War, page 13
The composer was German. From Leipzig. Or Berlin? I recalled not knowing the answer when it was on a high-school test. It didn’t matter where he was from, did it? I had complained at the time. Home is just a place one is sentenced to. Or, for happier people, a place one gets loaned, a gift with an expiration date. But my music teacher had found it fundamental, this composer’s place of birth. Gave me a thousand throaty recitations of the village, hamlet, city, burg. And I still forgot. Out of spite, I am certain. My teacher had a way of making you hate everything she liked. She wore her hair so tight it was a punishment. Her glasses fogged when she was mad at a student, as if her eyes exhaled toxic gases. I despised everything about the class except for this one composer. The fromless German. This man who had been born so many hundreds of years before me that he could easily have been a lie. Except his music (and it was his, it belonged to no one else, no one armed with notes and pencil and imagination had ever come close) told the truth. No. Was the truth. Or seemed to be the truth as long as I was listening to it. Ultimately, I had plugged my ears to him, because when the music finished I was lost. I needed his truth to be not just guide but map as well.
And it never passed over into my silence. This oxygen he gave always sealed shut when the record stopped. So I thought, if that is what you do with truth, if it is only a seduction, an invitation, and the rest you have to figure out yourself, then fuck it. Rather not know at all. Better to stay blind, stay blind than to see for a moment and then have the darkness return. For years I hated this man who began to tell me he knew what it felt like to be me but never finished the explanation.
I hadn’t heard one phrase of his compositions since the night I’d played it for my ex-wife. We were near the end, though she didn’t know it. And I’d played the record as a bridge for her to walk across. If she heard what I heard, if she could understand even half of the safety and promise I experienced, then maybe she could teach me to live in the gaps between the notes.
But she talked while I needed her to listen. She made tea, she stroked my face. She loved me. But she didn’t listen, didn’t obey the rules of my secret, nasty game. So I killed the music. And soon escaped her love. I had always been expert at eliminating beauty. It’s why I felt custom-built for war. But now, in the face of all that nothing, I suddenly longed for beauty. Even a droplet. It didn’t matter how long it lasted. I nudged the volume with my index finger. Notch by notch, keeping watch over the sleeping Mc., until I could hear all the orchestrated splendor slipping up above the rattle of car and road. Surfacing like a reverse angel, the music shimmering on the brightest wings.
I can’t describe the rest. Or won’t. But for the moments that followed (as many as there were until Mc. snapped awake like a man chased in his dreams and I snapped off the radio to hoard my epiphany) I was OK. I was almost … I thought I might be … OK.
“Why are you crying?” Mc. asked, curiously, not mockingly.
“Bonn. It’s a town in Germany.” I finally remembered.
“Yeah?”
“There’s a small street in the city center. Close to everything. That’s where a friend of mine was born.”
I stared at the black canvas of night that we were painting our way across with high beams of halogen and hope. I kept thinking we were going to hit something, arrive on an edge, tumble off like a fatigued lemming eager for the splash. “I feel like Columbus,” I said. “I’m suddenly terrified that the world is flat.”
“It’s not,” Mc. countered.
“First time, Mc.” I had to yield. “Actually funny.” Mc. popped open the glove compartment and procured a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I didn’t smoke, but it still seemed as if he’d discovered a hidden treasure. He lit one and passed it to me. All soldiers smoke when offered. It’s the eleventh commandment. “Did you know?” I asked.
“Should’ve guessed. This is a Euro truck.”
“Tastes amazing.” I coughed but meant it. The tobacco was the first food I’d had in I couldn’t keep track of how long. My stomach grumbled, and I took a deeper drag. “Where did you …”
“Get the truck. Right. Never answered that,” Mc. admitted. The embered cigarette gave him a tiny campfire glow. Made his hard-scraped features softer.
“Never answered anything.”
“Yeah,” he exhaled. “Guess not.” We smoked in silence. Was it a dare? Another bad joke? Finally, “He wanted to kill you, so I killed him. Took the truck. Left. Staying didn’t seem the wise choice. Although leaving’s not looking too good at the moment either.” At last I realized that Mc. reminded me of politicians back home. They answered questions that hadn’t been asked with words that begged other questions they wouldn’t answer. They made themselves geniuses by making everyone else feel stupid. But this time I was going to probe. “Who?”
“Who what?”
“Mc., I will crash this fucking vehicle.”
“Good. Break up the monotony.”
I jerked hard enough to lift us off one wheel, but I needed something to smash into if I was going to flip the truck.
“OK, but this isn’t because you’re a shitty driver,” he explained, putting his smoke out on the dash and blistering the plastic. “This is just … because … I’m going to tell you this.”
Life is so different when you expect to be lied to. Otherwise, when Mc. started with “I can only tell you what I know,” I would have slowed down and eagerly soaked up every morbid detail. Instead I sped up with each sentence, pretending the lies were pressing the accelerator and when he reached the apex we would burst into flames. And he never mentioned our hurtling speed, just kept spilling broken sentences like an animal spitting out bones. “It all comes back to what everyone’s assignment is. Was. Is. You get it. I had mine. You had yours. I mean, R. must have said something to you when he shoved you out the door.”
I didn’t answer. He wanted to be private, I didn’t need to tell him that the exact wording of my mission was “Go.” Maybe it was clearer to everyone else. But I hadn’t known what the fuck I was doing since the day I’d arrived, blindfolded and thirsty. I was on an escalator, couldn’t even say up or down, and if obedience would give order to my life, then I was willing to stay on my step, inside their parameters. But obedience had only led to more chaos. And while Mc. raved his lies like a street-corner preacher without faith, all my questions began to shave down to one: Why am I still alive?
If there was no rhythm or crescendo to this battle we were in the middle of, then maybe I just needed to figure out the personal so I could slip through the gap. That had to be the way out. Know why, then die. I had no illusions about discovering my place and being sent back home a hero. I didn’t picture myself standing on a pile of enemy bones, waiting for war photographers to drift by and flash me across the global transom. And a man without goals is just waiting to die anyway. What I did learn from Mc. was that I didn’t need him. He didn’t have a scintilla of my facts, any facts, and, if he did, not even torture would get him to share them.
“Absolutely,” I murmured. “Fascinating.”
“You still don’t believe me because you think I torched the hotel.”
“Mc, I don’t believe you because I don’t believe you.”
He liked that one, couldn’t hide it. He took a glance at the speedometer. “Fast won’t scare me.”
“Not trying to scare you, Red. Trying to scare myself.” I pinned it past eighty, and the truck entered a synchronicity of bumpiness that almost felt smooth. For a second I had the sensation we were sliding on ice into the gaping mouth of an invisible forest. I became certain we would hit a fir tree or a startled buck any instant. “I used to drive at night with the lights out,” I confessed. “Three a.m., sneak out, and drive crazy down my street. Hoping to hit something. See what it felt like.”
“Feels like shit, I imagine,” Mc. said. His voice had its first quiver, and he locked his fingers around whatever surface would allow it.
“There are things I’ve done no one will ever know.”
“True for all of us, bleeder.”
“Why do you keep calling me bleeder? We’re the same age. You’re younger, even. Same goddamn rank.”
“No,” he said.
“You think I bought that shit about you being my CO? When you open your mouth, you lie,” I berated. Then, slowly, as if to a child or a government worker, “Do you understand my lack of faith?”
“I helped recruit you,———,” and he said my name.
My full name. First, middle, last. He named the woman in the diner. The tight collar at the bar. The beard of bees at the grocery store. “I was on the committee that chose you, son. So I think I'm qualified to say whether you are still bleeding or not.”
My foot came off the gas. I didn’t brake, just let the car find its slowness. Lies, I reminded myself. They’re only more lies. I had told Mc. about my recruitment in a drunken haze during early days in the hotel. Or I had told another who told Mc. Maybe I sleepwalked, sleeptalked, and shouted it from the lobby up the stairs until all of us knew exactly the road I’d taken.
Bullshit. I knew I’d never spoken to anyone about the details. We weren’t men with pasts worth remembering, certainly not worth swapping as anecdotes. I took the job to be concealed, not revealed. I just hadn’t stopped to think that somebody besides R. knew the details. That there was a higher-up in our lowly midst. Mc. had been a spy. But not for the enemy. He’d been inside the hotel to make sure everything went smoothly, and he’d returned feigning injury to see how we all handled that.
“Are you my CO?”
“Yes.” And suddenly he didn’t look like a boy full of mischief and mayhem. He looked like a leader. He looked like he knew the way.
“Why did you blow up the hotel?”
“I did not. Enemy bomb.”
“Why did we leave? The second hotel. Why did you punch me?”
“It wasn’t safe anymore. You shouldn’t have seen that map.”
“What was it a map of?”
“My job is to protect my men,” he recited. “I will take a thousand bullets to protect my men.”
“But everybody’s dead.”
“Not everybody.” The truck stopped. The engine idled quietly, ready to roar, happy to be catching its breath. Mc. pulled me another smoke without my needing to ask. This one tasted like a mistake, but I smoked it anyway. Down till it burned the quick of my nails.
“I want to do something,” I said. “Aim a gun. Drop a bomb. Something.”
“Soldiering is mostly reaction. Rarely action.”
“What if I’m not a soldier?”
“You are.”
“Not a good soldier.”
“All soldiers are good soldiers.”
“Feel like I cannot be … the best soldier without more information.”
“You went out. You got lost. You got found. Now you’re with me. That’s all you need to know.”
“Where is everyone? Where is the enemy? Which way do we go?”
“Forward, son. Always forward.” I turned off the engine. “Not a good idea,” he said.
“I want to wait here. Wait for daylight. I need to see where we are.”
“In the combat zone, probably with a target on our back. Move out.” I popped the keys out of the ignition and stepped into the dark. The headlamps’ tubes of light were the only visible shape. Even the truck seemed to vanish back away from the hood. Mc. remained in the passenger seat. “Soldier,” he said, “enough.”
“Exactly.” I concurred, then threw the keys as deep into the darkness as my stiffened shoulder would allow. With Mc. bolting out and slamming the door, I couldn’t even hear where they landed. “Guess we’re staying here. Till daylight, sir.” Mc.’s face looked hollowed out in the half-light. As if someone had taken a scoop from his cheekbone to his chin. He started to speak, guttural and raw, words instead of punches, but I cut him off with a confidence I hadn’t felt all day. “Don’t worry about dying out here. That’s the thing I seem to do worst of all.”
“Soldier, you are disobeying a direct order,” he barked.
“I hope so.”
“If you endanger your fellow soldier.”
“You’re not my fellow. My compatriot. My anything. Fuck off, then,” I said. “Fuck off with your placeless maps and your need-to-know.” He seemed to lose power as I surged with it. “I don’t need you to rescue me, kidnap me, whatever the fuck …”
Mc. lowered his chin and his voice, as if he didn’t want to hear himself speak. “I have an obligation.”
“You are relieved of it,” I said.
“I got you this far.”
“I don’t want to go any farther,” I admitted. Exhaustion like an injury.
“You’ll have to.” Face still downcast. “We will both have to —”
“What, soldier on?” I mocked. “Not me, Mc. Soldier your own goddamn self on.” I didn’t wait to see if my words had done their intended work. I climbed into the back of the truck, and before Mc. even moved I was fast asleep. And dreamless.
Amnesia. Not permanent, barely even real, but sleep was always dusted with the edges of amnesia, so that waking up was a borning. And for the seconds before I realized where or when I was, I was back in the cradle. New. Possibility personified. Breathing free.
When I finally awoke, my hand was so close to my eyes that my fingertips appeared to me a baby’s hand. My own infant hand. The lines of the prints were recently etched by God’s tender knife, and the skin was pink as the inside of an orchid. I opened and closed my eyes, letting the lashes fall like palm branches in an easy breeze. Not that I had been born on an island or even had any memories before falling out of a tree when I was six, but that was the sweet lie of such an awakening amnesia. Not only did I forget what I would be waking to, I forgot everything that had come before.
Sun slanted in through the window, making thin pillars of light between my baby fingers. The open palm of my hand had barely visible lines. No signs of worry or wear. And the flesh was plump and round with newness. I drew my thumb in, examining the joint with the wonder of discovery, then balled it all into a gentle fist and tried to fall back asleep. But the odor wouldn’t let me.
Gasoline. That was not the aroma of a newborn’s crib. It was the dried stench of Mc.’s shirt in the backseat. Mc. must’ve taken it off the roof rack and slid it under my head as a pillow. But now it had fallen into the crook of my neck, where the vapors rose up like smelling salts. Amnesia gone, war on.
I jerked up in one motion, a man late for work, and saw that I was alone. The day was brighter than I’d seen since leaving the hotel, but small dark clouds moved like stones across the lake of sky. “Mc,” I said instinctively. The door cracked open and I tested my injured leg on the ground. The wound was tight as drum skin, but the pain was muted and I walk-limped to the front of the vehicle. “Mc.” A little louder as I three-sixtied the view. Nothing. In the far distance, what had to be an electrical tower standing at the end of things like a giant, lost giraffe. For a moment I guessed Mc. had to be out looking for the keys, but it wasn’t possible that I’d thrown them so far that finding them would lead to a disappearance. Had he abandoned me? Grown tired of my complaints and distrust? I viewed the landscape again, more rapidly, my heart beginning to trip like the heart of a child forgotten at a rest stop. It was a feeling I knew better than a simile.
I walked toward where I could best recall throwing the keys. In the daylight, the ground was easier to navigate without rolling an ankle. The road, or what was left of it, was devoured and pale. Even the macadam had had the color scared out of it by all the attacks. With each step I cast a glance back to the truck. Ever since R. had found me in the sea, I had been with someone, off and on, for the bulk of the last days. Being suddenly alone, without walls or weapon, without means of escape, felt like being naked from the inside out. Even my thoughts seemed exposed. They know I’m afraid, I imagined. Whoever’s out there, they are laughing. Waiting. And they already have the keys.
But they didn’t. I stepped right on them, and then I was the one laughing. And running back to the truck, get in, lock the doors, start the engine. I was explaining the actions to my body, just in case.
The engine turned over, and I put it into gear. Sideways, I thought. That’s the gear I wanted. That way I could sneak out of there without anyone noticing. First, clutch. Reverse. Clutch. First. Reverse. My right foot poised over the gas. But, unwilling to flex, I turned off the engine. Then the flat sun caught the top of the electrical tower like the wink of a beautiful woman, and I had my destination. As for Mc, wherever the hell he was, he’d have to walk.
I drove so fast, the light coming in through the side windows became nauseating. The truck’s shocks were shot, so the undercarriage scraped and sparked and my head met the thin metal roof often enough to leave more than a small impression.
The tower came closer and closer, and, on the tiny smooth patches of road, it seemed it was hurrying to me. The power lines that had formerly stretched for electric miles now hung like thin hair from the tower’s once-proud head. A hundred feet tall and useless, the tower offered no sanctuary. No strategic benefit, no nourishment or hideaway. It was simply a visible destination. And I hoped that, like the Sphinx, its mere presence would offer something new. Even if it was only more questions. I was beginning to feel protective of my questions. They were the only things that hadn’t abandoned me.
My speed and my distraction added up to my sudden arrival. Even slamming on the brakes couldn’t keep me from sideswiping the base of the tower and taking a deep dent in the passenger-side door. I left the engine running and got out. From directly below, the tower seemed more alive. Long metal beams like arms crossed and angry. Wide feet slanted in the earth, jointless legs rising to a torso of unbending steel. I had questions, but this tower had desires as well. It wanted to be climbed. And I needed the view.
