War, page 4
“Thank you,” I finally said, and he turned back in time to watch the bullet enter his chest. I looked to see if I was holding a gun. He dropped to his knees, his strings cut, and pantomimed his death with dark grace. I held no gun, and felt forgiven. Then I crawled to my knees, coiled like a sprinter, and ran into the bulletproof air. He had taken my number in the checkout line. Today, I thought, I do not have to wait to die.
The first time I can remember getting into serious trouble was when I burned my little brother with hot chocolate. We were nine and four, walking through an outdoor zoo, the day as hard and mean as a blade. Our parents had drifted to warmer environs. My mother stood in the gift shop, looking at her reflection and the postcard rack, back and forth. My father stood at the edge of the lizard tanks, looking like a cousin, wrinkled and lethal, his tongue darting out to be rid of tobacco leaves.
My brother and I had been given hot chocolate to keep our gloveless hands warm, then pushed toward the polar bear exhibit as if we were bait. I kept tabs on my brother by listening for the shuffle of his boots, and waited for the mushroom clouds of steam to subside from the hot chocolate. But they refused. Apparently, our beverages had been heated by Satan, and any hope of actually drinking them had to be deferred until our college years. We found a bench across from the polars, for whom the day also seemed an insult. They hid in their caves and breathed plumes of smoke to rival our hot chocolates’. We seemed to be communicating like Indians across the expanse. And all of us were saying, “It’s fucking cold.”
But not the hot chocolate. It refused the cold, dared it. Absorbed it without yielding. My brother and I found out when he pulled on my sleeve, inviting the chocolate in a cascade across his little legs. His thin corduroys were like paper towels, pulling the liquid through without delay. And my sweet little brother screamed so loud, all the animals went silent. All except my father, who slithered fast as a Komodo across the icy walk and lifted me with a fist that was both removal and a punch. My apology clotted just before it reached my throat. He left my screaming brother to my mother. She’d soothe while he satisfied his own anger by having a target and an excuse.
My brother’s wounds took two weeks to heal. I pondered suing the hot chocolate maker, even called up the zoo in a disguised voice, calling myself a name I thought sounded scary. But the response was always the same. “It’s the weird kid again.”
Little brother apologized to me, aware that his tug on my sleeve had given me a double shiner and a wheezy cough from where Father squeezed my chest so hard. “It’s not either of our faults,” I explained. “It’s the goddamn hot chocolate people. And they don’t even care.” We swore to never drink hot chocolate again. No hot beverage of any kind, in fact. Which would go on to cause us to covertly slip ice cubes in our soup at dinner for at least a year. Until we eventually simply forgot.
That’s what I was thinking as I ran across the rubble and the road. All the things I had forgotten. They seemed to rush up at me from all sides, like traffic finally freed. I should have been concentrating on a place to dig in, or hide, or even a coward’s sprint back to the hotel. But with every step another memory spidered up my spine. Sledding off our roof on snow days, landing on a ramp I’d built. Landing smooth and feeling the wind up my nostrils, the falling snow kissing my open eyes, adding to their whiteness. Another step and my brother’s funeral, the casket surrounded by men in suits I did not know. They formed a circle strong as a cult, and I could not see what was left of him. My mother kept her back to the altar and helped seat people like a movie usher. There seemed the smell of popcorn in the air. But I needed to stop remembering. When I got to the end, I’d die like my enemy. I needed to have no past to erase if I wanted a future.
I looked up for the first time since I’d started running. The fog was just as unyielding as before, but it had bloomed brighter. The sun must have finally come out. I gazed skyward, eager to track direction and time like a good, frightened soldier. The light did not seem to be coming from above. But around. Just like the heat. I had run myself directly into the center of a fire. I couldn’t discern what it was that was burning down around me, or if it was even a thing. The aromas of metal and flesh and oil had shaved into one sense. A sting. To breathe was pain, but it was not educational. The only way to find my way out of the flames was to walk more closely to them.
Heat bubbled my skin, taking fine hairs like a first crop. The rubber of my boots blistered and adhered to my feet. I was glad to be alone, because if I had spoken, my face would have torn open at the seams from the heat. I was made of paper and twigs. My bones kindling, my flesh aching to be ash. OK, I thought, this is who I’ve become. A man unafraid of his own cremation. I walked and walked, my eyebrows curling into gone. My tongue warm. My thighs prickly as my brother’s long-ago burns. One last step, I promised, and it won’t hurt anymore. One. Last. Step. Instead, I fell laughing into the water. I laughed because even before I hit the liquid, I knew where I was. I caught a glimpse of the ruins of the fire escape. That’s what made me laugh. Fire. Escape. Didn’t know I was actually on fire until the water put me out. Then I decided to stay under. Like a baptism. Fire and water. As if I would surface brand-new. When, gasping, I did, the only new thing was the knowledge. The hotel was gone.
I put out the fire one bucket at a time. I used an ice bucket from the bar, kicking it into the pool to cool it, then dumping water on every maw of fire until the air was once again toothless and gray. Whatever had bombed us had dropped and deployed, and it was clear from what I found inside, the assault had come without warning.
B.’s torso sat at one end of the cafeteria, a fork still in his hand. His dinner and legs sat untouched on the steel table, its temper impervious to the flames. K. and L. were downstairs in the billiard room. The explosion had sealed them below, and both died with their mouths sucking for clean air from the bottom of the door. They were Siamese close, arms interlocked, faces black as burned chicken. I found the rest scattered about the hotel. Some too burned to identify save for the room or an unmelted ring. Others died with their hands over their ears, as if what they didn’t hear wasn’t happening.
I was able to dig enough holes in the rubble with the ice bucket to set all of the men at least a few feet below the hell they’d died in. It was the most I’d ever felt like a soldier, burying my platoon like God was watching and their families were, too. I was about to utter a wordless prayer when I finally did my math. One body was missing. Mc.’s.
I raced through the ruins like a game of hide-and-seek. Even was foolish enough to call out his name. But he was not there. First, a mad rush of relief. He was alive. They hadn’t gotten him. I still had an ally, someone worth venturing back out to look for. Then, an elevator’s descent of grief. He’d already died. He was sickly when I’d left, and hadn’t made it through. He was already buried on the grounds. This was the saddest death of all.
I returned to the graves and feigned crossing myself. Whatever protection these men had needed had soured and expired. With the earth saturated with wet embers and a wind beginning to spin at my feet, I decided to stay the night. Or day. It didn’t matter. Time had become as meaningless as a stranger’s face. The only part of the hotel that hadn’t been completely destroyed was the subbasement. Built with reinforced concrete and steel, it had survived the onslaught nearly unscathed. Even the stairwell leading down was only dusted with debris. I snaked past wires that dangled like nooses, around the generators and heating system. The AC hub and electrical hot boxes. I had never been this far down, and the air was remarkably clear. My flashlight guided me to the janitor’s supply closet, where a mop and bucket uselessly stood guard.
Deeper still I wandered, my flashlight curious as an aardvark’s nose. Doors hid nothing. R. had long ago emptied the place of supplies for our use. Then to the farthest corner and one last door. It had been glass, now shattered, and the doorknob jimmied off. I eased in, suddenly afraid. I didn’t like pieces that didn’t fit. A glass door among all this metal. A missing doorknob. More chaos was not what I needed. Even as I yearned to see this final corner of what had been my home, I yearned more deeply to run away again. To be dodging bullets and mines, fighting fires, talking snipers into dying. I did not want this cramped office, shards of glass. This alone.
The brand name was famous. I recognized it from a thousand heist movies. The definition of excellence. The one that no one could crack. Four feet by three feet of impenetrability. But this safe was open. Not by a drill or dynamite but by the combination. It was also full. Stack upon stack of dollars. And euros. And yen. And yuan. I’d been needing a clue about location, but all these notes gave me were impossible riches and nowhere to spend them.
I emptied the safe, counting the money out of boredom. I stopped when it went into millions and I wasn’t a third of the way through. Then I reached into the dark back of the empty safe and knew why I’d been afraid. Into my hand fell three detonators. The flashpoint trigger mechanisms used to light plastic explosives. And behind them, a fresh batch of C-4, Semtex. The package was open, with just enough missing to make it clear. The goods R. had told us we’d be getting a shipment of. A shipment that had never arrived. He’d complained about it enough to make it true. I checked the box. No military markings. Just a box full of boom and no sender to return it to. As my shaking hands made a stuttering silhouette against the wall, I realized why Mc. wasn’t upstairs among the dead. He hadn’t come back to recuperate from some unseen horror. He had gone out to gather that which he was missing (hence the burns on his fingers, from handling raw chem), and he had come back playing broken to blow us all to hell.
Now I had an enemy. Now I had a war. And the beginning of my fury was aimed at me. How could I have fallen for the bluster and bravado? For his stammering address and his baseless confidence? Was I so in need of a hero that I chose a fool? Yes, he had added color to a bullet grayness that armored my days, but wasn’t I smart enough to recognize that he’d come back a faker? A TV version of shell shock. The slack mouth. Dull eyes. And he’d even winked his good-bye to me, as if he’d gotten away with something before he’d even dared it.
Asshole. Dupe. Slave, I chastened myself while I gathered supplies for my exodus. My search-and-destroy mission. Anger gave me light. X-ray vision. I took the detonators, scattered meals from the melted kitchen (government food is built to survive the nuclear option), and enough water to keep me quenched until. Until what, I didn’t know. I had no plan for my encounter with Mc. No particular map to guide me to him. I simply knew that having a target, and this sweet bile of revenge on the back of my tongue, had given me an energy I hadn’t felt since the first Run. Or killingY. Maybe I was truly good at killing. Created for it. Everything around me seemed to die, whether I wished it or hoped against it. Brother. Father. All my comrades at the hotel. Even the sniper who spared my life. I was contagious with death. And I felt like infecting Mc.
With my rucksack ready, I walked upstairs to where the door used to be, looked back one final time at the ruination, and memorized the mayhem. “Mc,” I actually spoke. “Here I come.”
Can you have a destination if you don’t know where you are going? And if you get there, is it luck, destiny, or the same fucking thing? I left the hotel thinking I had a target and within moments felt I was all target. Not to anonymous snipers anymore, or nefarious enemies TBD. But I pictured Mc, sitting on a pile of detritus, lighting a cigarette on the embers of a dead man’s clothes, waiting for me to present close enough for a kill shot. So I walked serpentine, silly as a movie I’d laughed at as a kid. What was I doing out here? Why wasn’t I stuck in the dead-end job, swapping gossip with po-faced coworkers? Why wasn’t I lamenting gas prices and the mortgage crisis? Where were my wife, toys in yard, broken Jacuzzi, ants down the hallway wall? Back home I had felt nothing, but to trade it for this … something emptier than nothing. Existence without markers. Highway without exits. Fear without meaning. That was it. I was afraid, but my fear was untethered. I wasn’t afraid to die but scared nonetheless. Perhaps I was already dead, and this was the dreadful unwinding of eternity. Hell wasn’t other people. Hell was yourself, forever, waiting to encounter other people who wanted you dead. War isn’t hell, I realized. Hell is war.
I was suddenly filled with a desperation to know where I was. I felt as though I would drown in the muddled air if I didn’t find a road sign, an emblem, a detail that said this is here and not somewhere else. If I knew the city, even if I’d never been there, I figured I could bluff my way. This way’s the river. This was the capitol building. Famous hospital. Local university. Playground donated by a man rich enough to have his memory bronzed. And then forgotten.
I slowed my rapid pace to snoop like a metal detector sniffing the sands of Miami Beach. I’d avoided this on my first sortie from the hotel because I didn’t want to see limbs and heads as the only signposts. But burying pieces of my company had cured me of that. I began to look at everything as parts. The parts make the whole. The whole is made up of parts. Each is identifiable without the other. A finished building hides its ingredients. A single bolt holds within it the promise of its endgame. Look. No, don’t look. See.
Archaeologists build careers out of shards of pottery. That was what I needed. Items of common use. A plate. A bowl. A Japanese temple. A hand-worn Hebrew bible. Chinese fortune sticks. A Russian doll.
“What are ya looking for?” The voice didn’t startle me as much as it should have. I thought I was talking out loud to myself.
“Proof,” I said.
“It’s not here,” the voice said. It was higher and happier than mine. I jerked up and put my hands in the air like the loser in a kung fu movie. “Nothing left here,” it said. “You need to go further in.” I tried to calculate if Mc. could pinch his voice into such a register. In the invisible light, anything seemed possible.
“Where are you?” I shouted, lowering my arms to feel my way.
The answer was a hand slipped into mine. It was a boy, maybe twelve. He was small, but his face was crisscrossed with enough scars to make it look like mended cloth. He spoke through lips that had only recently healed. “This way, then.”
“I can’t go with you,” I spat, angry as a teacher, helpless as a student. “I am still looking.”
“I can take you there.” His eyes were purple. The color of grape.
“No,” I said, meaning yes. Meaning please, meaning breathe for me. Anything but no.
“I’ve taken others,” he said, and now we were walking. His pull was powerful, and his hand, though resting softly in my larger palm, was strong as a rudder.
“But I need to find a man. He killed …” I stopped, wanting to protect this ravaged man-child from any more disconnected tragedy.
“Everybody has killed.” His voice like water over rocks. “I have killed. You have killed.”
“How do you know?”
“Everyone knows,” and I almost thought I heard him say my name. It was my adhered boots crushing a ceramic remain. A bowl, I thought, even as I let him lead me deeper into the murk. As I forgot to ask him our location.
“What is your name?” I said, suddenly unable to look at his map of scars.
“I,” he said and fluttered a laugh out like an escaping dove in a magic trick. “It’s a funny name, that’s why …”
“Are you the last one … of your kind?”
“There are others,” he said. I slowed down so I could take in more of him at an angle. He wore material more than clothing, and his feet were shod in tar. His hair was long and too filthy to be saved. Only if it were shaved would it yield its true color. His left ear, beneath the matted locks, was at least half missing.
“You can hear me?”
“The other one’s extra good.” Then we were walking faster. If my size hadn’t allowed me to take one step to his three, I would have been running. Yet his gait looked unhurried to the eye. My lungs burned with sulfur and dust. I began to formulate a hundred questions to ask him, but asthma clouded my trachea and I traded words for breath. The more difficult it became to breathe, the easier it became to see. Up ahead, less than a football field away, the sun seemed to actually be the sun, and it was reflecting down on an area covered in foliage. Trees heavy with green leaves. A circle of flowering shrubs and plants. A veritable garden in the middle of all this death. I wanted to sprint toward it, press all the pure green against my face and feel its organic life. As we drew closer, I could see birds on potted plants. The orange of a bird of paradise, the white of a calla lily, a violet’s own bright blue.
“We should run,” I said. “Before …” But I was alone. My hand held no hand. The air behind me was thick as quicksand and it stole my eyesight. I called the boy’s name once. Then didn’t have the heart to say it again. Or to turn back around. There were no flowers and fruit trees on the horizon. Just more blowback and loss. The misery of the mirage hangover leaked through my body until I had to sit down. Jagged edges pressed through my pants, and I pushed against them, eager to be cut.
“What are you doing?” the boy asked, back at my side.
“It isn’t fair to torture me,” I pleaded. “You aren’t real. The sunshine. The forest. Whatever the hell … Go away. You’re leading me the wrong way anyway.”
“No. I’m not.” He said this with such authority that I had to look at him. The sun that had lit the imaginary field now lent him a shaft to illuminate his wholeness. His face through the windshield, I realized. Half an ear. His feet of tar from the melted street. My brother. My sweet baby brother. He let me pull him close, as sobs fought their way out of me, breaking things on the way. He stroked my head with his shattered hands, sang me a song I had lullabied him to sleep with a decade ago. “You are my hiding place. You always fill my heart, with songs of deliverance whenever I am afraid …”
