were new to him; he wasn’t hurt, but he was more terrified than he had ever been. He couldn’t stop crying.

As he slid downward from level to level across the tilting, sloping floors, Johnny looked up and saw his father laughing, and that frightened him even more. This man was his father; he wasn’t supposed to be a man who made floors tilt and who made Johnny fall from one tilted floor to another. But there he was: Johnny was falling from sloped floor to sloped floor, and his dad was laughing while Johnny was crying.

*

The memory of this trauma haunted Johnny for years. When he was a toddler, he woke up after having nightmares that his crib was tilting and he was sliding back and forth on it.

When he was six years old, Johnny woke up at 4AM from a completely different nightmare. In this one, his dad was grinning at him. That was all — it was just a grin, but in his dream Johnny saw it as menacing, and he couldn’t get back to sleep. It rekindled the old nightmares from his infancy.

When his mother woke up, she saw his bedroom light on. “Johnny,” she asked, “Why do you have your bedroom light on, and what are you doing up so early? What happened?”

Johnny knew his mom loved his dad, and so he didn’t feel free to say anything. He knew she would pooh-pooh the nightmare. After some hesitation, he mumbled, “I had a nightmare.”

“What happened?” she asked again.

Johnny wouldn’t tell her.

*

Johnny’s dad died at the age of 43; John was only 15.

John missed his dad, but not a whole lot. They had never been close. His dad was a respected man in the community, and he did many of the usual fatherly things with John, but there was always a barrier between them. John had always been a little afraid of him. John didn’t think about the nightmares of his infancy or childhood very often, if at all, but they had affected him.

One day shortly after John turned thirty, he spent an entire day closeted in his office at work. He didn’t answer knocks on the door, he wouldn’t answer the telephone, and he didn’t go to lunch with his co-workers. He just sat at his desk all day, talking with his dad, trying to imagine a day-long visit and conversation. It wasn’t until then that he realized his dad had grown up the middle boy in his own family, not particularly well-loved and maybe even half-rejected by the rest of his family. Only then did he begin to understand that his dad was shy about showing emotions and had never learned how to give or show love to his son. And John realized, finally, that his dad had loved him deeply but didn’t know how to do it. He felt at peace with his dad.

At least he thought he did.

Many years later, his older sister and he were talking among some friends when she mentioned that alcohol had been banned from their house as they were growing up. She and John laughed about the religious conservatives in their neighborhood, but his sister added, “No, there was another reason. Dad had some men over one night and they all got drunk. Mother threatened to leave him and said he was never allowed to have alcohol in the house again.”

That night John understood. And felt sad. And missed his dad… again.

He understood that during that drunken party, his dad had been tossing him in the air and laughing with his drunken friends. John’s nightmare of sliding on tilting, sloping floors wasn’t a nightmare at all; it had been real. Up and down, up and down, and around and around. The world really had been spinning and falling away from him.

John tried to talk to his dad again that night. He tried to forgive his dad, “I know it wasn’t malicious, Dad. I know.”

And he wept silently.

EACH NIGHT MY MOTHER DIES AGAIN

Each night the phone rings—
Your mother has passed.
Each night I expect to be relieved, but night falls on night.
Each night she is the mother who makes waffles,
batter bubbling from the sides of the iron, the mother
who squeezes fresh orange juice, and serves soft-boiled eggs
in enchanted egg cups. Each night I squint into her face
as she carries me over the ocean waves, her arms my raft.
Each night she refills Dr. Zucker’s prescriptions
for diet pills and valium. Each night she waters her rosebushes
with Dewar’s. Each night I see her hands shake,
her brows twitch. Each night she adds ground glass
to the chopped liver, rubbing alcohol to the chopped herring.
Each night she puts a chicken straight on the lit burner
without a pot. Each 2:00 a.m., Mrs. Finch from 6G phones—
Sorry to say your mother is naked
in the hallway again.
Each night my mother is strapped into her railed bed
at Pilgrim State, curled into a fetal position,
her hands fisted like claws.
Each night she calls to me
from her plain pine coffin, calls me
by the name she gave me, the name
she hasn’t forgotten.

ABBA-1975

Abba’s lyrics, like water
shot from La Bufadora,
mingle with volcanic steam
from metallic pots of corn.

And the scrape on my knee
from chasing the seagulls
bleeds, but does not hurt.

On this Sunday, the ocean breeze slips
in gossip between vendor stalls
as young men in speedos walk past.
Tables of silver bracelets tap my eyes
and ABBA’s Spanish melody
carries on my tongue
before any English syllable
ever arrived.  Before the summer ended
when it tore me
from the sands of Ensenada
to a desert north of the border,
to a land with tongues
unfamiliar and stiff.

And now when I fall
chasing my shadow, my ABBA
lyrics cannot permeate
foreign soil.  Cannot stop the pain.

On the Street

Run naked through the streets
and shout, “Make love to me!”

Tag every wall in a turf war
with quotes from the palatero,
from the child who yearns for love,
from the gay son who hopes his father
will welcome him,
this time.

With your sharp and fast tongue, mesmerize
passersby as they get caught in the gunfire
of stanzas and sonnets,
popping the air.

Bellow on the street corner
of how love abandoned you,
how your life is empty,
how you aborted your dreams.
And every day it rips into you
of every opportunity you threw away.

I want that on the wall.
I want all the pain and hurt
to get out of bed, to grab that bullhorn
and run naked through the streets.

Aphrodite Urania

From a womb of foam I
came to be a woman, heavenly
gestated from Father, who also brought
weather, seasons. He is a castrate
and timeless, the bluest of planets.
As a warrior, my courage
is to stand by my brother while his
hunger weakens him, devouring
days, years – his children. My
courage is to persevere while
the sand under the waves carve
portraits of Mother – her power
quietly stronger than anything else,
ungrounded, unfathomable.

Chronos, After Castrating His Father

The sickle Mom gave me was super sharp, so all I had to do was, like, sneak up on the old
man – who always ignores my AWESOMENESS anyway and has so many fucking kids like
he’s the king of the freakin’ universe – get underneath that nasty tunic he wears (with the
blood and guts of all the meals he eats but doesn’t need to eat cuz he’s a God and all), and
from behind simply grab ’em, slice, and run like hell. Why did I think this would be a good
idea? Just because I hate the man, and the way he treats Mother is shit. But it was easier
than I thought. He didn’t follow, just shrunk down to the ground where his ball blood was
splattered and I could tell as I ran that there would be giants and furies and monsters
born out of that blood. I hoped the sea would bury his testicles as I tossed them as far as I
could, standing on a cliff, sure that all would be better now and my time here would calm.

Grandpa Uranus, Rainmaker

My grandfather no longer visits
with his blued capes that cover everything –
his foamy genitals an island for
Aphrodite. My name, Urania,
is his and my sky is his, the
sodden breezes still spray
my eyes so I look up. Don’t bother
charting the skies. Astronomy
is family. Look for me when you
are angry, I’ll kiss your temple
and promise you your future
and pray to my grandpa, the
father of giants and furies and
all that I turn from in my shadows.

Uranus’ Genital Blood

When my son cut off my testicles
and threw them to the sea, I thought
about those cherries I left for you
in a porcelain bowl by our bed.
His reason, Gaia? You, my darling.
So I’ll sire no more children, darken
the skies no more, abate the thunderstorms,
give the bloodied sickle away
and make some Phaeacians as I do.
Time himself, Chronos, betrayed me
and I’ve set a growing hunger in him.

What beauty could come of this
or the sea? Beauty itself?

REHAB DAY 1

He hadn’t told me, hadn’t stopped drinking
drank beer in the hallway near recycling

where people bring garbage and broken-down boxes
he guzzled, and I was here on the other side of the door

thinking him sober,

reversing redness and the inflammation
from an otherwise young and healthy liver

and I was sober—

how would it help for me to sip a glass of wine
while he drank water with our chicken piccata?

My first thought after drop-off was rebellion

to pull the cork from a long glass throat
and pour full garnet into stemware

I wanted that right again. In my home
the right again

to not finish a bottle and know
it will still be there in the morning

Then I felt a kind of shame

I checked him into a rehab facility
and all I could think of was wine

to unleash my desire for want

drove hours home like a Christmas-morning kid
thrashing through ribbons and crinkled paper

so soon as it was in sight
enrapt and hungry for vice.

REHAB DAY 4

He’s been in rehab four days now, four days without hands on my body

how indulgent that every day I’ve had hands plying my nerves into delight

delight like the tickle and lick of sharing a bed with the same person

and when I finally call my dad, my dad who I’d been avoiding telling

I tell him how lonely it was to arrive back home after leaving him there

with nurses in their face shields, yellow gowns, and their masks

and the globe eyes of his counselor, who stood just back on the sidewalk

and my dad says with unintended harshness that he takes back

as soon as the truth hits the mouth of his phone: You don’t have to tell me that

at least he’s coming back and I imagine him there alone, barefoot

in shorts with a solid color shirt, some sort of mauve, doodling spirals

and checker-box patterns at the kitchen table on a yellow legal pad

in felt-tipped pen while he talks to me, and I remember how in the month

between funeral and stay-at-home, he was well-booked—every day

somebody stopped by with a crumb cake. Baked goods multiplied

on his countertop: cookies mutated into blondies into muffins into baskets

filled mostly with crinkle paper with pears and crackers atop and underneath

the suffocation of plastic tied with ribbons. We worked in shifts

so he would not be alone, alone where he watched her for months and months

and months and months, he danced with her bald in her walker. Oh, how

she resisted that walker until she fell over! How there was a friend each day

on the calendar for lunch, how we took turns staying the night

frying two eggs with toast in the morning—he always ate breakfast—

the plate hearkening back to the diner in Waldwick. How he does not have a return.

My call—a child seeking solace from a parent who only understands

in the way the child will only know as real in some future

hard to materialize in the livingness of abundance and relative youth

how he too was young once with a wife who had long hair she permed

curly and he would tug on her locks under their blankets. When I say future

I see Jim again, clear-eyed with warm hands playing my rib cage,

The National on in the car as we drive up 95 to some version of our life

twenty-four days from right now.

REHAB DAY 9

of course the doctor finds a cyst

on my left breast uphill from sternum

rolling around like a glass marble

of course this is the first day he calls

of course I cannot tell him this news

washed from normal humdrum stress

he swims in progress

and my secret would not serve him

any more than it serves my own

malicious asshole cells

dense like perennials since puberty

of that particular region

of course I cannot even examine

the terrain of my own human lumps

with one arm raised like a branch

fingers ambling around suspicion

every time I’ve been terrified

I’ll find what mom found

and it all feels like oatmeal anyhow

and he’s helpless from there anyhow

to distract from my cycle of peering

into imagined crystal balls and storylines

seeing only the worst, seeing coffins—

if he does not know he cannot worry

and I cannot put that upon him now

make him worry for me

while he does so well in there

REHAB DAY 11

It’s time to take the IUD out.
This is what I think about today, my body
doesn’t want this preventer centered anymore.

I remember the day it went in:
man-doctor’s hand inserting copper
I winced. He said I know, I know

generic bedside assuaging
irked my nerves I sharpened back
No, no, you actually don’t.

And mom came along for support
all frail in her bird limbs, climbed broken
into a chair next to me at the outpatient place

and pain got to the point I needed her hand
to squeeze like citrus pulp out of my grip
as something external opened me up—

I want to be opened from the inside instead
dragged ragged in the riptide of giving birth—
I realized I’d break her frame of softening digits

and knuckles of chemo bones if I juiced
so I unfelt her skin and took hold of my gown
wrung into wrinkles and sweated holes

it’s only a sheen of thin paper anyway…
When he comes back, he will come back
to some levels of absence—and so in turn

open space comes back in, to come in
like syrup into my hungry self.

REHAB DAY 19

His absence heightens hers
so this is how I communicate with mom

I feel each breast one by one smushed
between a plastic pane and its baseboard
goosebumps prickle against machine sounds

in a room alone with the rumbling
inherited path toward lobular cancer

where will my tissue light up a mammogram
like a late-summer campfire sparkler?
Today the ultrasound is a shock

The technician skates a roller over my mound
and I see with clarity a round black orb

She talks to me lump to lump
on the same table she undid her robe years ago
except her skin puckered like a citrus punch

breast vines weighted
by clusters of rotting berries, overripe

mine are bright on the doctor’s screen
netted fibers the rind of a cantaloupe’s dry skin
I see roadways toward lactation

and roadways toward demise
and this marble eye from god

like an omen is benign
has come out as a reminder
of how to spend my days.

* Variation on second line borrowed from Barthes’s Mourning Diary
*Last line borrowed from Anne Dillard quote, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives”

I don’t want to keep going back there. I’m damn near forty years old; too broke and tubby to deploy anymore. It’s my kid’s birthday next week. I should be thinking about balloons, wrapping paper, last-minute toys to order off Amazon. I don’t want to keep going back there, to the dust up my nose from another bomb buried in the road, to the holes left in me, those feelings, the loss, but I do.

*

It’s eight months into my second deployment. August 2009. I’m standing in a guard tower sandwiched between two hesco bastions, looking out over a lush green carpet of terraced farms and qalats, all of it laid out before me with titanic, purple-brown, barren peaks rising up either side. Wheat grows down in the strip of green, apple and apricot orchards. Your night vision snags in their branches during patrols. I’m standing in my uniform, wearing a patrol cap, my radio tucked in my back pocket with the antennae whapping me in the shoulder. There are two other guys with me in the tower, wearing their mitch helmets, vests, ammo, however-many pounds of gear. I’m the Sergeant of the Guard, on light duty inside the walls of COP Blackhawk. My left hand looks like someone’s blown one of those purple latex gloves into a balloon, but the swelling’s been going down over the last couple of days. Within a week or so, I’ll be on patrol again.

One of the guys is talking about this new JSS—a Joint Security Something or other, I can’t remember my acronyms anymore. It’s a base. We’re going to build another base out at the far western nexus of that green carpet. Near a village named Omarkhel.

“Somebody’s gonna fuckin’ die,” he says.

I can’t disagree with him.

“You believe this shit, sergeant? We’re practically combat fuckin’ inoperable what with all the casualties we’ve taken and they want us to go out there and man another fuckin’ base?”

“Bullshit,” says the other guard.

“What’s gonna happen when this JSS gets hit, huh? I mean, we can’t even use the road without Counter-IED clearin’ the way. How’s anyone supposed to get out there to help us?”

“Hell, even Counter-IED got hit with an IED.”

This is all stuff way over any of our pay grades.

“What do you think, sergeant?”

I don’t say it but I think he’s probably right. Whoever came up with the grand idea of plopping another base even deeper into Nerkh Valley is going to get a rude awakening when they hear about yet another truckful of soldiers getting blown sky-high either on their way out to or back from it. It’s the road. There’s only one squiggly-ass dirt road in or out of that valley; a natural bottleneck. We’ve already lost so many because of that road. Hall. Ogden. Wilson. Obakrairur. Farris. I’m twenty-four years old and I’m tired of people dying. People I knew, ate with, slept next to, traded jokes and slaphappy bro-handshakes with.

Maybe my name is next.

But if the higher-ups want a base out in Indian Country then they get a base in Indian Country. That’s where the bad guys are at, hooah.

The guard flicks his cigarette. “Shit’s pointless.” His cherry somersaults through the razor wire, and down, out of sight. “We’re just shoving a stick in a hornet’s nest. These people aren’t ever gonna change.”

And it hits me that if a couple of grunts with probably nothing more than high school diplomas (and a Good Enough Degree, in my case) can see the fruitlessness of our endeavors in Afghanistan, then why can’t the generals, politicians and think-tank analysts up there in the Big Beltway in the Sky? How many more grunts have to die until they do?

“What do you think, sergeant?”

“I think both of ya need to mind your sectors.” Or, in other words, quit your bitching about shit none of us have any control over. “I’m headed to the other tower, call me if you need anything.”

Within a month the JSS would be built, then abandoned. It happened on their way back. It happened on the road. Pellerin. That was his name.

*

Wait, no. What actually happened was that I was in the recovery tent on FOB Shank. It wasn’t even twenty-four hours since I’d been wounded when a whole truckful of Blackhawk guys choppers in. Another IED. I beeline it into the triage tent and stand next to them, let them see a face they recognize, crack a joke or two. Some are still out of it. Specks of dirt in the creases of their faces. A couple in neck braces. One with a broken leg. Everyone’s been thrown around the inside of an armored truck and, yes, the steel is just as hard on the inside as it is on the outside. Necks, backs, heads, spines—all discombobulated. I count five, total, in the triage tent. They’re missing one. The driver.

It isn’t until after nightfall that we send Pellerin home. No lights but the ghostly green out of a Blackhawk. The wind of its rotors. The medics, doctors and others create a cordon leading up to the bird. I’m unexpectedly grateful it’s my left hand that’s wounded and not my right since I have to salute with my right.

We salute Pellerin.

He floats between rows of saluting soldiers. A body shape inside a black body bag. Four carry him on a stretcher but I don’t see them, I just see Pellerin sliding onto a waiting helicopter and the doors close and the engine rises in pitch as its wheels cease to touch ground and he’s gone. The IED had blown him mitch-first through three inches of ballistic windshield. I pray it was quick.

In another day or two, after catching a rare hot shower—careful not to get too much water in the hole in my shoulder, or the one in my thigh, or those in my hand—I’m on my own Blackhawk to FOB Airborne in Maiden Shar, then on a convoy back out to Nerkh, where I belong. That’s the order of events. A conversation with a guard in a tower about somebody dying actually happened before I was wounded. But it’s all so twelve, thirteen years ago, it’s like something out of a dream anymore. A gush of emotive images, smells, meanings. Takes a while for everything to settle into place.

Nettlesome memories, getting in the way of the story I want to tell and how I want to tell it, memories half-imagined anymore, memorized imaginings, best just forget about all of them, I got a kid’s birthday to prep for—tap, ctrl + A, delete.

*

I’d rather a thousand Afghans die than one more American soldier. This is what I write on my laptop in a not-so-diary word doc. It’s mid to late August 2009 and I type this, and save it, because it captures everyone’s frustration, my own particularly. A thousand lives equated to one. I write it because it feels so right, visceral, and I write it because it feels so wrong, vile.

At the beginning of the deployment, I spent months not in an infantry line company, where I felt I belonged, but behind a desk in the Maiden Shar District Center trading scraps of intel with Afghan police and national army about what was happening where, which outposts were attacked when, IED reports, and so on. I learned to speak some Dari, shared meals and chai with one Afghan officer after the next, traded jokes, was guarded by them while I took my turn grabbing a few hours of shuteye in a connex no more than a few steps outside the door of our little intel-swap office. I came to admire a number of Afghans, their patriotism, their ingenuity, their faith, and to sympathize with them, with the obstinacy of Afghanistan’s many hydra-headed problems, from corruption, to extremism, to poverty, to incompetence.

But now I’m back in an infantry line unit and things are a little different. I’m so tired of people dying. Everyone is. You deploy raring to kick some ass only to discover your entire deployment is turning into a line of losses, one after the next, like holes left in the road out in that bottleneck. You try to fill in the hole with something, anything, but it never fills.

Sure, we conduct a handful of night ops in retaliation, kick in some doors, find some IED-wire, but, soon enough, that hole’s empty all over again.

We’re rough with the people. Headed back to base, we’re dismounted, when my team leader spots a guy on a cellphone. He zeroes in on the guy, smacks the cellphone out of his hand, shoves him up against a mud wall, pats him down, stomps his cellphone into pieces. Another soldier smashes their buttstock through someone’s windows while we’re searching their qalat. Oops. When another IED hits, more than a few of us squeeze our triggers off at anyone. Goat-herder running away from the explosion? Pop-pop-pop. Van getting too close, not responding to shouts and waves to stop? Put half a belt of 7.62 through their windshield. Guy digging in the middle of the road for no discernible reason? One shot, one kill.

Yes, there were good things we did, promises kept. Communication barriers overcome. But throwing bags of candy at little kids and drinking chai with elders and showing general good will at best papers over the bad stuff. When the Big Army comes down and an investigation ensues about why this farmer was killed, it’s found that escalation of force procedures were followed. It’s an unfortunate accident. Here’s some money for the family.

But the people’s grievances keep piling up. Whatever trust we build, it’s erased with the single squeeze of a trigger. Try to paper over things but all that does is add fuel to the fire. It also doesn’t help that the Afghan army is often more indiscriminate with their bullets than we are.

The people are convinced, the Taliban encourages them to think this way, that you can never trust a non-Muslim, a foreigner, an American, or the puppet government they’re propping up. Trust is the hot commodity. You trust your brothers-in-arms over any Afghan stranger, but do you trust an American soldier’s narrative over an Afghan’s? Should you?

On another mission, a couple of guys wander into our perimeter, smiling, waving, out for a morning stroll—Oh look, Americans sprouted in our front yard overnight. We detain both of them, zip-cuff their wrists, put them in a row with all of the other military-age males we’re rounding up. Because we don’t know. We can’t tell the difference between who’s Taliban and who isn’t. We don’t speak the language, don’t understand the culture, we don’t really want to.

First day in country and they’re telling you about counterinsurgency doctrine, winning hearts and minds, even the President of the United States can spout off buzz words like COIN and the people are the key terrain, but it doesn’t make a dent in us. Not down in the thick of the ranks. From newbie privates already indoctrinated to mid-career professionals to flag officers, the majority of us resist counterinsurgency. These people, the rank and file, the army with its sergeants, lieutenants, captains, majors, colonels and kickass (kiss-ass?) corporate culture, they’re never going to change.

I’d rather a thousand Afghans die than one more American soldier. We put the people in our sights because, often enough, they were the only target we could find. The people, stuck in a no man’s land between pissing off the Taliban, who will kill them for talking to Americans, and us, who kick in their doors in the middle of the night and make their children scream when we zip-cuff their fathers. Still hear myself screaming at ten-year-olds. Sit down and shut the fuck up! Is that me? Is this who I am? Where’s my compassion?

I’m too tired of people dying, of worrying about one of my guys dying, or myself, tired of civilians catching the flak from soldiers frustrated with their role in a mean little war. It’s only another week until my scheduled R&R and it can’t come fast enough.

*

I’m on my way back from R&R. September 2009. I’m sitting in coach and reading the latest Stars and Stripes when there’s an itch on the top of my left hand, on the meaty part between my thumb and forefinger. I scratch at it. It feels like the tip of a screw just starting to poke out the wrong side. What the hell? And I realize: it’s my shrapnel. It’s working its way out.

Don’t pick at it.

Eventually, I leave it alone and return to reading my Stars and Stripes. The engines decelerate; we begin our descent. I finish my article and turn the—stop. Remembering the Fallen. Two full pages of photographs, ranks, names, places and dates of death, so many soldiers and marines, so many faces, names, but I’m zeroed in on just two of them.

That’s them—isn’t it? That’s their faces, ranks, names, dates, place of—that’s fucking them. Cox. Allen. They’re fucking dead.

“Shit!”

Heads swivel. I’m on a civilian flight. I’m not wearing my uniform but one look at my high-and-tight and anybody can probably tell. I fold up my Stars and Stripes, open it back up, recheck their names, their faces. I stare and keep staring until I’m certain I’m not seeing things.

“Shit.”

I say it much closer to myself this time. I fold up my Stars and Stripes—don’t, don’t open it again—and drop my head back and close my eyes and try not to think anything, to hear anything, but it comes on, under the clunk of landing gear and the roar of decelerating aircraft, a whisper in my head, an incantation, repeating names, all of their names.

*

I’m standing in a shower connex with a pair of tweezers in my right hand. I’ve been in Kuwait a few days, waiting for a C-17 to shuttle me back to Afghanistan. My shrapnel’s made a little recess for itself in the top of my left hand, though initially, boom, it entered through my palm. My tweezers don’t even have to pull, it just snaps through the last threadbare bit of skin and rimming of puss and I’m holding it, looking at it, my shrapnel, under the phosphorescent glare of the light over the mirror. It’s like a tiny meteor, silverish, clean. The hole in my hand isn’t bleeding or anything. My body made a perfect little recess to spit out the contaminant. New skin’s even starting to grow down inside. Without waiting to think twice, I release my tweezers and watch as my shrapnel drops into the sink, clink, down the drain, gone. I don’t need any token reminders. Their names are etched in my memory.

*

I also own a black bracelet with all of their names etched onto it. After we got back, roundabout January 2010, everyone in the company received a black bracelet with our fallen writ across it. Many Blackhawk guys were already wearing one; now even more wore one. I did not wear one, I still don’t. My black bracelet is hidden in a box in the basement, along with all of my other army stuff. To meet me, to walk in my house, you’d never know I was even in the military. No awards or folded flags hanging from my living room wall. My scars and the beaten pathways of my thoughts remind me enough, thanks very much.

*

It’s October and I’m back where I belong on COP Blackhawk talking to a couple of my fellow non-comms.

They’re tolerating me, sort of.

“Remember back in February, back before we even started building the cop,”—COP, or combat outpost. “And there was this intel report about the AP3 checkpoint out in Omarkhel getting attacked?”—AP3, Afghan Public Protection Program, call them whatever just don’t call them a US-equipped militia of half-Taliban good ol’ boys.

“Sorta,” says one of my fellow non-comms.

“What about it?” says the other.

“You remember the checkpoints falling? In February it was the checkpoint in Omarkhel. In March, the one in Karimdad. Then Mir-Hazari in April. By May, it was Dehayat’s turn.” I remember this because I used to work in that intel-swap office. A big map on the wall demarcated every AP3 checkpoint; I remember erasing them. “One after the next, west to east, all through the bottleneck, those checkpoints fell like fucking dominoes, remember?”

They’re not sure, it’s October and this is all so four months ago. (I’m not even sure, umpteen years later.)

“But you see what I’m saying? Special Forces set up the local militias, equipped them, then set up the checkpoints to safeguard the road. But the SF are all over the place, they can’t back up the militias day and night. Those checkpoints didn’t have any support. Not even from us though we can literally see Dehayat from here.”

“Mac, what’s your point?”

“June was when we started taking major fucking casualties, right?”

“Yeah—and?”

“It’s the road, see? The Taliban wanted unfettered fucking access to the road. That’s why the checkpoints were attacked. That’s why building a JSS all the way out to Omarkhel was never going to work, cuz the bottleneck was already IED-fucking-alley by the end of summer. The Taliban knew the road was key, they knew it all along.”

“Taliban don’t know shit. Don’t go giving those goat-fuckers any more credit than they deserve.”

“Yeah Mac, sounds like you’re scrapin’ the bottom of the barrel on that one. Every road’s got IEDs in ‘em.”

And they leave me standing there in the dirt. Now I’m the one talking about stuff way above my pay grade. They didn’t quite say that, but they didn’t have to. And it takes me a cold minute to realize: they’re right. Stay in your lane, buck sergeant. Stop talking about shit you don’t know the first thing about. No one wants to listen to you, you make too many mistakes.

I look down at my left hand.

Sure, I do some things right. I’ve maneuvered my squad under fire, engaged the enemy, prevented my own soldier from firing on someone they weren’t supposed to only to spin around at the shot from another finishing the job. Still, I’m nowhere near the level of competence I expect myself to be. I mean, no one is, but I’ve got one field-grade and two company-grades under my belt in my seven years in this man’s army, and—

Only a divot of a scar left in the top of my hand, a pale slice in my palm.

They told us before the mission not to go near the road. There was intel about (yet another) IED. Don’t go near the fucking road, they said. And what does Sergeant Mac do?

Thing is, it wasn’t just me who was wounded that day. Our lieutenant caught one or more pieces of shrapnel, too. But because his were located near a major artery—which I believe he made a full recovery from, last I talked to him—the docs shipped him back stateside, just to be safe. Be glad it wasn’t worse. That’s what I tell myself.

And it hits me: I’m not cut out for this operational shit. It’s October and we’re not even pulling patrols out west of Dehayat anymore. We’re doing odd jobs around COP Blackhawk, pulling guard, visiting “safe” villages like Kanie Ezzat and Dae Afghanan. Busy work. Minimal risk. Command doesn’t want any more casualties, not this late in the game. It’s October and all we’re doing is winding down the clock, waiting for the next regular infantry company, the 173^rd out of Vincenza, to begin rotating in. It’s October and I’m less than a year out from the end of my enlistment, and I’m done. Done with Afghanistan, with the army, with all of it. If I make it back to Fort Drum in the next couple of months, I’m out.

*

It’s the day before my kid’s birthday and we don’t have any cream cheese. How’re we supposed to make frosting for his birthday cake? Who’s running to the grocery store? You? Me?

Please let it be me.

Going into it you think it’ll be easy, being a stay-at-home dad. You won’t turn into a frazzled wreck of your former self. You won’t end up desperate for a mere thirty-minute jaunt to Walmart, a slice of time, a guilty convalescence from the rabid lunacies of your toddler, a chance to feel, I don’t know, normal again, but you do. Transitioning to solids. A dab of toothpaste the size of a pea. Fucking potty training. Your spouse gets to go and do adult things like commute to work, talk to other adults at work, stress out about work, while you get to stay at home and watch Blippi the clown for the umpteenth time and fight to survive another day of it. Because when you’re a stay-at-home parent every day can feel like a losing battle. He’s teething (again). Only daddy can rock him to sleep anymore. Take that out of your mouth. Spit it out—now!

I’m standing in the dairy section at Walmart and I’m spacing out. I’m not thinking about the all-natural organic cream cheese in my left hand, a buck-fifty more expensive than the low-fat generic cream cheese in my right. The coolness of their cubes in my palms. No, I’m trying to remember the names of mountains.

*

It’s December and my last night in COP Blackhawk. The remaining days of twenty-o-nine, and our deployment, can be counted on one hand. We’re hours away from lining up in our chalks and hitching a ride up to Bagram. Midnight flights. Darkness the infantryman’s friend. The 173^rd have already come in and taken over, pulling guard, running missions, sleeping in what were until very recently our tents. I’m standing down at the smoke pit and the stars are above me, brilliant spangled sonsabitches like nothing you see back stateside. And there are the mountains, black crags tearing into the spectacle.

I recall a few missions where we scaled the mountains and when we scaled them, we named them. Names like Mount Outlaw, Chocolate Chip, Drag-Ass One, Drag-Ass Two-point-O, Blackhawk Point. Who knew, or cared, what names the Afghans had given them.

*

At least, those are the names I can remember. I doubt my memory and I absolutely doubt my own versions of events, biased and incomplete as they are bound to be. I don’t really mention any heroics, mine or anyone else’s. My mind doesn’t dwell on standard heroics like it does the unpleasant realities, the blind spots in our collective rearview, the things that should not have happened but always do.

I’m damn near forty years old, staring into space, until I remember the cubes of cream cheese in my hands. Organic or generic? Price and packaging. What’s the difference, really? Is there any difference between the mythic me, the combat story me, and the now me, the real me standing in the dairy section of Walmart in flip-flops and pajama pants with two leftover bits of twelve-year-old shrapnel still in him? God knows they may never work themselves out.

*

My cherry crackles in the midnight December chill. There’s only a handful of us down at the smoke pit. None of us speak. We’re all looking out at the stars and mountains. Each of us in our own way saying goodbye, good riddance and good fucking luck. It’s only a few hours and we’re walking across the landing zone of COP Blackhawk under the gusts of propellers. I count my guys aboard the Chinook. Then I embark and catch a seat with a view out the back ramp. The only light is a green bulb in the fuselage. It details each of our faces. The only sound is the thrum of the double rotors. I give a thumbs-up to the crewman, then, in the next moment, we’re leaving. Never get tired of that elevator-drop in the pit of my stomach when the chopper’s wheels cease to touch ground.

I’m looking out the back of the Chinook, at the dark outline of COP Blackhawk as it circles below. The overall square of hesco bastions. The moonlit carpet of gravel from one end of base to the next. Armored trucks parked in rows. Light discipline observed. In a few beats of the chopper’s blades, COP Blackhawk is out of sight and I lean back in my seat, and my gear, my carbine muzzle-down between my legs, and I’m looking back at when we first arrived in Nerkh.

COP Blackhawk did not exist back in January or February or whenever it was. We visited the Nerkh District Center, a stone’s throw down the hill from where COP Blackhawk would be. The District Center wasn’t much to look at. A handful of Afghan soldiers, a sprinkling of police. What caught our attention were the bullet holes riddling the walls around the outside of the compound. One sergeant looked at me, grinned and said, “It’s like the Alamo.” I grinned back at him. Hell yeah, the Alamo. That’s what every infantryman really wants deep in their bones.

*

From January to December 2009, Blackhawk Company lost a total of eight killed in action. All of them to IEDs. Not to mention the dozens upon dozens of others who did not die but continue to suffer from paralysis, imbedded shrapnel, leg, neck and back injuries, PTSD, suicide. Their names are forever etched in my memory.

After we left, COP Blackhawk was renamed to COP Nerkh. Did the 173^rd rename the mountains, too? Or the company after them? Or the company after them? The names that stay with you, the names that wash away.

*

When I ask the Afghan army commander who had taken over COP Nerkh after the Green Berets’ exit if there was any way that someone could bury a body 50 yards outside his perimeter without him being aware of it, he laughs. “There is no possibility,” he says, pointing out that his guard towers have clear lines of sight in all directions over the flat ground. No one could start digging outside the base without attracting immediate attention. “The Americans must have known they were there.”

—The A-Team Killings, Rolling Stone, November 13, 2013

It puts my hairs on end. I’ve walked over that ground. We, Blackhawk Company, built COP Nerkh. My ten toes tingling inside of my boots. Ten bodies buried under the ground. When a place you’ve known becomes a site of torture and mass burial, it’s unthinkable, tragic, and then, all too familiar.

Many regular infantry bases, built up during the surge in ‘09, were turned over to Special Forces roundabout 2012. The surge was drawing down, the decade-long withdrawal from Afghanistan just beginning. Special Forces were sent in to assure Afghan allies we weren’t completely abandoning them while appeasing taxpayers back home by supplanting thousands of regular troops with “pods” of Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) teams.

ODA Team 3124 took over COP Nerkh.

In November 2012, Aziz Rehman was found under a bridge in a wadi, beaten, near death. He’d reportedly been stopped by Special Forces, on the road, earlier that day. He died right before reaching a hospital in Kabul.

Mohammed Hassan, in December 2012, was waiting with his family for the bus to Kabul. The bearded soldiers told him to come with them. Mohammed said to his family not to worry, that he’d meet them in Kabul. They never saw him alive again.

Nasratullah, a veterinary student, home on break in Ibrahimkhel, was abducted in a Special Forces night raid in February 2013.

I’ve read there was a box, on COP Nerkh. A plywood cube. The bearded soldiers put the men they arrested in the box. Agha, a fifty-year-old man and employee in Maiden Shar, described how Special Forces broke into his house without knocking and took him to their base. When he was electrocuted, buried up to his neck and left to freeze overnight, or dunked headfirst into a barrel of water, Agha said it was the Americans telling the Afghan soldiers to do it.

The SF went to Karimdad, to Omarkhel, to Dae Afghanan, to all of these villages I still see before me, the road twisting through them, golden mulberries drying in a wooden bowl, the apple orchards with the oldest trees and the deepest shade. There was a man I met in Dae Afghanan, in twenty-o-nine. We knocked on his door and he allowed us to search his home. It was a cursory search; peek inside. Clear. I remember I stood outside, just below the man, in his courtyard, my eyes feasting on his garden. A bee rummaging across the fiery head of a zinnia. Red-lipstick geraniums. The cool blue of cornflowers, or something like them. Salamalekum. You have a beautiful garden. I said this to him through our interpreter. He put his palm to his chest. Salam. Thank you. Was his name Mohammed Hassan? I don’t know; I can’t remember even asking the man his name.

In 2013, a military investigation was opened, shut, with “no evidence connecting US troops to allegations of abuse, torture, harassment and murder of innocent Afghans.” Protests erupted in Wardak Province. Hamid Karzai demanded the Special Forces leave Nerkh and, by April 2013, they did. Within a month, with permission from Afghan security forces, relatives began uncovering bodies scattered in shallow graves around the walls of COP Nerkh. Relatives who had searched, questioned and quested in vain to find out what had happened to their brother, father, son, as no record existed of their relation being detained in any official database, now knew.

Neamatullah wept when, with pickaxes, his three brothers, Hekmatullah, Sediqullah, and Esmatullah, were raised up out of the brown broken earth. He knew them only by their clothes—a telltale scarf, a shirt, a watch. All else was bones and barely decayed flesh.

Information is scant, but from what I can discern an investigation was reopened, per new evidence presented by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and it’s still pending, or has gone stale, unresolved, or is closed again. Who knows? It’s all so five, six, seven years ago. Many fingers point towards the Special Forces’ interpreter, Zikria Kandahari, but, as a 2013 Human Rights Watch article points out: “Even if Afghan personnel are found to have carried out the killings and mistreatment, US personnel can bear criminal responsibility for war crimes and other violations of international law if they aided and abetted, ordered, or knew or should have known about crimes committed by their subordinates and took no action.”

Things buried, whether in flesh or earth, have ways of wriggling themselves out into the light. Ten bodies buried under the ground. Another eight found dead or left for dead in wadis, under bridges, or what have you, in Nerkh Valley, Afghanistan. Come home, kiss your wife, go to your kid’s birthday party. And what of the people you left behind who don’t have their son, father, husband anymore? What memorial will come to stand on that ground? What plaque speak their names?

Mohammad Qasim. Nawab. Sayed Mohammad. Noorullah. Mohammad Hassan. Esmatullah. Sediqullah. Atiqullah. Mansoor. Mehrab Khan.

Maybe the tragedy itself needs a name for people to remember it by. Maybe we call it the Nerkh Massacre, or the Nerkh Killings, so it can join the long sad list of other massacres, named and unnamed, committed by US military forces, from Wounded Knee to No Gun Ri, from Bud Dajo to Bad Axe, from Haditha to My Lai. That village, or valley, or river, that ground forever in collective memory stained in blood. Or will their names, too, one day, wash away?

*

My kid’s birthday goes off without a hitch. He’s running circles around the yard with cream cheese frosting still stuck to his cheeks—organic, only the best for my baby. I’m sitting in a lawn chair, watching him, and imagining a future-me and a future-teenaged-him sitting at the table in the kitchen. I’m talking away about something or other, but then, out it slips, and he asks, “Wait, dad, you were in the army?” and I say, “Yeah, for… a little while.”

“Why have I never heard about this?”

“Well, it wasn’t anything to write home about—say, what’re you doing with your friends this afternoon?”

That’s how it goes. Divert and distract. Change subjects. It never works out that way. But I don’t want my kid following in my footsteps. Chasing war, combat, strife, then growing into a forty-year-old man who spends his days trekking the fields of his memory, gleaning shoots of violence, reciting the names of others gone before him to prevent their dying a second death. No, not for my kid. If I could swaddle him in a bubble of innocence forever, I would.

Though, chances are, it’ll all go to shit.

He’ll grow up wanting to join the army, the infantry of all things, he’ll go off to fight in some mean little war just like daddy-o. Because I can’t stop going back there. Because the United States can’t help itself from starting mean little wars it can’t finish every couple of decades or so. Because part of me is in love with the making of a myth of myself.

In May 2021, with only a thousand or so American troops remaining in Afghanistan, the Nerkh District Center is overrun. A Taliban spokesman claimed Afghan security forces were killed or captured in the taking.

I don’t know how to make it stop, or what remedy would suffice. I can’t bear to count the dead anymore. All any of it makes me wonder is: whose names are next?

<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>

References:

— Gaskell, Stephanie. “Frustration Mounts in Afghanistan for Soldiers from Fort Drum-Based 10th Mountain Division.” New York Daily News, September 23, 2009. https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/frustration-mounts-afghanistan-soldiers-fort-drum-based-10th-mountain-division-article-1.403466

— Left in the Dark: Failures of Accountability for Civilian Casualties Caused by International Military Operations in Afghanistan. Amnesty International Ltd, 2014. https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/left_in_the_dark_afghanistan.pdf

— Aikins, Matthieu. “Afghanistan: U.S. Special Forces Guilty of War Crimes?” Rolling Stone, November 6, 2013. https://www.rollingstone.com/interactive/feature-a-team-killings-afghanistan-special-forces/

— Wendle, John. “Did U.S. Special Forces Commit Atrocities in a Key Afghan Province?” Time, February 28, 2013. https://world.time.com/2013/02/28/did-u-s-special-forces-commit-atrocities-in-a-key-afghan-province/

— Aikins, Matthieu. “Mapping Allegations of an American War Crime.” The Nation, June 21, 2016. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wardak-investigation/

— “US: Investigate Killings in Afghanistan.” Human Rights Watch, November 6, 2013. https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/11/06/us-investigate-killings-afghanistan#

— “Taliban Capture Key District near Afghan Capital.” Reuters. Thomson Reuters, May 11, 2021. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-conflict-idUSKBN2CS2DV

CONTENT WARNING: A hate crime against an Arab-American is committed in the story. Being an Arab-American myself, the hate crime is loosely based on something that occurred to me back in 2004 when I worked as a raft guide in a southern state.

It’s past two in the morning, and it is warm on this early summer night despite a slight drizzle falling through the trees. I’ve just bedded down in my tent, which is my home for the summer and fall seasons here in Copperhill, Tennessee, where I work as a raft guide on the Ocoee River. But as I lie there, my eyes getting heavier by the second, I have a strange feeling that something’s not quite right.

I had spent three hours hanging with Brady at his campsite, feeding the fire dry wood, smoking pot, telling stories, jokes, and, as the threads of conversation dwindled, watching the dance of the flames in silence. Then, with the workday looming just a few hours later, I called it a night, patted Brady’s shoulder in friendly affection, then shined my headlight along the path leading to my tent some thirty yards away. As I approached, I made out a red pinpoint light to my left in the dark, in the distance. Then the light vanished. Odd, I thought, but gave it no further thought as my feet carried me inside the tent. After I undressed, I lay down, eager to fall asleep.

“So you’re the Arab riding around with a peace sign,” a man’s voice says.

I hear this through the fabric of my tent. I must have dozed off, but now my eyes snap open. I am in danger. I reach for my knife, but outside I hear the sound of a gun cocking. Shit.

Then, that same voice coming to me from the darkness: “Come on out, why don’t you.”

I’m considering my options when a blade slashes open the back of my tent. I clutch my knife, ready to defend myself as two dark human shapes stand outside, two red pinpoint lights emitting out of them. I look down at my chest and see both dots upon it.

“You might want to drop that knife, Arab.” He says the first “A” of “Arab” like the letter A. “If you want to live, that is.”

I drop it.

“Now, grab your wallet and car keys and come on out—slow-like.”

I do as I’m told, step out of the tent and wait for further instructions.

“Alright. Listen well, now. We want you to get in your car and leave Tennessee. Tonight, you hear?”

He hits me in the stomach with the butt of his rifle, and I fall to my knees. Then he strikes me again, this time in the face. I hear the crack of my nose breaking before I fall over, warm blood now flowing out of my nose. I taste it in my mouth, noticing for the first time in my life its flavor—salty, metallic.

“You hear?” he repeats.

“Yes, sir,” I manage to say through the pain.

“Oooh, he called me sir. I like that. I like me a courteous Arab. What do you think?”

His friend speaks for the first time. “Courteous or not, the only good Arab is a dead Arab, if you ask me.”

“You hear that, Arab? I think you better go. Now git!”

Holding my nose in one hand and my keys and wallet in the other, I struggle to my feet and start to make my way around the tent to the dirt path that leads to where my car’s parked.

“And don’t come back. Ever. You hear?”

“Yes, sir,” I say as I reach the path and hurry down it, making my way half out of memory and half by the light of the lamp over at the parking area of the campsite.

When I get to my car, I fumble with my keys and get the door open. I turn the engine, back out, and drive off in my boxers and blood-soaked shirt, leaving my tent, clothes, cell phone, life vest, helmet, rescue bag, friends—leaving it all behind. Except for my life, I think to myself—except for my life. I think of going to the police station, but am afraid that here, in the south, not even three years after 9/11, I might not get the protection and justice I seek. I fear that I might get mistreated there as well. So I just drive. It’s a long way to Seattle, where my parents live. I’m twenty-nine, a full-grown man, so I don’t know why I think of them as my destination. Perhaps it’s natural after traumatic moments to revert back to childhood instincts. I don’t know, but the sooner I get there, the better. I drive. First west so I can get to a well-traveled highway where I start heading north, blissfully north. I’m going to Cincinnati, Ohio, I’ve decided. There I can take stock of the situation, find a hotel, clothes, wash up. There will be no rafting for me today.

I think back to the previous day, at how everything had been so perfect. My life, my job, spending my days on the rivers I loved so much. I recall what led me to Tennessee in the first place—the roundabout way I got to Copperhill from Seattle.

I’d had my first taste of rafting back in Washington when I was still a teenager, and I didn’t know that I would carry that experience with me to the east coast. I had wanted to move as far away from my parents’ influence as possible. My mother, in particular, was insistent that I join the family business—a small marketing firm—while I wanted to stand on my own two feet and know I could still make it.

I lived in New York City where everything was exciting at first. The city, the people who inhabit it, the multiculturalism, the job itself even. I’d gotten a job in advertising and it was sexy to work on products millions of Americans used; I felt important. And then 9/11 occurred and everything changed. I couldn’t get excited about my job anymore, the tragedy having wiped out any semblance of relevance to what I was doing. Still, though, I did it, woke up, washed up, dressed up, and went through the daily rigmarole. I began to think about things—about why some people hated the U.S., about whether a war with Afghanistan was the smartest way of defending ourselves against terrorism. But in my work life, I had become an automaton. A buddy who worked in IT at a different firm was feeling that same lack of purpose and floated the idea of escaping down to Tennessee to become raft guides. It didn’t take much to convince me to drop everything and in May of ’02 we had moved and were both training on the river. My friend couldn’t cut it as a guide and returned to New York, but I’d had a natural ability for the job and fell in love with the river, its currents, the lifestyle of the raft guide. Save for winters—when I worked as a chair lift operator at a ski area a couple of hours northeast—I’d been there ever since.

As I drive I realize I’m shaking; fear, panic coursing through my body. I grab the steering wheel harder to make myself stop, but still I shake. How I could use some of Brady’s weed, I think, to mellow out a bit. I switch on the radio—country music, the last thing I need right now. I turn the dial until I find a rock station, but I can’t focus on the music, can’t shake the feeling that I’m still in danger, that I’ve got a target on my back. After all, I do have that stinking peace symbol on the back of my car. Anyone could see it and follow me. I must stay on the highway, must make it to civilization, must make it to Cincinnati.

After a while, my shaking disappears. I don’t know what I was thinking choosing to work in the south. And now, now of all times, with the war in Iraq raging… What was I thinking? With a name like Farouq Benhajjar and flouting my peace sign like an idiot. Then, a niggling thought comes through to me. Why the heck did they allow me to take my wallet with me? It seems like such a considerate act that it baffles me for a minute, before I realize they wanted to be sure I made it out of the state. What if I ran out of gas? What then? they must have thought. I might have called the police, then.

I check the gauge. Should have enough to make it to Kentucky—then, I’ll refill. I’ve been on the road about two hours. The radio is still playing its dumb, vapid songs. I’m thinking it could’ve been worse. They could have shot me. Heck, they might have shot me if I’d done something stupid like refuse to drop the knife, or try to fight, or be defiant, rather than submissive. Yes, sir. I can’t believe I said that—twice.

Who did this? I wonder. I’ve no idea, didn’t recognize the voices, couldn’t see their faces in the dark. I haven’t been careful about who I’ve had political conversations with. I’ve had them with other guides—locals and non-locals—as well as with customers. In addition, I’ve been writing anti-war editorials to local and state newspapers, signing off with “Farouq Benhajjar (Copperhill, TN).” Stupid, I’ve been stupid! I realize now more than ever that which blacks and whites, heck, what everyone knew back in the sixties, that activism in the south is serious and dangerous business.

Of course, in a post 9/11 world, I wasn’t so naïve as to think that I wouldn’t be victim of some sort of prejudice in the south. There’s sometimes a misconception here in the U.S. that Arabs are dark-skinned, but we’re not. We’re Mediterranean for the most part, look more like Italians or Spanish than like natives of India or Pakistan. So I did think that I would be less conspicuous in the south than, say, a Black person. Thought it would spare me some grief, which I’m sure it did. But still, there were isolated incidents, always unexpected, always hurtful.

Two seasons ago, I was in a store buying firecrackers for July 4^th with a friend who said, “Check this out, Farouq,” pointing to what were the biggest firework rockets I’d ever seen. And before I could answer, one of three young punks who were browsing, said, “Farouq? Isn’t that a terrorist’s name?” The other two smirked. “Shit,” he continued, “we ought to drag your ass to Polk County Sheriff Department and have you locked up for trying to buy explosives.”

“Forget it, man,” my friend said, getting between me and the three guys. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Yeah, beat it, towelhead.”

“Go fuck a camel, Farouq,” another one chimed in, to which the three of them busted out laughing.

I shake my head at the ignorance witnessed two years ago, and again today. At the thought of tonight’s events, I feel my heartbeat pick up again. But then, yes, there, I see the sign, “WELCOME TO KENTUCKY,” and feel my breathing come a bit easier. I’m still in the south, but out of Tennessee. I check the gauge again and stop at the next gas station. I step out of the car, fill up the tank, then walk barefoot into the station.

“What the fuck?” says the guy behind the counter, his gaze penetrating, his hand reaching for something out of sight. “Are you okay, sir?”

I look down at myself. My white t-shirt is blood-stained—it looks like I’ve been shot in the chest—and I can feel the blood on my face, sticking to the skin like dry mud on a hog. “I—I—” I stutter. “I was attacked a couple of hours ago,” I say. “But I’m fine now.”

His hand comes up now from behind the counter, and in it is a phone—just a phone.

“Do you want me to call the police?” he asks.

I think of all the explaining I would have to do, when all I want is to escape, be on my way, find a hotel and sleep, hug my parents in Seattle. I don’t have it in me to spend an hour with police officers going over what happened, let alone here, in the south, where anything could still happen to me—even at a police station, I tell myself.

“No, thank you. I don’t think I could handle the police right now. Could I use your bathroom to clean up a bit, though?”

“Sure, sure. Go right ahead.”

I walk to the back and enter the restroom. As soon as I see myself in the mirror, the darkened blood on me and the anxious, fearful look stamped on my face, I break down. I lean forward and press on the sides of the sink and let the tears stream down, drops of diluted red hitting the porcelain below me. I sob for a minute or two and then, to make myself stop, I throw water on my face, soap, more water. I take off my shirt, wash it too, and dry it under the hand drier. When I don it again, there’s a visible stain, but nothing that would alert anyone of any violence having occurred. I use the toilet, wash my hands, and step out.

The clerk is waiting by the counter with a plastic bag. He walks over when he sees me, and hands it to me.

“After my shift here,” he says, “I go to the pool for a few laps. They’re not pants or anything, just a pair of swimming trunks, but at least you won’t be walking around in your underwear. There’s also a pair of sandals in there.”

I feel the emotion well up in me again, take the bag, and say thank you, holding back tears. I return to the restroom, change into the sky-blue swimming trunks and look almost like an ordinary person, except for the cut on the bridge of my nose. The sandals fit—they’re a little big, but they fit. Now that I’ve got footwear, I take the opportunity to wash my feet from the dirt and when I step out, I wouldn’t say that I feel almost normal, but I feel a little better equipped to face the next few days.

After I pay for the gasoline and some food I’ve picked up off the shelves, I thank the man again and walk out.

On the road to Cincinnati, I think of the kindness of the clerk compared to the two men in Tennessee just three hours ago. Those men. They must be laughing their asses off right now—having scared the poor Arab shitless—laughing all night, I’d say if I were a betting man. It’s mind-boggling and I’m shaking my head at the absurdity of it all. I’m barely even Arab, I tell myself. I’m not Muslim, don’t speak Arabic, haven’t been to Algeria in nearly two decades. I’d be just another American if it weren’t for my name, my father and a few cultural items he’s imparted to me and my sister. But I’m obviously not. My broken nose and the ache in my abdomen remind me just how much a name can mean to some.

I turn on the radio, not wanting to get myself all upset again, and focus on the road, think of rafting instead, of yesterday, my last day on the Ocoee, I now realize. The day had been epic—my lines down the rapids clean as could be. If it was to be my last day on the river, I could be proud of it. Eric, however, had flipped his boat and there had been a furious scramble for me and the other guides to rescue the swimmers. After the trip, we had all chuckled about it over a beer at the company bar, watching and rewatching the flip on video, the customers laughing along with the guides, because now they had a story to tell.

Would I ever again have days like that?

*

In Cincinnati, I locate a Target, and decide to rest a bit. I recline my seat and try to sleep. But the night’s events replay in my mind, over and over again, and I wonder if there was anything I could have done differently. Nothing comes to mind, other than maybe being less openly progressive, less of an activist. But as I consider this and remember how many innocent Iraqi deaths could have been prevented, I realize how impossible it would have been for me to be silent. No, I conclude, there was nothing I could have done to avoid being singled out. There’s nothing to regret here. Just plain bad luck.

And now I’m angry. Angry at these two racist men. Enraged all over again at the ignorance pervasive in America, at how Arabs are dying in Iraq because of the same type of racism I’ve just been victim of. At that damn president who, in the face of adversity, sees only war as the solution, and death—though I doubt he considers the latter, else he wouldn’t put our troops in harm’s way, or engage in such violent action toward a people that hasn’t done anything to us.

I need to calm down, I tell myself. Nothing good will come out of my anger right now. So I give up on rest and walk into the store where I buy myself a whole new wardrobe, as well as toiletries, a duffel bag and a backpack. Right away I change into jeans and a t-shirt, and, after a full meal at a diner, I feel it in me to drive another couple of hours. Soon I’m nearing Indianapolis and decide to pull over at a Country Inn. I check in, take a nice long shower to wash off the scuzz of the day, brush my teeth and get to bed even though it’s still only afternoon. I’ve been awake over thirty hours and, knowing that no one but the hotel receptionist knows I’m here, that the door is locked and bolted, that there are walls surrounding me to protect me, that I’m abundantly safe, I fall asleep at once.

I wake up to use the bathroom around ten thirty—nighttime—then go back to sleep where I find myself back in the forests of Tennessee, in Copperhill, running in the dark with the sounds of men calling out from behind me and dogs barking. I’m running as fast as I can but I can hear them gaining ground, can hear them yell, “We told you not to come back! Ever, you hear? Ever!” That’s when I trip on a root, a rock, a branch, on something that sends me flying through the air and landing on the ground hard. Vicious, wicked snarls surround me and dogs bite at my limbs, holding on and shaking as though trying to rip them away from me. I look up into the night as I struggle to get them off, and see a red pinpoint light there, and I know I don’t have much longer to live. Then a voice says, “Did you really think you could escape?” followed by a loud BANG.

I open my eyes and find my shirt moist with sweat. I turn to look at the clock. It’s a little past four in the morning and I know I won’t be able to get anymore sleep, not after that. I wash up, check out, and hit the road.

About three months into my tenure at Muddy Waters Rafting, I had a group of rambunctious customers who just may have been a little drunk. Once they heard my name, one of them said, “Arabs are flying planes into our buildings and, in the meantime, we give them jobs. Go figure.” That was about a month after the fireworks shop incident, and the two coming so close one to the other had me fuming. So I flipped ’em. Flipped ’em good. I’m not proud of it, but I put ’em in the drink and watched them flail. Afterward, I put the blame on them, told them they hadn’t paddled hard enough. It felt good to get a little revenge.

I make it to Chicago where I stop for breakfast. As I eat, I realize that nobody back at Muddy Waters Rafting knows where I am. I was supposed to work yesterday and people would be sure to ask about me. I finish off my French toast and eggs, then use the pay phone to call the river manager at Muddy Waters. Sammy’s relieved when he hears it’s me calling. I give him the lowdown on the assault, on where I am, where I’m heading. He asks for my parents’ address so that he can send over my things.

“Thanks for everything, Sammy,” I say. “For having given me a job and a home for nearly three seasons.”

“No sweat. You take care, you hear?”

And I flinch at that “you hear?” Even though it’s said in a different tone, in a different voice, the phrase reminds me of that man, of the violence, the blood, the fright.

“Farouq?” Sammy says, and it pulls me away from that night and back to my current reality.

“Will do, Sammy. Tell everyone there I wish I’d been able to say goodbye.”

I hang up and then it’s back on the road. Hours of driving, followed by lunch, followed by more driving. It’s dinnertime when I get to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, I’m tired, and I need to stop for the night. The next morning, it’s back at it again, foot to the pedal and trying not to speed on the highway, when I see something strange. A black pickup truck in my rearview mirror is edging ever closer to me, until I feel the truck bump the rear of my car. My eyes find those of the driver and there’s a guy with a big old smile on his face giving me a small wave. Next to him is another man, this one with a rifle in hand. I can’t tell if they’re the same guys that attacked me back in Tennessee, but I step on the accelerator and soon I’m putting distance between me and them. Until my car starts to slow down. I pump the gas pedal, but nothing happens. The truck gains on me, reaches me and passes me on the left. I swivel my head and there’s the passenger aiming his rifle at me through his open window. He motions for me to open mine, and I do. Then he shouts, “Hey, Arab. Remember us?”

I wake up with a gasp. That’s nightmares two nights in a row. It’s like a haunting, and I wonder how long they’ll be chasing me, can’t wait to be in Seattle where I can just…decompress. But the nightmare has got me spooked, and I decide to remove the peace sign from my car. It’s better that way—safer. No reason advertising to whomever that I’m against the war. Then I put some food in my stomach, and head off. Every so often, I see a car with that “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbon on its rear and, when I do, I have to keep my calm, because it’s such people who support the president and his actions overseas. And I wonder if by removing the peace symbol I’m betraying dead Iraqis, fallen American soldiers, my own nature, for that matter. This assault business has really thrown my head for a spin. I try not to dwell on any of this, insert a CD and drive on, let the music void my mind until it’s become numb. And I realize it isn’t just because of the dullness of the drive; it’s a numbness that has been creeping up on me since the beginning of my flight, a numbness at having had to leave everything behind, back in Tennessee. My life vest which was like a second skin to me; the helmet I had purchased at the beginning of the season; the gorgeous guide paddle that helped preserve my back and shoulders from the strains of the job; my home which, yes, was just a tent, but still, one that I had saved up for and spent a couple of hundred dollars on; the high-quality air mattress I slept on; the camping chairs and half a dozen other camping essentials. I frown. That’s not it. I’m going to get all of that stuff back—Sammy said I would. As for my friends, I know that our paths will cross again—I’m not worried about them. No, it’s more profound than that. It’s the sadness of having to leave behind the rivers. I’m going to miss the rivers. That’s it—that’s what it is.

Moving water has always inspired, and the pristine nature that surrounds it—the lush forests, cacti-sprouting hills, or majestic snow-capped peaks—is an inseparable frame to an awe-inspiring moving picture. But I find the beauty of the river runs deeper—much deeper.

It’s a subtler one, accessible only to boaters—kayakers, river guides, canoeists. The eddies, currents, hydraulics, waves, rocks, boulders are all features of the river that one could examine, but to take such a deconstructionist approach at describing the river doesn’t cut it. Not one bit. The skill we boaters possess to access a river’s hidden beauty is that of reading water; in other words, of deeply understanding the dynamics of water in motion. That’s what we do—we read and react to what the water tells us. Put in this way, it can sound somewhat pedestrian, but in reality it is a magical and spiritual feeling, as we’re in effect dialoguing with the river. One of the most dynamic creations of nature understood and I harmonized with it, easing my boat from one current to the next, playing with the river, smiling and laughing with it. And, some would say, playing, smiling, and laughing with Him.

I take a large breath and expel it. Yes, I’m going to miss them. But I feel that my relationship towards them has changed. Those men have done more than violence toward my physical and mental self. I can feel it—they’ve altered my viewpoint. I no longer consider the river with peace and love in my heart and mind, but with dread. Those bastards have made me fear nature, or, maybe not nature itself, but the vulnerability one exposes himself to in these wild and wonderful places. And now—what the hell am I going to do now?

For the moment I set the matter aside and just drive. Drive till I feel the weariness in my body, in my brain, and I wonder how truckers manage to do this every working day of their lives. The tedium is insufferable. I stop in Bozeman, Montana. Tomorrow, last stretch to Seattle.

I would like to make it home for dinner, so I leave early and make it to Spokane by lunchtime. I’m now in Washington, just four hours from Seattle—I’ve made it. I want to cry out victory, and I do—I whoop as Credence plays on the radio. I can’t wait to eat my mother’s cooking, to hug her and my pop both. I’ll hug them so hard their eyes will pop out of their heads.

But rather than drive west toward Seattle, I find myself compelled by…I don’t know by what…by the best of me, the strongest of me, to turn the steering wheel and head southwest. I know of a couple of rivers a few hours down that way. It’s still early in the season—they might have work for me. And I hear there’s some gnarly rafting on the White Salmon River. I don’t have a life vest, or my helmet, or a splash jacket, or a throw bag or river sandals, or a flip line or a dry bag even—I’ve got none of those. Plus, I’ve got that nascent dread of nature to deal with. But still, I tell myself, it’s worth a shot, no? On the way there I can find a place that sells stickers, something to fill the gashing hole on the back of my car, something colorful and hopeful, something that really has meaning—like another peace symbol.

GRASSES QUIVER BEFORE / image by Amalie Flynn

ABOUT WHAT YOU HAVE

In my dream
Dad, age one hundred twelve,
has his first cell phone—

big and square,
with a rotary dial.

With a proud index finger
he dials my mother,

gets her voice mail.
Together we lean in,
listen

to her low, drifty voice,
its mist so warm on my ear
as it rises from deep underground.

I ask Dad for his number,
but he can’t recall it
before fading into the passage. He’s left me

messages, though,
like: When eating fish be careful
not to get a bone stuck in your throat; when walking
tuck in the tummy; think
about what you have,
not about what you don’t.

FEMALE FIGURE IN PHOTOS

fourteen-year-old mop of hair
sullen air in mod raincoat
on London sidewalk with
beaming scowling father brother

seventeen leaning
on brick wall in black-and-white flannel shirt
no cigarette yet mien
as in movies seen through a puff of smoke

college-era long hair
akimbo arms
eyes narrowed
to spot foe in tall grass

sixty odd in a museum at a window
face a little wooden
and through the panes
an autumn-leafed tree flames

TO MISSOULA

The cold air her pillow of courage, she skirts
the northern rim of the nation.

As she crosses the Dakota Badlands,
where even the hardiest grasses quiver

before earth’s uprisings and revolutions,
her eastern forest home has tilted

and is sliding over the rim!

She pulls her wings in closer
to fly fast and low

over layers of pink and gray guts
squeezed from deep under.

A tail feather tears loose,

whirls away;

she almost bursts into a plume of magma.

Night cools into dawn.

She parks the car,
steps out into a new world,
a young woman with compass and camera
and a crown of mountains.

that night we forgot for a while
the broken country where we lived
in hearts discontent walking backward
into unicorns, rainbows, butterflies
grazing beauty until blood oaths shattered
and you left, the hard leaves crying out
under your step it was good once, you said
well, thank you for that, you touched my face
a scribbler’s tender touch, is there a better way
than this, you said, this nuclear family two dogs
a cat the twins asleep until the rage of words
tore at the roots    the spiny hurts
too late for I love you.  .  .  . that last evening
spread out against the sky
with mathematical certainty    gone
not even so long, it’s been good
to know ya
unique, I think, the way we dissolved
into yards of ancient lies it wasn’t deceit
no not a pity party not even a rave
of dances and songs just two shills
selling our micro myths glasses raised
so  here’s to the years left after you left
I wonder how my new lover
will like my plastic cheeks
my potty mouth my breasts
of steel    even now as I scour
the rooms of your scent
where we died in an instant
in this freeze-frame
of memento mori I still
turn down the covers
and wait

When I was losing myself, the only thing that saved me was immigrating to America. Only then, with great effort and sacrifice, I was able to come out to  myself and do what we all have to do for ourselves – to be who we are. Condemnation, fear, physical injury, loss, death – these are the first words in response to the question of how L.G.B.T.Q.+ people survive in post-Soviet countries. Many of us have been  beaten or killed in one form or another. Where I’m from, Ukraine, fear lives in every vein. When you are a woman who loves another woman or a man who loves another man, this is included in the category of things people don’t talk about. I grew up where the words lesbian or gay were not spoken, but other words were said  I would not dare to say aloud. The traditional family was the only concept I grew up with, even though I can’t connect myself to this concept. From an early age, I realized I had unusual feelings towards women, which I couldn’t find a name for. The L.G.B.T.Q.+ topic was out of reach; I didn’t know what questions to ask to understand who I am. I didn’t know such  questions could be asked.

In high school, others found me different. The stereotype that girls should wear skirts didn’t leave  my classmates, but it never took root in me. I was often asked when I’d look like a girl. I didn’t know  how to answer this question because I didn’t understand it. I was already a girl. In my student years, the concept of my love was becoming clearer. But that didn’t mean I could afford it. All my girlfriends lost their virginity, and I couldn’t allow myself to be looked at differently. Even a bottle of vodka didn’t help me to undress and go to bed with a man. After every unsuccessful attempt I had to lie to my friends. I had to carry condoms in my bag and show them with obvious visibility,  so that no one had doubts creeping in. The fear that friends would start to despise me has always hung over me. There is a certain mentality of concepts and stereotypes that make you think that you  should do the same as everyone else. In Ukraine, it is easy to surrender to society and miss the opportunity to discover who you really are.

In my second year at university, I had my first relationship with a girl. We hid in dark corners where we could finally breathe. We could only hug briefly when meeting in public. Our hands met in places where there were no eyes. We often had to run away, to go to other cities where nobody knew us. Where we could look at each other and hold our gaze, not  arousing too much attention with the smiles we exchanged. We loved loving each other, but we could only love in lies. We even lied to ourselves, saying these feelings have no life. I wanted to believe it was not so. But she couldn’t help succumbing to society. She continued to love me,  but at a distance with another man. I was sure this was the future that awaited me every time. There  was no one who could tell me otherwise. No one who could talk to me at all.

At the time I met my second girlfriend, she was engaged to a man. Our relationship began soon after and a month later she had to get married. The fate of our relationship took the same turn as my previous one. We kissed behind the trees. We spoke words of love through messages and then immediately deleted them. We sent her fiancé to the store to find a moment alone, hugging each other, touching our hands. She wanted to leave him, but her attempts were unsuccessful. She said, “What am I going to tell my  family? What will they think of me? I love you, but I have to marry him.” I was maid of honor at her wedding. Kissing him, she kissed me too. Everything happened only because we believed these feelings had no place in this world.

Nobody knew I was a lesbian, including myself. I often denied my feelings and inclinations, and questioned if I was normal. Suddenly people began to understand who I was before I knew it. By deception, I was met in the courtyard where I was met by a few men to show me their strength in opinion. After regaining consciousness from beatings behind garages, I quickly came to the conclusion this was not my place to be. It was useless to go to the police, knowing  they were not involved in such matters. They would’ve shaken the hands of those who beat me for who I am. I had no one to expect help from. I no longer wanted to wake up behind garages. I  decided to immigrate to America.

I had to study everything again after immigrating. I learned to speak openly. I learned to feel openly. I learned not to be afraid to feel. But it took a long time. I saw L.G.B.T.Q.+ communities in America and, at first, rejected them because fear lived deeper and stronger and didn’t allow me  to be touched by who I was. At my first job, an employee asked me if I was a lesbian. I immediately blurted out “no.” It was the first time the word lesbian was applied to me in a  positive form. For the first time, I heard in my head “I think I’m a lesbian.” Later I found out half of our staff was gay. I didn’t deny myself anymore.

My mother didn’t know what I was struggling with. I couldn’t lose her. In America I met many people from different countries, mainly Russia, who were disowned and abandoned by their parents. The pain the loss inflicted was unbearable. For a very long time I prepared to tell my mother who I was.  She and I were very close, and in the absence of such large and significant information about me I didn’t feel complete. On the phone, a year after I moved to America, the conversation happened. Having said I have a girlfriend, my mother’s first question was, “Is everything good between you?”

No, you can’t be silent. You can’t give in, giving yourself up to people. You can’t play by the rules and be convenient for others. I’m glad I’m on my side. It feels good to say – I am a lesbian. What is finally more important to me is that I feel. It took a large part of my life, and chasing a new one, to finally come out to myself.

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.

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?”

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.

The Shoes That Bore Us

It is a dream of kind slippers that coddle bunions appeased
by hands mittened as the same kind slippers
holding warmth as forgiveness for all the combat boots
sogged by brackish muck of wars
when not hoisted in the occasional stilettos of never regrets
a conundrum of cognitive dissonance stabs the dreams
of where ever we had been, we escape to now over racked rails
rocked goat paths and deer runs you think it’s a man’s world until
it is not

a sidearm presses to a right hip as cupped palms to iliac crests
walking boundaries and borders skirting domains of possibilities
that astrological forecasts stagger out on slow printed pages
like stammering promises spoken by the dead selling real estate,
“Check Mate”
no choice is a lie when the inevitable is an illusion, no freeze to suffice
that fighting, although futile,
is still taking a stand

Unhinged Again

a stone leaves the hand that flung it-air escapes
constricted vocal cords – a vomiting wild – enraged urgency and angst

kinetic makes contact – leaves bruises the color of bludgeoned
fists pounding flesh is quiet.  I can’t remember if I was screaming

my face and shielding hands turned overripe plum purple
sweet with sticky juice that dribbles down chins

attracts sugar bees you swat in autumn sun
that smells of maple leaves red with change

this hammer drives the firing pin into a child’s memory, my memory, of cap guns
explode a thousand times greater than a simple pop & puff

a chunk of lead propelled, is unhinged
from the mansplaining – the antagonistic prod of condescending joust

I was stuck in a ring of double fisted doubts: leave don’t leave
I didn’t know that I was a prisoner of white picket conditions

like my mother. Was she also a prisoner? A side bar of recollection
a nursery rhyme my mother sang to me:

 “Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her
He put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well.”

I know my Mother knew when I was being beaten
there – my face laying with one ear pressed to cold linoleum

the other, an upward funnel catching my Mother’s vengeful whisper
“get up…get up…fight”

to be marginalized – a side note or comment, placed in the periphery, only seen
when the reader desires or deems worthy of notice

only one of us walked from that house that day
to be silenced – a voice, a room, a home, a door closed upon it

a mind made up, barred entrance, not worth the time to view, hear, acknowledge
I’m writing this and telling you words are a privilege

voice is a human right thrown as stones – they fall from the wind

Crying Over Continents

windfarms
white wake of ferries
channel crossing

a nonstop jack hammer knee
Morse code through time zones
pounding out instructions, the next destination

I’m not letting go like I used to. I feel heavier
in my gathering of nuances, intimacies –
You watch someone for hours, days
you learn what time they take their dog for a shit
turn on the garage light – the one just right of the workbench
and always with their left hand
You learn to recognize the screams of a woman
in an upstairs back bedroom being struck
or the subtle moans of make up sex easing across the back yard
from windows never locked and left half open

Or maybe,
it’s the man in the downstairs apartment under yours
that you watch shaving his son’s head before forcing
the kid to wear a chain and crucifix bigger than the kid’s malnourished chest with ribs that break at 0200 hrs
when Dad comes home drunk, no sex, and vile. The mother
died mysteriously, they say, in a different town, a different country

Intimacy is being there as a ghost
being fed the compromise of “I’ll never do it again”

Intimacy is being there at the end
and being held in the mantle of a dying eye

“Even if one does not know the history, one feels the presence of the past.”
~Peter Balakian

“You have to beat the egg,” my grandmother said while cracking shells over a mixing bowl.

“Beat the egg?” my sister asked, her little brows nearly colliding. “But I don’t want to hurt it!”

My grandmother laughed. Covered her gaping mouth with a flour-dusted hand and wiped playful tears from her cheeks with the other. I looked up from my fourth-grade vocabulary book and watched them push a roller over the opaque ball of dough until it unfurled like a tongue across our countertop, brushing melted butter atop the beige concoction and patching holes as they emerged. When my sister pulled the tray out of the oven, my grandmother’s childhood bruises oozed out of the blooming chocolate and cinnamon nut pastries that her own gentle grandmother, Ester, had taught her to make.

My grandmother spent decades suppressing her past, but in moments like these she occasionally, unintentionally broke her silence. When she and my sister baked rugelach for a class project, or when she took us for ice cream on Wednesdays after elementary school, or when she arrived at our parents’ Miami home two hours early to cook French toast made from challah before middle school, we swarmed her, gazed up at her beaded neck and slight waist, and begged for stories. Three husbands, a nose job, a knack for intricate baking and a sharp eye for discounted designer clothes? We were desperate to learn more about her fascinating and often scandalous life, about our family, about our cryptic past. Once we got her started, it seemed she couldn’t stop.

I don’t recall precisely when I learned that Ester’s husband-my great-great grandfather Charles-beat each of his six children, including my great-grandmother, Lillian. But at some point over the years, I gathered that Charles and Ester raised Lillian in a poverty-stricken Orthodox Jewish home, and that Lillian ran away to New York City at seventeen-ran away, I assumed, from Charles’s abuse and strict religious rules. Charles was eventually sent to a mental institution and one of his sons was admitted to The Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City. Paranoid schizophrenia. Although I understand this mental illness might have been genetic, entirely independent of environment or trauma, I still wonder if some other part of Charles’s history might have led to his abuse. After all, Lillian abused her daughter Claire after Lillian’s father abused her.

If Charles’s abuse might explain why Lillian readily deserted Judaism, why she beat my grandmother and why my grandmother repressed her past, then what explains what Charles did?

Though my grandmother once told me that Charles had emigrated from Hungary and settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania near the turn of the century, and though I have read many tales about Hungary during that same time, I still know nothing of his specific life in Europe.

More than two years after running away from a traumatic life of my own, I’m more determined than ever to understand my family’s repudiated history-to prove that their traumatic pasts somehow propelled me into mine. It’s May 2015 and although I’ve recently begun to interrogate my past, too, I still can’t see that obsessing over my family’s trauma might be another symptom of my need to understand mine-that this archeological pursuit is, in some ways, a stubborn, unconscious attempt to continue repressing my personal history.

Desperate to uncover my grandmother’s past and the environments that shaped her mindset-and mine-I call her, hoping for answers to these persistent questions: Who was Charles Horowitz? What drove his abuse?

On the phone, I do not tell my grandmother that I want to understand Charles in order to understand my great-grandmother Lillian-that I want to understand Lillian because I want to figure out why my grandmother is so deft at closing doors, why, for so many years, she’s appeared perfectly capable of not speaking about her mother’s abuse, her son’s suicide, her first husband’s abandonment and her second husband’s depression and rage. I do not tell my grandmother what I have only recently begun to share with my mother: that, I, too, am dangerously adept at burying my past-the abusive, six-year relationship with Carlos that began when I was sixteen and he twenty-one, drug abuse during that same time, and, more recently, my anorexia, the bodily siren that demanded I start talking.

I focus solely on facts about our family instead. When I finally ask my grandmother about Charles she says, “Nothing. I know nothing of my maternal grandfather.” Her response seems indisputable.

“So your mother never spoke about him?” I’m certain she must have heard something as a kid. Didn’t she meet him? Didn’t someone talk about him?

“No,” my grandmother replies. “I know nothing.”

After we hang up, I begin to wonder: Are the holes in our histories symptomatic of fallible memory and careless record keeping, or have those lost stories been purposefully forgotten? What will it take to decode my grandmother’s words, to bridge the dissonance between her shifting memories and what I know to be true?

~

The next morning I call my mother with questions my grandmother evaded. My mother doesn’t know much more, but she reminds me about the fragile, brown chest of heirlooms in her Miami living room. A deteriorating leather strap seals it shut. I long to rummage through it but I’m 1,500 miles away, sitting in my kitchen hiding from the indecisive Boston spring. Raindrops tap tap tap against the window. Green leaves and amber tulips won’t appear for a few more weeks. I miss color.

My mother is likely rocking in her chair beside the old chest, paintings of ships hanging around her, coconut trees swaying in the backyard behind her, South Florida sunlight blanketing the floor and her freckled legs.

As a child my eyes lingered over the chest, which my parents said came from my father’s South Carolina family and housed old photos my mother inherited after Lillian’s death. But the chest always seemed just another piece of the constellation of familiar and intriguing items that constituted our home. Nothing was off limits, except the knife drawer and my father’s gun, which hid somewhere in the garage.

Each of my parents’ belongings was a piece of treasure hiding in plain sight, waiting to be exhumed. Art hung on nearly every inch of the walls. Rugs and handcrafted bowls and my sister’s third-grade pottery covered counter tops. Rusty tins. An old cobalt lantern. My mother’s tiny childhood chair-originally blue but painted red for my sister when she was three. And my mother’s menorahs, which we lit for years without reciting the customary Hebrew prayers we did not know. My mother buried (and I unearthed) her most cherished items-old photos of her now deceased father and brother, birthday gifts she bought months in advance, cards and old photos and every kind of button imaginable-in her top dresser drawer or the back of her closet, shoved behind layers of discounted clothes I never saw her wear.

I inquired about every item. About each clue to my parents’ pasts, to the people they had been before they became my mother and father. I didn’t realize my curiosity might have been stronger than most kids’; I didn’t realize that other kids, especially those who went to Hebrew or Sunday school, might have known more about their history than I did. That when their parents tucked them in at night, they heard stories about their ancestry. My mother hadn’t been told much about her family’s past, and my father seemed to keep his Baptist Christian life-and his service in Vietnam-behind him. My parents read me fictional tales instead.

“Will you open the chest?” I ask my mother over the phone. The Boston rain is no longer tapping at my window. Sunlight shines through the drops as they climb down glass.

“Of course,” my mother says. She’s always wanted to know more about our family, too, though I only learned of her curiosity when I began to pursue mine. Several years have passed since anyone even touched that deteriorating leather strap. “Let me call you back.”

I imagine my mother hovering over the chest: sitting on her knees, her jean shorts stopping halfway down her thighs. Hands pressed against the floor. Perhaps one hand supporting her achy lower back. Black, curly hair spilling onto stacks of photos that smell like the old, yellowing books I used to read in the corner of the library, my little knees tucked into my chest, my long, straight hair-rare in our family of curls-spilling onto the pages. In the absence of our family’s narratives, I devoured as many others as I could. Later, as a teenager, I devoured Carlos’s narratives, too.

A reason has to exist, I keep thinking, for why I evaporated into Carlos’s world. My family, and therefore I, possessed little sense of identity because our ancestors had denied it, buried the past in order to hide from their trauma and then taught me to do the same. Logical, I tell myself. Right?

As my mother digs through the heirloom and I watch robins dance outside my Boston window, the trunk is no longer just another item in the constellation; it feels enchanting, magnetic, more alluring than my father’s gun or the knife drawer which, once unbearably tempting yet terrifying, now orbit the chest like planets circling the sun.

“I guess they called Lillian ‘Lily,’” my mother writes when she sends me text messages of photos she found inside.

I’ve never heard anyone refer to Lillian by that name, and neither has my mother. I’m surprised; Lily seems too gentle a name for the woman who beat my grandmother.

~

A few minutes later my mother sends a photo of Charles. As soon as I see him I think, villain. I want to look away.

Square face. Dark, full hair-cut short. I imagine someone yanking him away by one of his protruding ears, his head tilting sideways in pain. His mustache is thick and perfectly symmetrical, the ends curling upward as though attempting a smile. Perhaps it’s fake. The rest of his face is bare. Not one hair appears out of place. He does not look directly at the camera, and yet he seems to be looking at something. I follow his gaze and imagine a projector in a dark room, the machine’s light illuminating a cone of dust, the spinning film reel echoing through the room. Click, click.

I can see him running through a Hungarian village, dirt smeared across his face, no mustache above his lip yet, walls climbing up on either side of him as he plays with other eight-year-old boys-Jewish boys like the ones I have read of in historical tales.

1882. Since Czar Alexander III ascended the throne in neighboring Russia the previous year, he’s been encouraging riots and massacres, forcing Jewish families from their villages and “removing” them from their businesses. Over several months these riots have occurred in countless nearby towns. As Charles and his friends laugh maybe they hear hooves clomping along the unpaved roads in the distance. Maybe, minutes later, men with torches and axes encircle them.

Now Charles must be running and falling and scraping his little knees, crying as he approaches his parents’ small hut. I imagine other children-siblings, perhaps-are here, too. With one arm their mother cradles a baby, with the other she rations each child’s meal: one piece of chicken as long as her pinky and wide as her thumb, a scoop of potato no bigger than an eye.

“The men with fire!” Charles shouts. “They’re coming!”

Perhaps the Jews have been sequestered in this village. Perhaps they’ve been denied work and taxed more than their Christian neighbors. Perhaps there’s been a massacre before this one. Charles and his parents and that baby and those other children hide in the chicken coop and listen for hooves. Clop. Clop. Charles watches the torches’ glow slither toward them. He watches the men set their hut on fire. He watches them slit his parents’ throats. His mother’s beige headscarf-worn by most married Orthodox Jewish women-has slipped off, the fabric drowning in her crimson river.

As I stare at that photo of Charles, I want to believe my imagination. This story is easier to believe, easier because if I can justify Charles’s abuse with a traumatic past, then I can…what? Empathize? Believe my grandmother’s abusers at least had reason? Understand why my grandmother shut the door to her past while my mother and I desperately want to open it? Understand why I, too, inherited my grandmother’s denial mechanisms?

Find an excuse for staying with Carlos all those years?

I study Charles’s suit, the satin tie fixed firmly at his neck, shiny buttons trailing down his vest. A chain extends across his chest and beneath his jacket. A pocket watch? Again I follow his gaze, this time to a scene I want to resist yet need to conceive: young Charles in a suit, no scuffs on his little knees, skipping to synagogue and eating cinnamon nut rugelach or apricot strudel and running home to parents who await him with open arms and boiling goulash. This scenario makes my inquiry harder. If Charles did not flee persecution and poverty, which may have been less likely in Hungary than in neighboring Russia, can I find another way to explain why he beat his six children? Is my very attempt to understand Charles’s violence problematic in itself? Am I unintentionally implying that trauma always (and worse: acceptably) leads to more trauma?

Perhaps my imagined scenes of young Carlos unintentionally imply this, too. Yet I can’t help but envision the world he once described. As he shook in the corner of his childhood home, thumb pushed inside his three-year-old mouth, did his father shove his mother across the room like Venezuelan guerrillas had shoved him inside hostage holes, like Carlos would eventually shove me? Did his brothers lift their shirts to reveal guns when Carlos begged for Burger King? Or did everyone just forget that Carlos was standing there, hiding in the shadowy crevices of an un-swept room, learning how to use his hands and heart as his tears spilled into long waterfall lashes?

~

The rain returns. It knocks hard against my window. As I look down at the oak trees separating the neighboring building from mine, my mother sends a photo of Charles’s wife Ester. The hair atop Ester’s head is cut short like a man’s, but long hair is pulled together at her neck, too. I’ve never seen this particular hairstyle before, though it reminds me of a mullet. Maybe she’s sixteen, seventeen. She looks away from the camera, her face angled to the right. Her football eyes appear big, and far apart. She isn’t smiling, but she doesn’t seem unhappy. She seems deep in thought. About her parents? Their farm? The old castle ruins they lived beside now more than 4,000 miles away from her? Her earrings resemble single grains of pearl couscous, and she wears what appears to be a dress-the photo stops at her waist-several layers of lace framing her chest, puffy clouds of cotton billowing from navel to neck. The bottom of the photo says: Newman. 13 Avenue A. New York. This shot must have been taken shortly after she arrived from Europe.

Another: Ester and Charles on their wedding day. Linked arms. A smirk-Ester’s. Charles’s tilted head and watchful eyes. My grandmother Claire’s handwriting curls across the top like vines strangling a fence: Grandmother and Grandfather. Their Wedding. October 18, 1898.

~

A few days later, I call my grandmother again.

“All I know is that Charles and his wife, my grandmother Ester, were from Hungary — Austria-Hungary — and that Ester was very educated,” she says.

I’m determined to know why they left. Why they came to the United States over thirty years before the Holocaust. What were they fleeing?

“Ester wasn’t fleeing,” Claire says. “She was thirteen when she came to America near the turn of the century. Her family didn’t want her to go. Her father was a German educator-they all spoke German when I was a kid-and she knew how to bake and embroider. That’s what she did. She was a baker in the Catskills for some time. Their family was well-to-do in Europe! Ester was so adamant about coming to America that she went on a hunger strike until her parents let her go. Now that’s a story.”

I sense she’s leading me to a story she wants me to tell. A story that is not about her. But I still can’t see that my desire to uncover her story-to blame her denial of the past for my lack of connection to our history and my identity-feeds my reflex to conceal my past from my family. Despite how much I’ve revealed in therapy, I’m still employing the very technique I depended on during those six years with Carlos, the very technique for which I’ve been condemning my Jewish family-even my father’s Gentile family: numbing to survive.

“But what was so appealing about America?” I ask. “Ester must have wanted to leave something behind…” Can my grandmother sense what I still cannot? That I, too, am searching for a story that’s not about me?

“No-the story is simple. It was just like everyone always said: ‘America was paved in gold…’”

I follow my grandmother’s trailing voice into her living room where I picture her sitting on the taupe couch I slept on once as a child. I imagine her lifting one arm to draw that gold road with her bejeweled hand, her delicate fingers moving through the air, her chin tilting up, eyes closed. Graceful, as always. And beautiful, though whenever I study photos of her before her nose job, I always think, even more beautiful before. I like the long, slender, familiar nose I’ve only seen in photos.

“Look,” she says, her hand probably dropping back down beside her waist. Maybe she props it on her hip. “That’s the story they told.”

Perhaps that truly is the story. America’s promise beckoned Ester and Charles, who were both, according to my grandmother, from Austria-Hungary though they met in the U.S.; it beckoned all of my Jewish ancestors who immigrated in the late 1800s and early 1900s. But this narrative still doesn’t answer my question. With what was the path behind them paved? Persecution? Violence? Or simply a desire to leave their homeland? Though I understand many Jews like my grandmother’s paternal grandfather, Aaron, fled persecution in Russia, I don’t yet understand just how many Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe between the 1880s and the 1920s; oppressive legislation and poverty and murder compelled more than two million Jews to leave during that time.

My grandmother continues discussing Ester’s family and ignoring Charles’s. But I want to know about the towns they both left behind, even if they left solely for the alleged gold. The trauma narrative must exist there.

“It’s a dead end. I have no idea where they came from exactly,” my grandmother continues. “And now the maps are all different, too. What I do know is there was a clear difference between the Austrian-Hungarians like my mother’s parents, Ester and Charles, and the Russians like my father’s parents, Aaron and Hannah. The education was different. The ones from Russia were illiterate. My grandmother Ester was much more cultured…you could just tell—”

“How could you tell?” I interrupt. Everything seems so matter-of-fact to her. But the only parts of our history that seem matter-of-fact to me are menorahs and presents and Yarzheit candles lit on the anniversaries of my grandfather’s and uncle’s deaths. As a child, having a menorah seemed as ordinary as having a Christmas tree; one didn’t have to go to mass or temple-or even understand what people did in those places-to hang ornaments or light candles. My father slung our tree over the hood of his truck, and my mother bought our Chanukah candles at T.J. Maxx and stuffed our stockings with chocolate coins called gelt. We ate mountains of previously frozen and toaster-oven-charred potato latkes, golden mudslides of applesauce eroding the pancakes’ crunchy crags.

I never attended temple. My mother never told me there might be a reason I love rugelach and gefilte fish. Her mother had never told her either. Until my twenties, I had never even seen Fiddler on the Roof. When my family lit Chanukah candles, my sister and I sang “Dreidel, Dreidel” and ate gelt and then opened a pile of gifts. When I ate dinner at my best friend’s house one Chanukah night when I was nine or ten, when we circled the menorah and I prepared to sing “Dreidel, Dreidel,” my friend’s entire family placed their hands over their eyes and started speaking some other language I’d only heard at my grandfather’s and uncle’s funerals. Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu…

“Ester cooked more refined food, not peasant food. The kind you’d find in an Austrian restaurant. Upscale.” I can see my grandmother’s hand waving through the air again.

How does she know what you’d find in an Austrian restaurant? She’s never traveled to Austria. And didn’t she just say she knows nothing of where her grandparents came from? I suspect that someone told her these stories, that she’s been storing them in her mind for so long that they’ve begun to feel like her own memories-or facts.

“So what does refined food look like then?”

“Hungarian. More German.”

Now that she’s mentioned German two or three times and repeated that Ester and Charles spoke German in America, not Yiddish or Hebrew and certainly not Russian, I can’t help but think she’s choosing sides. The Hungarians-the German-speakers-are winning. I haven’t yet learned that this classism among German Jews is as well known to many Jews as “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” was to me as a child.

She continues: “The Russian side ate peasant food. And they probably lived in a ghetto. But my grandmother’s family was educated. They must have had a much better life. More refined.”

Again that word.

Despite my instinctual detection of favoritism and my reflex to resist such classism, I still don’t know what some people might have known nearly their entire lives: that many Jews of my grandmother’s generation believed Austrian or German Jews to be more educated and refined than Eastern European Jews. That even Eastern European Jews believed this, though they hated the German Jews for their arrogance. Months from now, when I reveal my ignorance to a group of Jews, they’ll say, I hate to tell you this, but that’s old news. Everyone knows that. And I’ll grow silent, embarrassed but also suddenly afraid I don’t belong-or am not allowed-in their club.

As my grandmother speaks, I think of Mimi Schwartz’s book, Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village. Schwartz explains that in Benheim (her father’s German town) the German Jews, unlike many Russians, had numerous non-Jewish allies. Though most of those German Jews still were not saved in the Holocaust, some non-Jews were willing to help them flee-had remained their “friends.” Could this be true of my great-great grandmother Ester’s family? Did they believe their education and culture shielded them-that non-Jews were more likely to protect them because of it? Could that be why my grandmother favors the Austrian-Hungarian side? Not because their refinement made them more desirable, but because their refinement might’ve helped them survive? Even if that is true, I don’t think my grandmother could know this. She likely inherited this prejudice, wherever it originated, as a child.

“And I don’t think my grandmother’s family lived in a pogrom,” she continues, “because she could read and write and was educated and-”

“Wait—” I say, flying past the last thing she said about education. “What’s a pogrom?” My grandmother always claimed to know little of our Jewish history and traditions, never intentionally taught my mother anything about it, yet her Yiddish vocabulary appears to be growing. More clues to the past oozing out of her blooming mouth.

“A ghetto.”

I nod and write this down. I don’t realize that although she knows the word, she is wrong about its meaning. That same group of Jews who will tell me that classism among German Jews is old news will also tell me that not understanding the word “pogrom” is like not understanding the word “Holocaust.”

“Okay, so Ester might not have lived in pogroms,” I say, “but some sort of anti-Semitism must’ve still remained. Don’t you think?”

“Maybe the Jews were persecuted,” she says, and pauses. “There probably were restrictions, but there was a time in Europe when the Jews were accepted into society. I don’t think they mingled because Ester’s family didn’t intermarry, but they were able to enjoy culture at a point in time. For example, my grandmother Ester did very fine embroidery, and her superior baking and cooking…she learned it all there!”

This mention of mingling but not intermarrying, of enjoying culture despite restrictions, reminds me of Schwartz’s book again, where she explains that Benheim’s Jewish and Christian neighbors claimed they did not harbor negative feelings for each other, yet they accepted the conditions as matter-of-fact. Jews might have been restricted to live in certain areas, or they might have paid more taxes, or the Christian neighbors might have claimed ignorance when their Jewish friends were taken during the Holocaust, but neighbors still brought each other homemade Linzertortes and asked about the children and lingered in doorways. They didn’t say goodbye because they believed there was nothing they could do, and they were ashamed.

Is this the enjoyment my grandmother is speaking of?

~

When we hang up, I race to my computer and quickly learn that a pogrom is not a ghetto. Not even a place. In the 1800s and 1900s, thousands of these massacres of ethnic groups occurred in Eastern Europe, including one Schwartz discusses in her book-Kristallnacht; the 1938 “night of broken glass.” These pogroms, along with the story of my grandmother’s paternal grandfather, Aaron, who served in the Czar’s army as a boy in the late 1850s, might be among the reasons our Russian family fled. Is that why Grandma knows the word? Did she hear it from Aaron?

The severance from our history suddenly seems deeper than ever. How can my grandmother not understand this word when it was likely among her grandparents’ biggest fears before they emigrated from the old country? What does this silence say about my family?

I keep reading. Of the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian Empire. Of the influence of a new wave of German Nationalists in the German-speaking parts of Austria-Hungary. The Nationalists were in alliance with many Jewish intellectuals; both were in favor of a large German republic and liberal ideas like freedom and equality. During this time, many Jews had also begun to intermarry; many stopped speaking Yiddish and Hebrew and left their religion behind. But as the nineteenth century progressed, German Nationalists began to endorse anti-Semitic ideas. Anti-assimilation thoughts festered alongside German nationalism. Seeds of Nazism were planted whilst Jews attempted to integrate.

Even in early-twentieth-century Hungary, several decades after Jews were granted equal citizenship in 1867 and after the 1895 Law of Reception recognized Judaism as a “received” religion, Jewish assimilation continued to rise. As I read on, I think of Susan Faludi’s memoir, In the Darkroom. Faludi writes of 1920s Magyarization-the centuries-old, often forced adoption of the culture of the Magyars (Finno-Ugric people who conquered Hungary in the ninth century and constituted the country’s dominant ethnic group).

The deceiver was the Magyarized Jew, applauded for decades for “correcting” his alien nature, but now, in the popular parlance of the time, “the hidden Jew,” whose disguise fooled no one… In ’20s Hungary, there were to be two species-one pseudo, one true-  and the pseudo-Hungarians needed to be expelled for the true Hungarians to thrive… The assimilated Jews of Hungary responded to the mounting animus by trying all the harder to assimilate… The more their affections went unreciprocated, the more the Jews of Hungary tried to prove their fealty as loyal Magyars, with tormented results. That torment had been building for decades in so many of the new nation states of Central and Eastern Europe (233-5).

While returning to these passages, I can’t help but think about the psychological responses to this rejection that had been “building for decades”: Aversion to the past. Self-hatred. Extreme conformity in appearances and imitation of Christian behaviors. Such responses to rejection and persecution surely existed before the 1867 equalization laws, and during the centuries my ancestors lived in Hungary. How much of this extreme conformity and aversion to the past had my great-great grandmother Ester inherited? And my grandmother, Claire, who tried to pass as Gentile her entire life? And me?

It seems possible that Ester’s family was among those Jewish intellectuals who once united with Magyars and German Nationalists. This doesn’t quite make sense though; I’m fairly certain my grandmother once said that Ester and Charles raised their children, including my grandmother’s mother Lillian, as observant Jews whom the family would have rejected had they married a non-Jew. Unless they reconnected with their religion when they immigrated, or unless they remained observant Jews but altered their dress and speech to appear less Jewish, they must not have totally assimilated like these other German nationalist and Magyarized Jews. My grandmother must have been the first to refuse our history.

~

Over the next several days, my mother sends me more photos. She also mentions that she and my grandmother have been discussing our conversations and recalling stories of my curiosity. Of me trailing my mother and asking of my father’s whereabouts. Of me crawling into a cabinet, slipping my left pointer finger into a hole. Of my playful sister closing the cabinet door, a sharp, metal hinge entering that hole and carving off the tip of my two-year-old finger-which eventually regrew. I knew that tale of my inquisitiveness well: my mother bagging the severed tip in ice; my sister wiping blood from the tile floor; nurses coating each of my fingers with some antibiotic I thought looked like brown paint.

As my mother tells me of her recent recollections with my grandmother, she adds that although Grandma was hesitant to talk about her childhood at first, now she can’t seem to stop. This might be the best time to call my grandmother again. She answers after one ring.

“You know…my cousin Eddie looked up the family…” she says, quickly moving away from my questions about Ester and Charles in Hungary. “He found Charles’s grave in Scranton, PA.”

Maybe Mom was wrong. Or maybe my grandmother is more candid with my mother now but still fears what I’ll do with her secrets.

“Eddie?” I’ve never heard of this cousin.

“One of my mother’s brothers, Albert, was Eddie’s father. Albert was a child abuser, too,” she says.

That’s more like it, I think. And then: child abuser? Though I’ve always heard Lillian was “rough,” I’ve never heard anyone describe the Horowitzs with such a clinical term. The dough unfurls. Maybe my mother was right about my grandmother’s new frankness after all.

“Eddie was thirteen when I was born,” she says. “Later he was in the army. I always liked him even though he considered me a spoiled brat. I was the only girl of all the boy cousins-they were all very Jewish and very poor. I guess I got all the attention.”

My grandmother’s father, who contracted pneumonia and died after a long walk in the snow and a dose of penicillin, was a wealthy jeweler. Perhaps the cousins resented her for that.

“Eddie’s a chiropractor now. Lives in Del Ray, I think. Al beat Eddie and Eddie’s brother, and just like my father didn’t interfere when my mother abused me, Eddie’s mother just let it take place.”

I want to know if she’s angry. Resentful that no one stopped it. I want details about her mother’s abuse, but I remind myself those doors are not mine to kick open.

I know what it’s like to crawl inside your shell when your secrets-your safety-are endangered. I know what it’s like to unintentionally hide long after danger disappears.

She continues. “My mother said her father Charles beat all the kids…”

I wonder if her mother was trying to explain herself then, if my grandmother is trying to explain her mother’s abuse now. Is my grandmother remembering her mother’s hands against her skin, the way I remember Carlos’s hands against mine when my therapist probes and I suddenly dream of him again? Is my grandmother closing her eyes, her arms no longer waving gracefully through the air but instead covering her mouth-a shield-just like I shield my chest and neck whenever I recall Carlos drawing near?

“Anyway, I was told Charles had clinical depression. Eddie said Charles died in a hospital and that the official word they used was ‘melancholia.’ And others said Charles was depressed because he lost a son. One of Lillian’s brothers, Clarence, died during the flu epidemic when he was nineteen,” she says. “But I don’t believe that was the reason.”

“Why not?”

“My mother said Charles had been driving a horse wagon, got knocked down, and had a head injury. She said that caused his illness.”

I, too, resist the story that Clarence’s death caused Charles’s depression, but the wagon narrative also seems suspect.

“Couldn’t that have been another story told to cover up the real one? Don’t you think this was all somehow related to Charles’s abuse? That the abuse, which had been going on long before this depression, was a result of some mental illness? And if his son, Herbert, was schizophrenic, couldn’t Charles have been schizophrenic, too?”

“I guess so.”

I know all of this speculation could be just that-a guessing game reliant on fallible memories-but I’m still determined to find the origin of the issue, whatever it might be. I’m still hoping to exhume a story that will somehow reason away my own past.

I require a tangible formula: Charles’s trauma in Hungary led to Charles beating his children in Scranton, which led to Lillian beating my grandmother, which led to my grandmother numbing herself to the past, evaporating into a man and raising my mother and her brother in an unstable home devoid of heritage and expressed love. And all of this might explain why my mother escaped into drinking, why her brother took his life. All of this must explain why I, too, knew little of our history, why I searched for myself in a man who himself had been abused by a political refugee, why I stayed in a destructive relationship for six years. Voilà! Case solved. Easy math.

As I speak to my grandmother, though, I ask only about Charles. Did genetics cause the depression, the schizophrenia, the abuse? Or is something that happened in Hungary to blame instead? My grandmother can’t say. However forthcoming she was minutes ago, she’s beginning to feel less and less reliable. I need other sources.

“I know Eddie would love to get a call from you…” she says. “He was looking for a relationship from me, but I didn’t care to give him that. I tried to close the doors for reasons I’d have to go to a shrink for. And now you come along and want to open them. The thing is, I didn’t choose to drag these memories out. I repressed them instead of trying to figure out why my mother was the way she was.”

There’s the unexpected frankness Mom mentioned. Still, I feel like my grandmother is trying to shift the burden of my questions to someone more willing to peer into the past. I’m also beginning to feel guilty for prying. Am I wrong for trying to unearth painful memories my eighty-six-year-old grandmother wishes to keep buried? Will this excavation benefit anyone other than me?

~

I spend the next day searching the Internet for more information about the Horowitzs. My mother finds and shares some of my grandmother’s first cousins’ phone numbers, including Eddie’s. I know I’ll eventually call them, but I’m still too focused on my grandmother’s slippery tales to tackle other sources yet.

When I call my grandmother to report my findings, she returns to tales about Ester.

“Did you know my grandmother Ester learned her baking and cooking and embroidering in Europe? She was very cultured. She even spoke German!”

I try once more to ask my grandmother about Charles. “So you’re certain Ester and Charles were both educated and well-off in Europe?”

“Absolutely. Now the Russian side-my father’s parents-they couldn’t read or write,” my grandmother reminds me. Claire taught English to her paternal grandfather Aaron. Between lessons he said, We don’t speak Yiddish. We don’t speak Hebrew. We hide to survive.

My grandmother told me that story years ago, and I accepted the narrative as true-complete. It seems to explain why my grandmother ignored her Jewishness. Lillian did not raise Claire religiously-no Hebrew school, no menorah on Chanukah, no Passover Seders-likely because Lillian had fled an abusive, Orthodox home, but also because her father-in-law, Aaron, didn’t want his granddaughter near a synagogue.

“My parents didn’t observe any holidays,” Claire says. “They didn’t keep kosher, they didn’t do anything. Except of course all of our friends were Jewish.”

It’s the of course that stops me again, just like the Yiddish words that have snuck into Claire’s mouth. She claims no understanding of Jewish culture yet the evidence against this is glaring. She’s been married three times. Never once to a non-Jew. But she never let anyone hang a mezuzah over her door.

We hide to survive.

Her impulse to conceal aligns with other narratives I’ve heard since childhood. About the Holocaust, first introduced to me in elementary school. About survival. I’ve long accepted those with ease, too. In my quest to understand why I possess little understanding of my own Jewishness, this makes sense: Aaron survived the Czar’s army and then told his granddaughter to hide, too. Lillian kept Judaism out of the household. And Claire was a teenager when the Nazis were murdering Jews abroad; even though she lived in New Jersey and was seemingly safe, she must have been afraid.

“Your mother, however, wanted to know about the holidays,” Claire continues. “When she was a teenager, she was very sheepish about me knowing she was lighting the menorah. I was shocked-I didn’t know she had been doing these things! I didn’t teach the kids a thing. But when she had you girls, she wanted to show you the rituals even if she didn’t quite understand them.”

I tell her I’m glad. I don’t tell her I’m surprised she’s so blatantly acknowledging her effort to erase Judaism from our lives. My mother told me of this erasure long ago, but has my grandmother ever spoken so openly of her disguising?

“On Jewish holidays, I sent your mother and her brother to school and they came home very mad at me. Most of their friends were Jewish; they lived in a Jewish community at the time,” she says. “All of those kids stayed home. But I sent mine.”

“Yes,” I say. “Mom told me that.”

I don’t return to my questions about Charles and Ester. I’m glad my grandmother has been willing to share all she has, but I still feel guilty for yanking at her suppressed past. I also can’t shake the fear that accepting these narratives as complete will close doors again. Yes, Aaron, a survivor, changed his name and denied his past. But if I can’t find a trauma that Charles fled in Europe, if he and Ester came here with beautiful clothes and opportunity and didn’t need to survive anything-if he abused his kids just because (can that ever be true?), or if our family’s history of mental illness is not dependent on trauma but instead on genetics-then I cannot explain his and Lillian’s abuse or the ultimate rejection of our Jewish identity. And I cannot, then, blame this unexplainable lack of identity for the fact that I remained in-and later repressed-my own destructive relationship. I so desperately require an external cause that I’ve begun viewing family trauma as a more desirable reason than genetics or “just because.” I’ve begun exoticizing and romanticizing my ancestors’ suffering in an attempt to explain my own.

I’m trying to claim that the ultimate reason I grew up without knowing the word pogrom is the very fact and effect of those pogroms’ occurrence, but without confirming that Charles’s abuse was born of that persecution, I don’t think I can.

And even if I can claim that his abuse caused Lillian to ignore her Judaism and my grandmother to hide from her past, I cannot continue blaming that absence for my retreat into silence. I cannot continue blaming the longing I felt as a kid-when I sensed my history tugging at me as I orbited around the items in my childhood home, when my loving parents tucked me in at night and kissed my forehead but never said what I finally know I should: We must remember our pasts. Charles’s palm hovering above his children’s heads. My grandmother’s long skirt hiding her mother’s marks. My pockmarked walls and cratered fenders and Carlos’s bruised hands. His tears spilling into the wrinkles of my dry fingers like rivulets running atop the cracked earth. My thumbs tracing the crescents beneath his tired eyes, his anger slipping off like a mask.

“Paved in Gold” originally appeared in Consequence Magazine, February 2, 2018.

A Letter to Greta

“…so pitying and yet so distant,” Cecil Beaton

Among my father’s posthumous
flotsam recently washed up in my house,
I found a letter, postmarked 1928,
addressed Miss Garbo Hollywood Cal
(Private!), stamped RETURN TO SENDER,
sealed unread and stored for sixty years
inside its author’s desk. Held to light,
the envelope revealed a trace of earnest
cursive written to a star flickered
on a million screens. I set a kettle
on the stove to steam the letter open
and expose the heart of this dead man,
once vestal boy, husband to three wives—
one widow, one dead, one faithless
(also dead)—fighter pilot with cleft chin
and good teeth whose friends had died
from too much war or too much booze,
who, if asked, what happens when you die?
would sip his drink and say, “you rot.”
When the envelope at last unglued,
I found a time-fogged photo of a skinny
school-age boy standing contrapposto,
looking straight into my eyes. I slipped
the photo and unread letter back inside
the envelope, taped it shut, and late
that night went outside and burned it all
as offerings to a heaven of Gretas.

Operation Odyssey Dawn, 2011[i]

See Naples and die, Johann Goethe wrote,
the deep-dish bay, smoke plumed Vesuvius,
the castle and the terraced hills, the fleet
at anchor, tended by a swarm of skiffs.
Gigs skim from ship to shore, filled fore and aft
with sailors, their paychecks cashed in lira
to spend on booze, tattoos, and prostitutes,
and reams of postcards they’ll forget to mail.

At night the fleet is rigged with winking lights
and swings according to the wind and tide,
couched in swells of trough and crest, rocking
sleeping sailors above the sea scrubbed bones
of city sacking Ithacans who heard
the Sirens’ hymn and never more saw home.

[i] International military operation against Libya, including elements of the American Sixth Fleet, homeported in Naples, Italy.

Dead Shot

Drunk or sober, but mostly drunk,
he had a knack for seeing
and a gun like twelve-gauge Euclid
to make the dizzy world cohere.
That he spent hours as a boy
splitting three-inch blocks his father tossed,
busting them clean with a twenty-two rifle,
one hundred, two hundred in a row,
is not explanation enough:
he became his sorry old man’s trick.
Imagine this: a case of shakes, cross-eyed
from the night before, he’d shoot trap
and never miss, pump-twelve booming,
two discs shattered in one tick,
but never draw a bead on anything
that breathed, no early morning vigils
squatting in a duck-blind—too hung over
for one thing, and for the other,
his skill was calculating proofs
with rapid fire theorems as tangents
angled into exploding resolution—
until he drew one on himself.
At sunset he would drink and watch
the purple martins slice the falling light.
His last night he tacked a strip of tin
outside his room so he could hear the rain
rinse clean and clear the drunken dreams
in which he split the moon.

Chiaroscuro

for John Jennings

The muffled pull and puff of breath, the soft
insistence of his need, dispel my dreams
and I wake up as swaths of headlights sweep
my wife and child, composed into one shape,
gigantic night rebounding through the room
while they lie still, curled on the cusp of sleep,
mouth to breast and filling god with god.

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.

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.”

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.

victory conditions

My father taught me
to say I love you
every time
you stood in the door

left for school
went to work
flew off to war

it became a habit
a good one
like checking the tires
or clicking your seat belt

but now
every conversation feels
like a movement to contact

we took the same vows
we swore the same oaths
we wore the same uniform
we see the same news

I raise my kids
like he did his
and have the same hopes for them

How is it that we now live
in two countries?

three more tanka from Des Moines, Iowa

1.

The leafblower drone
buzzes into consciousness—
fast cicada hum.
I wave to the new police,
before I close the window.

2.

Yellow Little Bird
hovers near high-voltage lines
conducting repairs
outside my bedroom window,
but I am miles away.

3.

Thunder and popcorn;
a remembered joke about
the “sound of freedom.”
In rain, I stand listening
as rifles prepare for war.

a future space force marine writes haiku

1.

This drop won’t kill you—
terminal velocity
varies by planet.

2.

We spiral dirt-ward,
samaras in early fall,
sowing destruction.

3.

Reconnaissance drones
orbit our squad’s position:
Expanding beachhead.

4.

“Almost” only counts
in horseshoes and hand grenades.
Go toss them a nuke.

5.

If war is still hell,
at least my bounding mech suit
is air-conditioned.

This is just to Say All Again After …

after William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say”

I have expended
the “pineapples”
that were in
the ammo box

and which
you were probably
saving
for final protective fires

Forgive me
they were explosive
so frag
and so bold

Most Likely /
Most Dangerous Enemy Courses of Action

what most
threatens my children

social media /
unending war

the rat race /
the daily grind

half-baked policies /
global warming

a lack of hope /
a lack of justice

my constant distraction /
my constant distraction

the stand

if you can’t stand injustice
take a knee

if you pray for others
take a knee

if you believe in freedom, not fabric
let others see

you practice
what you preach

Here’s an empty grave, where a body that had been a boy became bones beneath a wooden cross. They buried him with one set of dog tags hanging against his bloodied chest.

He bled in a field hospital bed not far from here, shrapnel buried in his skin. Is that what killed him—hot metal melting flesh, an unseen severing? Or was his body tossed limply from a jeep seat as it crossed the desert, the crush of cargo snapping ribs, a crackle of tinder at dusk?  “Morale is very high,” the morning reports said, on the day the boy disappeared into the horizon. The next day he’d be dreaming under several feet of sand. They couldn’t have known. They couldn’t have. They couldn’t.

When he died, the boy was twenty-three and dark-haired, all shoulder and grin: my grandmother’s little brother. It’s one thing to consider his photograph on a mantelpiece, a charming kid wearing a tilted cap; another to imagine him becoming broken, hollows purpling beneath his eyes and a bloody bandage wrapped around one thumb where a cactus thorn was entombed in the soft pad of his finger. One thing to read “artillery fire” on a typewritten government medical form (death requires paperwork); another to watch a German gun spitting shells, coughing up sounds that rattle across time and sky. How fragile is a human body in the path of such certainty.

Here is that body: one-hundred-sixty-two-pounds, down from one-hundred-and-seventy since he’d filled out his draft card in an office in Philadelphia one year before. Seventy-five inches tall. Gray-blue eyes, like his father’s. Freckles across the top of his nose blotted out by five months of sunburn and grime. One thumb now scarred. One uniform crusted with sweat, salt, blood and smoke, one rosary and an American flag stuffed in the pockets. Feet stiff, callused and blistered. Lean jaw and face, angles cut sharper by sleeplessness and fear. Shrapnel lacerations unfurled like tattered red-black lace over his left arm and chest. This is the body they buried in Tebessa with a gunshot salute and a chaplain’s murmured blessing.

Bury him at Gettysburg, his father said, when the government wanted to know where to leave his son’s bones for good. There’s no room in Gettysburg, came the reply, that meadow’s already crammed with dead American boys. Choose another tomb.

Here is a letter about nothing: “Dear Sir,” it begins. “Will you kindly change my address on your records? My son, Private Richard H. Halvey, 331356641, Headquarters Co. 18th Infantry, 1st Division, was killed in action in North Africa, March 21st, 1943, and I am anxious to have your records correct so that I may receive future correspondence regarding the returning of his body. Thanking you for your attention, I am, Very truly yours.” Signed, Brendan H. Halvey, my great-grandfather. Here is pain, laid out on one creased sheet of paper.

He bled for us. But he will not rise. Here in Algeria the air is still, the night is silent. There is no weeping. The only cross at his grave was the slatted thing they stuck in the dirt above his head, one set of dog tags looped around its arms. He hated those dog tags. The cord bit at his neck, a reminder that the Army was trying, every day, to convert him from a person into a number. It took all of one day for him to die. Then he was inked into a serial code in some forgotten notebook. 331356641. 331356641. 331356641. Repeated till it stays.

Across the ocean from the skeleton his son had become, his father wondered where to bury what was left. Here is what the government said: We can’t tell you much about your boy, other than that he isn’t coming back. They took his blood and his body, and all that’s left is bone.

Maybe Brendan asked for Gettysburg because the government was bold enough to parrot Lincoln in the pamphlet it mailed to stricken fathers. “Tell Me About My Boy,” the pamphlet was titled, though really it told nothing. The dead were valiant and heroic, said the pamphlet, they “gave the last full measure of devotion.” There was no mention of Lincoln’s next line: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

Arlington, Brendan decided, finally, in 1947. So they shipped Dick Halvey’s body (which was jumbled bones and dog tags) to Virginia, where the Army shrouded him in stripes and etched a cross on marble above his name. Not blood-soaked Gettysburg but Arlington, everything green and white except the roses laid on headstones. Here, across the river from the capital, we buried our boys in neat rows. “Our boys,” they said back then, pleading with o-mouths at news reels for a glimmer of truth. Our boys aren’t coming back the same.

Note: Tebessa, Algeria was the site of a temporary American cemetery during World War II. Starting in 1947, soldiers’ remains were moved from Tebessa either to the American cemetery in Tunisia or brought back to the United States, according to the family’s wishes.