War, page 15
I was glad for it, that much was certain. It was an enclosed refuge and housed at least the possibility of rest for my suddenly pain-encased feet. I didn’t know how far I had gone on my dash, but the blisters and twinges below my ankles said that I had gone far enough.
I stepped up onto its metal steps, expecting the door to slide open for me. Instead, the mirrored glass failed to show me my reflection or open. I imagined the far-off sound of the violent tribes approaching to motivate the strength I would need to get inside. Two elbow jabs to the glass broke only my elbow, or nearly. I jammed my fingers into the thin space between metal and rubber, using them as tiny crowbars, until they almost snapped off too. Some hiding place. I couldn’t even get inside.
I stepped back down and quickly circled the train like a man in a hurry to buy a used car. The outside didn’t promise much of an interior. It looked like a workaday commuter line, silver as an old filling, graffitied like a high-school kid’s backpack or, in more recent time, like a high-school kid’s skin. All the way around I hustled until I could see that the roof had a hatch. It had been damaged in whatever mishap had befallen this vehicle, and its mangled orifice was aimed at the sun. It caught just enough light to reflect an invitation.
A running start propelled me up off the top step to just the bottom lip of the roof. I pulled it down nearly into a frown as I armed and legged it up and over. The hatch had been crushed open, but not wide enough for a man. I needed leverage, but I was too tired to provide my own, so I leaned against the slim opening and gave up. For a while I pretended that giving up had been the whole damn point. That this entrance was the type that only yielded to a coded touch, a gentle knock, never panicked force. The small of my back would simply need to apply the perfect percentage of pressure, and the entire hatch would open wide as a lion’s mouth, and I would be swallowed into a softer, safer world. No.
Then I recalled a cartoon I had seen as a child where a man kept encountering wall after wall on his morning walk. It seemed profoundly unjust, even in my early youth, that this innocent lank should be forced to scramble over one impractical wall after another. He wasn’t training for an event. He wasn’t escaping a prison. He was just trying to go for a goddamn walk. But still the walls came, each higher than the last, and each scaled by his relentless optimism and dwindling strength. Until he dared to be happy. Dared to celebrate the scaling of one particular wall. For soon his punishment would be the highest wall of all. So he gave up. I still remember vividly how I’d clapped for him at that moment. Out loud in the theater, confusing my brother into clapping along, to which he’d added a couple of woo-hoos. Yet I wasn’t clapping encouragement. I was clapping his decision to end his walk. Fucking walls, enough of you. Sit down, attaboy. Have a rest. I turned to my mother and said, “Good.”
“Shhh,” she gently breathed. “It’s not over.”
“Over!” my little brother exclaimed, clapping again, but directly in front of his nose like an organ grinder’s monkey. Sadly, she was right. It wasn’t over. My long-legged friend stood up. And instead of walking back home for a little cold soda and a change of shoes, he started, the stupid son of a bitch, to climb the wall. “No,” I protested. “That’s not the way it … the way it needs to end.”
“You tell that,” my mother said, leading us by the hand out of the theater like a butcher carrying slippery chickens, “to the animator the next time you see him.” The credits were rolling as I yanked a peek back at the screen. The words moving fast and meaningless upon its shimmering blackness.
“That’s not fair,” I said, still turned toward the screen.
“Two movies and a cartoon seems OK fair to me. How about you, nubbin?” She asked my blissful baby brother for backup, and he provided it with a spectacularly grateful smile. But I wasn’t sad we were leaving. I was sad that the poor schmuck kept climbing. Hadn’t he learned what was on the other side of that wall?
So on the top of the train car, I decided to really give up. Because even if I did crank open the hatch with adrenalized strength, there would only be another hatch or door or lock to jimmy or pick or explode. No, I was going to give up. If for no other reason than to see what happens when you really surrender.
“I give up,” I announced. My voice bounced off the metal like a flat snore. I liked the way it sounded coming out of my mouth. Ironically confident. Shyly sure. I. Give. Up.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “Not this time.” The hatch began to open. From the inside.
It had been probably seven years, but she looked almost identical. Her hair was shorter, so I knew she had become a mother, and the skin around her eyes had grown more transparent with time. A tiny blue vein pulsed just beneath the surface of one. She backed down the small ladder that led inside the train. She even kept a hand on my leg as I dropped down in. We were in the dining car. It wasn’t a commuter. Tables replaced regular seating and the galley was visible behind her, halfway down the car.
“They said you might come,” she said. “I wasn’t sure how long to wait.” I was too undone by her face to ask who or why. The dent at the top of her nose. The dust of freckles cinnamoning across her left cheek. Her neck long and white as a candle, with her lovely face the flame. “You’re shaking,” she worried, and guided me toward one of the dining tables. The chairs were molded plastic, but they felt like the deepest leather as I sat myself down.
“I’m cold,” I lied. These were the shakes of shame. Of corruption. Of walking into a church when I should have been walking into a prison. Of how much I had disappointed her but far more how deeply I had disappointed myself. Who walks away from this (I scraped the question across my brain to dig the deepest trenches) and chooses war? I wanted to be nineteen in the sugar-sweet rain and dumb in love again. Not ruined and useless, the object of pity. I was shaking so fast because I was desperately trying to shed my skin.
“It’s warm in here,” she offered, instead of her coat or an embrace. “You’ll feel better.”
I wasn’t sure if she used only words because she didn’t want to be too near to me or she trusted they would be enough. “W-w-what are you doing?” I chattered through clicked teeth. “Here?”
“I was sent. I was asked for.” Her tone gave away no surprise, neither at the request nor the reality.
“They said, ‘Come meet him? He’s in a train?’”
“On a train.”
“You’re still funnier than I am,” I said.
“Everyone’s funnier than you. It was one of my favorite things. If I could make you laugh …” And she let out a hopeful breath that seemed to bloom as it traveled. By the time it hit my ears, it tickled.
“Now I’m laughing and shaking,” I said, “like a lunatic.”
“Lunatics are all right.” She smiled, her fingers playing an invisible chord on the tabletop. “At least they love one thing … with everything.”
“But the moon can’t love them back,” I ricocheted.
“Then I guess I was the lunatic.” The weight of memory bowed her head. We were quiet for a while. I eyed the empty train. It seemed possible we could ride things out here inside this useless hunk of steel. If there was food, she wouldn’t have to go back. To wherever she now belonged, with whomever had brought her.
“I missed my life,” I said. “I came out here to kill and all I’ve wanted to do is die. And even that I can’t get done. I missed my whole life.” She didn’t look up, but her shoulders gave away that she was crying. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I kidnapped you. Should’ve just let you be.”
“No.”
“OK,” I allowed. “Thanks.”
“I’m all right now. A little boy. And girl. Bangs. Cowlicks. Days full of playgrounds. I’m all right.”
“Good,” I said, and I meant it. I also noticed that I’d stopped shaking. “Husband, I guess.” Biting down hard to keep my voice from cracking.
“Yes.”
“Not a lunatic, right?” I said to my impossibly, imperfectly beautiful ex-wife. “I bet he knows how to love many things.” She exhaled her yes, stretched out her hand and almost touched me.
“Look at you. You’re …”
“War,” I said. “At least now the inside and the outside match.” She rose as quickly as a bird scared from a branch, quick-stepped to the galley, and began searching for something amid the crooked shelves and smashed glass. I peered out the window to the clatter of her investigation. Outside the tribes collided.
Using blade and barrel, they slaughtered each other. Bone into bone and blood in the air like an afterthought. I crossed the aisle to watch the carnage from my trackless sanctuary. The war was old now, or old enough to unleash final weapons. Arrows, Molotovs, chains to necklace a man to death. Bodies fell like drunks until it was impossible to decipher who was finishing whom. Then a noise. A wail like a trumpet blast, an air-raid horn, but one born inside the head.
I slammed my palms over my ears for protection, and still they ached like tetanus. My ex steadied herself against the aural assault, words streaming from her mouth, all unheard. The soldiers outside fled, or covered themselves in bodies first and then crawled out and fled this plague of noise. Just as I dared to shout against it, it fell as if from a cliff and splashed down without a sound.
I hustled to her side, and we fell into seats, shaking our heads and rubbing our jaws. “Ouch,” she said. “What was that?”
“Loud,” I said. “That was loud.”
“Uh-oh. You were just funny.”
I laughed. I laughed like a kid who knew what was in the box before even shaking it. Like an old man who finally catches the fish of a lifetime and there is no one around to show. Oh yeah, and he’s a notorious liar, so he knows no one will believe. Yes. I laughed like that. Then she laughed, and I even louder, until we were laughing only to not have to stop laughing, to not have to face the silent car, the ruined corpses, the mad impossibility of this fractured, gorgeous interlude.
“We shouldn’t stay,” I finally said. “They’ll come back to collect their dead and …”
“I know.”
“What are you looking for?” As answer she set up on the table a roll of paper towels, a bottle of water, and a bar of soap, blue as menthol and stronger in scent. “You want me to clean the place up before we go?” I laughed again, this one sad. “I don’t think the next renters will be by for a couple of generations.” I finished the joke slowly, knowing that good-byes were on the other side of it. My throat clotted with years of noes. Of anger and pressure and grief the size of the globe. I swigged the water, but most of it fought its way back up.
“I have to go,” she said. Tears tricked the seal of my eyelashes as she handed me the towels and soap. “I can’t do this for you.” She wept. “But please …” Her face on my cheek left the gentlest scar. “Wash as if I am.”
I went straight to work, peeling off my clothes like a beech tree hungry for clean winter. With my boots unstuck, my soles tingled electric on the train-car floor. Naked, I doused the soap with water and lathered up a sudden foam. I did the first arm in a hurry, then allowed her request to take root. My hands eased, my muscles uncramped, and I, slowly and as close to tenderly as I could get, washed myself clean.
The soap rivered through the blood and mud cake of my wound. I pushed in with a necessary pain and sent thank-you to my hawk for how he’d guaranteed I still had a limb to cleanse. I washed my feet, between the toes, brushed the soap over my heels until they were slippery enough to skate on.
I took my time, picturing my ex doing my back as I unstuck inches of grit and battle dust. I rubbed my neck like a kiss and remembered the last one we’d ever had. In a driveway. She, off to work, not knowing. I, waiting for her tail-lights to vanish so I could coward away. Only this time the kiss was good and safe. This time the kiss wasn’t the last, it was the first.
I said her name while I washed my hair, then used nearly all the water to rinse myself done. Standing in inches of filthy water, the suds brown between my toes, I stepped clear and doused my feet with what remained. I was wet and new as a summer baby. I didn’t want to look up because I knew she would be gone.
“Your face,” she said from the far doorway. I could see only her back, her shyness another precious gem in her crown.
“You can’t go that way,” I told her, even as the metal door slid open at her touch.
“You forgot.” Only her voice now. “Your face.”
“I didn’t forget,” I said, touching the place her hand had been. Feeling that, beneath the grime, it was already clean.
The door closed after she vanished. And I stood there trembling, dripping, waiting for her to have left. Instead, the shivers returned. I dressed, yanking stiff clothes over new, cool skin. Boots last, and I was a soldier again, or at least I looked like one. All dressed up and nowhere to run.
“———.” It was her full name. It sounded like the answer to a question. “I don’t give up.” The longest silence. Nothing. Just me, bathed, alive in the food car. That was when I should have been laughing. I looked up at the hatch I had climbed through and took aim. It was still open the same original sliver, and it would not give an inch. Shoulders, back, legs, all forcing. Nothing. FUCK I wanted to say. Instead, against my will, I repeated, “I don’t give up.”
“Good,” she said. And with my left hand I lifted the hatch, climbed out onto the roof of the train. The sun had found a hammock in the horizon, and the late light seemed to melt the place where I was standing. I started walking. My feet even felt better. Walking away from the scattered bodies and my hideaway train. Faster, and I was thinking, I know what I said to my ex back there, but please, somebody, whoever … No more walls.
“But you said,” my ex reminded me. Immediately.
“OK, OK. Walls. Bring on the fucking walls “
The sky was dragon-skin blue as night chased day like a monster. But somehow on this evening it didn’t seem dark out at all. The atmosphere had a sheen to it, the air above filled with refulgent light.
Was I in Jerusalem, walking an ancient road, now destroyed by Armageddon? I didn’t have the Sunday-school knowledge to faithfully answer the question, but I did remember the mention of wars and rumors of wars. Had it all come so quickly? Perhaps I was walking toward the Holy City and would encounter a berobed and bearded original who could pencil in the gaps. Maybe there’d be a star to guide me, the idiot shepherd with nothing better to do than leave his flock and go searching for the King.
I suddenly felt that, being faithless, I lacked a piece of armor or, at the very least, a map. A rudimentary understanding of the possibilities. How could I know it was the end of the world without having paid any attention during the end-of-the-world discussions? It seemed both unfair and absolutely deserved.
The fact was, my life had prepared me for nothing. I had never learned to enjoy things. To treasure people or circumstances. I had calendared from one anger to the next. My years before the hotel had prepared me for one thing. To kill. The death of my brother should have made me spurn mortality, long for life and its discontents. Instead I’d romanticized and romanced death. I sniffed it out like an airport dog. Fd arrayed myself in the glamour of it so that, by the time I said yes to these assholes, there was no life in me. I was unconscious and conscience-free. I was eager to obey and find direction in my directionless life. Let me point my fury. Point, aim, and fire. They gave us dog tags not to identify the living but to separate the dead.
I tried to make a list as I walked of all the things I had wanted to do with my life. I didn’t need a pen because there was nothing to write down. Perhaps I could make a few up. Senator. Album-cover designer. Cooper. Bartender. Short-order cook. Street-corner evangelist. Tugboat captain. Ball-hog soccer player. Mediocre cellist. Detective first grade.
But these weren’t identities, they were jobs. Was I my father’s son? My mother’s worry? My brother’s keeper? Failed on that account. Was it the true me who asked the ice cream girl to marry me, or was it me in the driveway, kissing her off and gone? Don’t say both. I did both, yes, but only one could be true. I didn’t want to be split in half. If I was shit, let me be shit till it’s all shit and I could blend in. Or let me be light. Dare I even say it? I didn’t want to dream I could be like my ex, like my brother, even my mother, because then I might want to live, and the landscape in front of me was still looking like a cemetery without tombs.
I stepped on something big as my foot, and it crumbled beneath my weight like a beached horseshoe crab. I didn’t stop to see if it was a human forearm. I was thinking too much, examining, trying to understand. I could have saved time by lighting a flare and sticking it in my mouth to help the enemy end my too-long night.
But the question remained … Who was my enemy? I’d watched the tribes pierce each other through as if they enjoyed it, yet I’d recognized nothing but the color of their blood. That, we all shared. Bright red, then back in the air and on the ground. When we went we only knew how to paint one picture. Maybe it didn’t matter anymore.
War is a cycle of viciousness and revenge that never ends. A Möbius strip of mayhem and misunderstanding that generates only burials and insurrection. And yet, for all the emptiness and futility, I still found myself yearning to be somewhere. Comprehending something. Even if the news turned out to be all bad, I continued to search the dial. Not out of hope. Out of necessity. Because as long as limbs, brain, and heart were working, I seemed utterly incapable of lying down and dying.
Up ahead, what had to be a line of trees looked like a dead heat of galloping horses. The bright-blue light of the evening was vanishing as they ran from the approaching tsunami of darkness. It came so fast, there wasn’t time to prepare for the blackout. An eclipse? That felt biblical, too. But there hadn’t been a moon visible to eclipse since I’d arrived. I sat down to wait it out. The ground around me was soft to the touch, with the give of hot fudge, and it took every effort to keep me from shoveling a fistful into my mouth. My stomach pinched itself tighter in obedience, and I waited for the eclipse to pass. It did not. I lay down. This is not lying down and dying, I reminded myself. This is just lying down.
