The Deluge, page 5
“Look, Kel.” She slid the saltshaker from one hand to the other. It scraped across the table. She kept right on staring at Murdock. “We can go through this shit to the moon and back. In fact, at some point I’m sure we will. But for now, I just want to know”—she slid the saltshaker back to the original hand—“if you’ve got one more war in you?”
ANAMNESIS He liked to think it’d been Toy’s triumph that finally got them good, but that was specious and relied on a certain Hollywood symmetry. Anbar had dozens of skilled bomb builders and trained more every day. Toy himself may have been a composite of every operator that ever outsmarted them, a concrete antagonist to hunt. Still, his gut would always tell him Toy left the suspicious package in the intersection where the choke points were obvious and the convoy had to set up fifty yards back. After they’d rolled the TALON down to the package and discovered that it was only some men’s shirts—false alarm, not unusual—Ta’amu cracked, “Man, I just got a baller idea for a GAP ad,” as the EFP hidden under a garbage pile went off and pretty much liquefied the captain in front of his eyes. SSG Jim Matthews was killed as well, and SPC Cort Kronlan lost an arm. Someone had triggered it through a wire hidden in the ground, so the Warlock couldn’t save them, and it was some five hundred pounds of armor, tactical vest, ammo, rifle, and man vanishing except the feet still in the boots. Ears droning, concrete chunks raining, molten steel popping holes in the armored Humvee, Murdock didn’t stop to think of all the bits of Ta’amu he had in his eyes and mouth. The gunfire began.
INSTINCT One thing you could say about the US military is that when they trained you to do something, you fucking well remembered it. Even with pieces of Ta’amu coating him and a hail of bullets thwapping from a nearby building and the Muslim call to prayer suddenly ringing out from a nearby Statue of Liberty–colored minaret and someone screaming, “Tell ’em we got a TIC! Put the fifty on those niggers!” and SSG Mason Saunders going cyclic with the SAW right by his ear, spitting through nine hundred rounds in about a minute—melting the barrel in the process—Murdock still did what his trauma training told him to. He leaped on top of Kronlan, this shrieking nineteen-year-old child of Texas, ripped the med pack from his vest, ground his knee into the bicep above Kronlan’s severed arm to stop the blood flow (between the heart and the wound, America told you), got the tourniquet ready, spitting out pieces of his brother that tasted more like diesel than blood, not thinking Captain’s dead, Captain’s juice, letting the pressure go long enough to slip the tourniquet around the Limb Formerly Known as Cort Kronlan’s Arm, spitting, spitting, spitting, but Kronlan wouldn’t stop thrashing and screaming long enough to get his life saved (Kronlan, for the sweet cunt of fuck), so he cracked him in the face with his elbow, broke his nose, but stunned the Texan long enough to get the tourniquet tightened—until the limb stopped the spurts that timed eerily with the pulse Murdock could feel humming through Kronlan’s whole body—and then packed the wound cavity with this handy little Kerlix super sponge stuff they gave you. With sticky fingers, packing it into a stump the color of grilled brook trout he and his mother once caught, long ago, in Wiconisco Creek.
AND LATER When Kronlan was saved and people were already telling Murdock about the Bronze Star Medal coming his way, Slade found him picking at a bit of bloody material still stuck in his teeth, and SPC Slade looked at him and, channeling Ta’amu himself, Murder said, “Tastes like chicken,” and laughed. Slade thought this was inappropriate, but Murdock was drenched in so much of Ta’amu’s and Kronlan’s blood he didn’t much give a fuck. You put that shit somewhere deep and beat a stray cat to death with a hammer five years on to try to work those feelings out.
NOW THAT WE’RE DOWN THIS ROAD Two springs ago he’d driven down to Fort Walton Beach, Florida, for the annual May ceremony to induct the recently juiced on the EOD Memorial Wall. He sat among the family and friends of that year’s fallen EOD in the sweltering, swampy heat and marveled at how many people in the audience were missing limbs. All manner of hooks, tennis-shoed prosthetics, grippers, and angled titanium protruded in place of bone and flesh. One woman had half her face burned away and wore a large hat tilted to cast a shadow over the ruined portion. The wall, a pale gray slab of concrete resembling a highway divider, had four cenotaphs, one for each branch of the military, with EOD dead dating back to World War II. A bedsheet of an American flag riding above. The keynote speaker was the air force chief of staff. “This is EOD,” he’d said, and Murdock felt his throat close, his eyes well. “The brains of an engineer, the hands of a surgeon, the heart of a martyr.” They played “Amazing Grace,” and he went to the wall and ran his fingers across the slim bronze tablet affixed to the army’s cenotaph, the one that said CPT TROY J. TA’AMU 2/07. Then he tossed his Bronze Star Medal at the ground because that was the cliché most appropriate to the moment. In war, cliché was as inescapable as the dread of your own death. They’d gone over there having already learned all the clichés from the movies, and they took them up with ease: the brotherhood and adrenaline that made you cuss and laugh and feel as if this was the only place you belonged, and then you saw fucked-up shit and did fucked-up shit and it changed you, the way the movies told you it would. How frustrating to watch your life, your misery, your madness depicted absolutely accurately by cliché. Because it felt so real and original when it was you with these wives, husbands, parents, brothers, sisters, and children milling in the heat. And what was he left with? What could he do when his head was a mess of forgotten voices and errant whispers of memories with no value and no sustained narrative, just purposeless minutiae and fragments he’d take with him to the void?
AND YET There was a memory that never happened: of eating steak and drinking beer and watching all these children with his friend’s eyes play in a sunny yard, and it made him so fucking furious, so fucking crazy and desperate and sorrowful that he pressed his face against the surface of that bronze tablet and through gritted teeth and layered time sobbed into the metal, hot with the warmth of the Florida sun. An older Black lady, probably the mother of some other poor dead motherfucker, knelt beside him and took him in her arms. She whispered, “I know, baby. I know. We’ll all be with God soon,” while she stroked his back with one hand and held his heart with the other.
There was the tinkering clitter-clatter of silverware on plates, murmured conversations ebbing and flowing, hash browns and eggs being lapped up. Outside on the highway, the pickups and SUVs sluiced by, spraying mocha slush from their wheels. By now the pristine white had all but disappeared. The waitress returned, and Shane and Murdock ordered breakfast.
THE ACTOR
2014
I saw him in the bookstore without recognizing him at first. I was stewing from the last meeting of the week. Darren would get the promotion, and my eyes were still threatening tears. This news had enveloped me so thoroughly since leaving the office that my gaze passed over this man I’d watched so many times in other contexts. He was poorly incognito. He wore a crisp blue Cubs baseball cap and thick sunglasses that were a rectangular mask across his eyes. Yet I could see those distinct lips, naturally pursed like a blooming flower. The straight nose with its squarish point. The five-o’clock shadow, pinpricks of black on a flawless tan.
I’d wound my way from the office to the downtown Barnes & Noble because I did not feel like getting on the train at rush hour, not with the pulse of indignation still beating in my head, and decided to calm myself by browsing books. That meeting evaporated as I took in the rest of him. Dark blue jeans with the requisite fade, a tan jacket over a light blue shirt, brown leather shoes. He was shorter than I would have imagined, but you always hear that about actors. What surprised me more was his build—clearly in shape, but so slender. Those muscles that graced the posters were more compact in real life.
I thought of that peculiar phrase then, my eyes darting away from him as I sensed his glance: in real life. A cliché so far removed from what it ever meant, if anything. I could even remember watching one of his thrillers a few years back on one of those early dates with Jefferey; he was not exactly an A-lister, but his films were unavoidable if one saw enough American movies. I picked a book off the shelf just to have something to do with my hands.
Then he spoke to me. I missed what he said because I was trying to see the eyes behind the sunglasses. His lips curled expectantly, and my words came out with a defensive tinge that sounded crass to my own ears.
“Excuse me?”
“McCarthy,” he said, pointing to the book I held. “Do you like McCarthy?”
Blood Meridian lay in my hand, a limp accessory. I had never read anything by McCarthy. I’m one of those people constantly trying to read short stories by Flannery O’Connor yet reverting to Jodi Picoult and Gillian Flynn at the first pang of boredom.
“I haven’t read much of him.”
“He’s one of my favorite authors. The Road is incredible and an easier read. Blood Meridian has the Judge, who’s one of the best characters in modern literature, but it takes a lot of concentration. At least that’s my expert recommendation.”
He smiled and that institutional bookstore light almost created a glare on his whitened teeth. I set Blood Meridian down and picked up The Road.
“The problem is this is a movie, so I know I’ll quit halfway through and finish it on Netflix.”
It was a feeble joke, and I immediately hated the dynamic, as if he was the authority because he’d read this one book. At the office I had learned never to give the guys ammunition or I’d watch their entitlement bloat. This is exactly how Darren Grinspoon muscled in and took credit for my work on his way to leap-frogging me to executive creative director: I let men explain novels to me in bookstores.
He laughed. “Eh, movies are cheap facsimiles of what novels accomplish.”
“Strange coming from someone in your line of work.”
His sandy eyebrows perked upward. “Ah, so you saw around the disguise.”
“Oh, I’m calling my mother about this as soon as I walk out of here.”
He smiled and leaned into the shelf in the manner of a high school boy at your locker.
“In that case, can I tell you why you should read that book rather than see the movie?”
“They passed you over for the starring role?”
I put a foot forward, moving closer, challenging him. There in the pit of my belly was the kind of squirming excitement you feel so rarely as an adult, the joyous ache of a crush whose face you want to push into the mud. While my celebrity infatuations tended toward the older, more distinguished type (Harrison Ford from the eighties, please and thank you), I still had a pulse, and this attention from a man I’d learned about mostly through issues of People was undeniably thrilling.
“No, they wouldn’t even take my agent’s call,” he said. “But McCarthy has this way with his prose, so you’re always chasing sentences down these caverns of meaning. You just can’t translate that to film. No actor, no screenwriter, no director, no team of studio wizards can do in a lifetime what Cormac McCarthy can do in an afternoon.”
He said this with a wry smile that let me know he was as serious as he was aware of his own bullshit.
“That’s good,” I told him. “Do you have to wait for women to pick up a McCarthy novel to plagiarize a New Yorker review or…?”
His head bobbed back when he laughed.
“C’mon, I’m serious. Let me be corny!” His finger brushed against mine as he took the book from my hand. He lobbed his head toward the front of the store. “This is on me.”
“Don’t,” I said, reaching for it.
He brushed my arm back, a little too forcefully. “Seriously, it’s my pleasure—just in case you don’t like it.”
In my head, my friend Linda’s voice rose in pitch: Let the famous actor flirt, dummy!
“I wasn’t planning on buying anything,” I said when we reached the register. “I was just killing time before I met a friend.”
“What kind of friend?”
“What kinds are there?”
“Boyfriend?”
“No, a girlfriend. We were going to get a drink, maybe see a movie. Do you have anything out? I need at least a sixty percent on Rotten Tomatoes before I commit.”
I stood awkwardly beside him as he produced an AmEx. My face flushed as I felt other people in line watching us, and I still wanted to snatch the book before he could buy it for me. He thanked the clerk, her bored eyebrow ring never rising in recognition, and glanced back at me. I was supposed to follow him now, and I did, slipping The Road into my bag.
Outside, early-evening pale had settled in. He took off his sunglasses, a full reveal. The high cheekbones and irresolute brown eyes. I remembered them as blue in his films and now took that as the work of contacts. It made me wonder how much of that fresh, taut look was surgery or Botox.
“I’ll tell my mom you said hi.”
“What if…” He looked off into the headlights and taillights of traffic. “You canceled on your friend and we grab a drink instead?”
The truth was I wasn’t meeting a friend. It had been a spur-of-the-moment lie, the kind you tell when you want someone to think you have plans. A single twenty-seven-year-old wandering the shelves of a bookstore on a Friday evening with nothing better to do? Though I hated that it made me feel anxious, it did. The drink offer wasn’t shocking—his flirting was hardly subtle—but now my mind jammed with thoughts of how I looked. What did he see? Chestnut hair, I’d recently had drastically shortened and highlighted for the coming summer. The small bulb of my father’s nose mixing with my mother’s darker Mediterranean eyes. I attempted to not let my insecurities wash over me and thought of all the yoga and treadmill miles I’d logged during the city’s hibernating months.
“Aren’t you dating Scarlett Johansson or someone?”
Again, the laugh was surprised and genuine. “I’m between destructive relationships with coworkers at the moment. Here’s my perspective: I’ll either go drink at the hotel bar by myself until someone recognizes me and I get annoyed… or I can buy you dinner.”
“Now it’s dinner?”
“If you’re hungry.”
Of course I was going to say yes. But I told myself I was saying yes only because the initial shock at his fame had worn away. He was just another guy trying his hand at a pickup line.
We took a cab, sitting a comfortable distance apart in the back. The butterflies that flapped and spun kamikaze in my stomach when he first spoke to me now lay dormant, reverse-aging back into their chrysalises. The cab rounded the corner of Wacker, passing the river on our left and the gleaming silver phallus of Trump Tower. The setting sun reflected off its miles of mirrored glass and cast light over the city, lighting from a painting or a dream. After a bit of awkward silence, he said:
“You got into this cab and still haven’t told me your name.”
“Jackie.” I shook his palm, and the grip lingered. That smile, how he flashed it like a knife, knowing it was dangerous. No wonder his dumb movies made so much money.
* * *
In the restaurant, we were led up the stairs to the second floor and a series of private tables. He was ordering a bottle of wine before I’d sat all the way down.
“Did we just screw everyone on the waiting list?”
“They don’t give us half-famous folk a choice.”
As the wine arrived, he went with the standard barrage of first-date questions, not all that different from a Tinder date: What do you do? Where are you from? (Consumer advertising, creative director; Iowa originally.)
“Do you like advertising?”
“It’s a job,” I said, only because I did not feel like talking about it. I was obsessed with my work in the way one is obsessed with a cruel lover, but I was saving my rant and fury about Grinspoon and the general chauvinism of advertising for my therapist.
“That’s too bad. People should have passion for what they do.”
I gave him my meanest laugh. “That’s a pretty asinine thing for someone like you to say.”
He’d taken off the Cubs cap and hung it on the back of his chair. His oak-colored hair, matted from the hat, swept back from his forehead.
“I don’t see how I’m asinine because I love what I do.”
“I said what you said was asinine. Because it was. You know, most people take whatever job they’re offered. That’s how you pay a student loan or buy a burrito for lunch.”
“All I meant is that I love what I do, and I love it aside from the money. Aside from all that bullshit of being known.”
“How can you separate the two?” Suddenly this guy was Darren Grinspoon and every other mediocre man I’d ever dealt with professionally. Linda Holiday had once called this “the conundrum of contemporary straight women”: We understand better than ever that men are selfish, arrogant, awful, and entitled, and yet we nevertheless spend most of our energy and intellect trying to find one who seems okay enough and will love us. Leftover emotional energy is then wasted on not wanting to want that.
“I think you know how you sound,” I told him. “It’s easy to love what you do in your circumstances.”
He didn’t quite look like I’d taken the air out of him, but his gaze was puzzled, maybe put off. Then he smiled. “Hope you don’t dissect every chunk of blather that comes out of your dates’ mouths like this.”
“If you’d like, I could sit across from you all night googly-eyed, asking what it’s like to work with De Niro.”
He laughed uncomfortably, and his eyes wandered, unable to settle.
“Yeah, okay, but you realize that I didn’t get to that point for almost a decade after I dropped out of college. Until then I was a broke stage actor living in a shitty apartment, doing odd jobs for spare cash. I’m just saying I never cared. I’ve loved this since I was seven years old and my second-grade teacher suggested I try out for Oliver Twist. I just meant I’ve always loved performing, and I’d still do it even if it was community theater back in my hometown, which by the way, is Omaha, not Orange County or something.”
