War, page 5
“I’m afraid,” I whispered, tears like communion into my mouth.
“It’s scary,” he said.
“No shit,” and we both laughed at the illicit word as if we were in church. “Where have you been?” I accused. “I really could’ve used you.”
“I’m here now.” The violence of his injuries had given his face a permanence, like a marble statue in a park. Weather-beaten but stronger than nature itself.
“But you’ll leave. You left me just now.”
“No,” and he said my name like a doctor calming a patient. “I just went back for this. You dropped it. You’ll need it.” He handed me my rucksack. I must have left it back at the mound where I’d met him. Or maybe I hadn’t taken a step at all.
“Where am I? Tell me now, in case you leave again. Or I get lost.”
“You are lost.” This time neither of us laughed.
“I don’t want to be. I want to be home. Not home. Just away. From this.” He didn’t answer. His eyes, purple and perfect, said what I already knew. “I don’t want to be anywhere,” I admitted.
“But you’re here,” the little boy said. Suddenly not my brother at all. Suddenly a shape without a shape. Not invisible. Not an outline but a presence, like fear or hope or faith. “Be here,” the emptiness said. Gone. Then all the nothing that was left spun around my face like a veil removed. And, in a flash, I knew which way to head.
For the first time since they’d corralled me at the train station and snuck me into this endless sentence, I could feel the earth under my feet. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know the name of the place. I knew it was a place. Where people had lived. Where the good, the bad, and the indifferent had made a history of their own. I was treading over destroyed history. Not an idea. But something people had sweated over, dreamed of. These streets were not designed for war, which was why they were so unrecognizable. An airstrip is an airstrip is a barracks is a cell. Things built for war are not transformed by war, they are oxygenated. Enlivened. That which they are doesn’t change, it only becomes effulgent.
Depending on the city, these streets had been freckled with bakeries and bookstores. Halal cafés or antique markets. I could sense that now. The destruction was uneven because nothing destroyed had been uniform. Surging condominiums had crumpled alongside squat bistros. The dead below my hurry were architects and schoolmates. Insurance men and charity workers. The homeless holding hands with diplomats. We are always one at death.
The hotel had insinuated that, but there were hotels everywhere. Airports. Suburbs. Factory towns. This hotel revealed itself only in its ruin. Multinational cash in the safe, proximity to buildings tall enough for a sniper to hide in their skeletons, in what seemed to be a medium-to-large city. I scanned my memory for details of the hotel. An outdoor pool but no indoor one. So odds were we were somewhere hot enough to make an indoor pool redundant. The curtains in the room were heavy brocade. To black out excessive sunlight, most likely. This was a sunny place before the pollution of violence blotted out the sun. The keys to our rooms were heavy and uncopyable, so the building was probably at least fifty years old, or it had been designed to look that way. Regardless, it was luxurious, so this was a wealthy metropolis. I checked off city after city in my head, as each criterion limited the field. And I walked. I was not afraid of Mc. anymore. My brother’s visit had made me feel as ethereal as he, and I gained confidence that I would sniff out Mc.’s laughing chicanery long before he had his bead on me.
Snipers’ bullets remained a threat, especially considering that whoever took out my sniper was likely still out there and still eager to ice another. But deeper was the newly abiding sense that I just wasn’t going to die. Not immortality — even after talking to my little brother, I didn’t lean on that. If I’d believed in heaven, I’d have confessed all and gone begging for land mines. This feeling was one of temporary shelter. That wherever I moved, a shield was following. The land mine was shy. The sniper fled. The hotel burned without waiting for my reservation. I was tramping around out here for a reason, and, until I found it, no bullet could craft its way in. It was a theory I could use for cover until the heavy stuff started to fall.
That was why I wasn’t afraid when I heard the singing. Why I instinctively walked toward it. It was coming from beyond what appeared to be a ridge to my left. I had yet to figure the poles, so left and right were still precious friends. The voices, and there seemed many, sang a wordless song. The harmonies were doleful, with a melody alighting atop the dirgelike foundation like a child running circles at a funeral. I keened my ear, thirsty for any language, but received only tonal beauty in return. Closer, louder. I knew soon I would either have to crawl on my belly or pull out a gun. The air threatened to clear. The ridge was a ridge of bones. And as I climbed skeletoned ribs like a ladder, the singing reached its climax. In the sick mist stood ten or more, shrouded in robes or shawls, their faces downcast. All but one held a solemn note as I bit my breath to keep from joining in. The melodist danced a soliloquy around his mouth and let it trickle out one note at a time. As if he were telling himself a secret again and again. Then he stopped.
And looked at me. Or looked at me and then stopped. It didn’t matter. They all stood in sudden silence, watching me like thin wolves spying unexpected prey.
I saw then what they were praying over. A body. I had in-dianed up on a funeral. Their silence and immobile eyes seemed to allow for an escape, but I could not move. Because the body they were mourning should have been mine. They were grieving over my sniper.
It is possible to be so afraid that you’re not afraid. Muscles clench so tightly that they become a new kind of strong. Like falling off a cliff and realizing that it isn’t falling at all. It is flying. It’s only the landing that changes your mind … so just don’t land.
That was the kind of flying I was doing as I climbed up and over the ridge of bones and down toward their solemn circle. They bore a resemblance to my sniper, but whether it was familial or sympathetic I could not discern. They remained silent as I hurtled toward them. And I was running. Like a fox fleeing the hunter. It seemed vital to reach the circle, be absorbed by it, so I wouldn’t be out in the terrible open anymore. I needed shelter, and, if it also meant death, then so be it. At least I would be noticed by other human beings. I wouldn’t be utterly anonymous. It would count until these individuals all decided to forget. I was running like a boy returning home.
I was guessing at that emotion. The one of a child rushing home for cookies, or summer, or to be hoisted up by a parent and slingshot into joy, shoulder to shoulder, hip to knee to giggling stomach, I’m home. Home had always been a place I’d slunk into, or snuck around. I’d learned how to be a spy long before they plucked me and my anger out of my life and into this war. Time had not uncommonly found me standing behind my father with his straightedge in my hand. I could have shut him up, or at least scared the hell out of him, a hundred times. OK, maybe three. But it gave me power, knowing I could do him in if he decided to go for my mother or brother or me. I could sneak up on anything.
I sneaked into the back of a cop car once, when I was thirteen, and sat there for more than an hour. Listened to two crew cuts talk about details it would take me years to realize were about sex. I could smell their coffee and sweat through the iron mesh as they sounded stupider with each passing comment. Boo, I’d longed to say. But I knew the fun would have been rapidly replaced by an arrest and more redundant pain at home. So I let the door half open be my warning. Hid behind a Pontiac until they realized they’d not been alone. They popped out, guns drawn, expletives like firecrackers in the asphalt night. I backed away, watching them argue and investigate like chickens after an egg theft.
Down this narrow hill I ran. Was I making a sound? A clicking of my tongue, perhaps, to mimic their mourning. A hum. A sound that would be the same in any language. I didn’t know what that word was.
Their hoods were not of cloth but their own hands, which were interlocked over their heads in grief. Those hands now fell to their sides. This was when they’d pull out their weapons, I realized. I pictured a dramatic demise, my bullet-pocked body stumbling its way down on top of my sniper. Dead like I should have been already. Destiny denied not a second longer.
“Stop,” I heard. It was English. They did understand English. But I couldn’t stop. My legs and heart were moving too fast to halt. When I was fifteen steps away from them, bones like treeless roots, turning my ankles as I came, they encircled my sniper. They thought I was attacking. They were afraid. They had brought no weapons to a funeral. No civilized man would. But we were in the fold between civilization and its discontents. They needed guns. I pulled mine.
“Stop,” I said, to myself. I didn’t want what I was trained to do. “Stop, goddamn it, stop!” I did. Inches from this wall of outstretched hands, this flesh barricade, fingernails for barbed wire. Flashing eyes for a silent alarm. My gun came to rest on an open palm. I put it away as an apology. “Stop,” I breathed, my words pale in the new charcoal atmosphere. “I … stopped.”
And that was enough for them. Because they began to sing again. The pinions of sorrow, dotted like i’s with the pianissimo melody. And as they sang they turned back around to face the corpse, keeping me on the outside. I tried to ease closer, but they seamlessly kept me behind and blinded. Their strange tallness added to my frustration. I circled to the left and found them gently rotating in that direction. Their arms were once again above their heads, but their torsos seemed to interlock at the ribs and seal me out completely.
So I sat down. My feet demanded it. I realized they were in the kind of pain I’d read about in books about war. A feeling of being flayed from within. A condition brought on by overuse, adrenaline, and bad shoes. I longed to peel my boots like browned banana skins, but I couldn’t reach them. A cramp climbed my shins, electrocuted my knees, seared my groin, and lit itself inside my belly. It was as if I’d been shot.
I looked up the moment I realized the singing had ceased. The mourners were gone. They had snuck out on me. I was the stupid cop, distracted by my pain. I could just see their outlines stuttering smoothly into the twilight. Their images made conjurable by the flames that had sprung up in front of me. My sniper was burning. The funeral was over, and now the pyre had begun to take. Whether it was a religious rite or practicality, my dark ghosts had found enough kindling to make a blaze. The smell of burning flesh wrinkled the air. My cramp worsened. I lifted my shirt to find that I had, in fact, been shot.
My sniper got me, but only because he was dead. He must’ve had a live round on his belt that the fire popcorned out and into me about an inch below my belly button, just beneath my S API. It was still sticking halfway out. I squeezed the molten blackhead and blood souped into my hands. We are made of goo, I thought. Goo and electrons. Impractical, foolish, vulnerable. And yet some of us find it extremely difficult to die. I stepped into the flames and dragged my sniper free. I thought I heard protests from the invisible far. A keening, worried cry. The mourners had noticed the silence of the fire, now denied its meal. They would be back, and this time with guns of their own.
The sniper was warmer than he had been in life, and his tendons and bones collected ash, postmortem tattoos. “Who are you?” I asked. “And I’ll leave you alone. I just need to know where I am.” The voices were now matched by sliding footsteps. I had only moments left with my totem. In his back pocket I found a wallet. The light was good enough to read by, but I wouldn’t have the time. I jammed the wallet into my waistband, the hot leather stinging my belly wound, and lifted my sniper. He was light as a kid. The heaviness of his soul now departed, I thought. The flames took his body gracefully, leaving me unmarked. By the time the mourners returned, they found they had nothing to worry about. Their compatriot was on his way to dispersal. And the interloper was gone.
Gone, but not forgotten. I heard them fire my gun after me. I checked my belongings. Sniper’s wallet, yes. My Beretta, no. My gun fired again, this time the whistle like a bully’s tease beside my ear. So on ruined, disobedient feet, I ran serpentine and forward. Or backward. Wherever. I laughed as I ran. Camouflage. If there was one thing this place didn’t expect, it was a genuine, hearty, tear-jerking laugh.
The first time I went to the beach was with a neighborhood family on a thunderstruck Memorial Day weekend. I was almost eleven, and, living as close to the beach as we did, I was given to make up elaborate stories of my ocean exploits in order to fend off inquiries from my tanned schoolmates every September. At five I killed a shark with a knife I held in my teeth. At seven I survived a wave that pulled me under for five, no, ten minutes. The September after my tenth birthday, I told a gripping tale of swimming with giant sea squid and schools of dolphins, etc. I figured out halfway through that this one big doozy was undoing the goodwill all the earlier stories had earned. I knew then I would have to become a better liar. I also believe that pity spawned by that story inspired little JJ to invite me to the beach with his family the following year.
JJ was the kind of boy they scouted for kid surfer-clothes advertisements. Even his freckles were blond. None of us knew at the time that drugs would poison everything sweet inside him and curdle it into cruel stupidity. In the fifth grade, JJ was the coolest, nicest kid any of us knew. JJ’s parents picked me up at school that Friday (my mom had packed, or rather overpacked, a bag for me that left me staggering by the bus circle). They treated me like a regular from the moment I opened the door. JJ pummeled me. His sisters touched my thick brown hair like doctors unsure of the diagnosis. His mother smiled at me so broadly that her soapy aroma wafted back like a visible cloud. JJ’s dad was losing his cherry-gray hair, and his bald spot crinkled when he spoke back over his shoulder to me. We drove, listened to music that was forbidden in my house, and did a weird number game that involved license plates, distances between towns, and somehow always guaranteed that JJ’s dad won.
Before we even got to their house on the water, I decided to use whatever legal means necessary to become a member of this family for life. The house was exactly the same as every other house on the block wherever it was in whatever town. I don’t remember anything about the house except that it was eighty-seven fast-running steps to the ocean. I opened the car door before we stopped, let my bag fall to the driveway beside me, and sprinted toward the foaming mouth of it like it was hungry for my dive. It wasn’t until I exhaled out of a wave and looked ashore that I realized I’d gone in with all my clothes on. JJ’s dad was laughing so hard his stomach shook beneath the cling of his shirt. The mom smiled and waved. And JJ peeled his pants like a healed patient peeling a bandage, and we were riding waves until the moon pushed us home. That night my breathing was shallow and my limbs ached. Maybe I was secretly a fish, I thought, and could fully breathe only in my natural habitat. Morning seemed a prison sentence away.
On Saturday it rained. The sisters stayed inside and built a dollhouse out of cereal boxes. The little brother ate the spillover and was later accused of swallowing their doll’s bedroom suite. The parents stayed in their bedroom, save for forays to the cocktail cabinet. And JJ watched TV. I couldn’t believe that a little water was keeping everyone from going in the water. After the fourth comedy-free cartoon in a row, and countless fruitless hints to get JJ beach-side, I left my new family and ran back toward the sea. The sand was deserted, save for two enormous women under an umbrella as useless as one you’d find in a drink. They bobbed under it at intervals, rationing their dryness. Until I took them both by the hand and led them into the ocean.
Happiness. That’s what it was. I didn’t have a name for it, because nothing that private had ever happened to me and also brought me … whatever the feeling was. It was like learning a language and becoming fluent in the same day. I told jokes to the fat women. One wore a green bathing cap festooned with stars. When she came out of the water, she glistened like a Christmas tree. She also taught me how to body surf, hands like an arrow, the wave my bow, beach as target. We competed, wave after wave, until she was too tired and I was too good. We waved to each other when they left as if we’d see each other at dinner. And still it rained. In wide, silvery drops it fell like kisses, kerplunking into silence against the endless surge. The ocean canceled out the rain, made it redundant. I expected JJ and his family to scamper out any second. I checked the windows after every wave, but only saw their bored silhouettes moving like moths trapped in a parked car. So I swam, and talked to myself about how awesome a time I was having, and memorized every grain of the experience because next week’s stories were not going to be lies. I didn’t need a knife and a shark and a near-death experience. I had, for the first time I could remember, exactly what I needed. It was what I was doing. I was satisfied.
JJ’s dad came out to get me. He wore a thin windbreaker emblazoned with ducks, and an expression that said he was sick of waiting. I’d seen it on my dad a thousand times, only my dad’s patience usually lasted about half a cigarette. When we all piled into the car, I thought it was for dinner. It was only when JJ’s brother yelped, “I hate the beach,” that I realized we were going home. It took every inch of lip and tooth to grind the tears away. I stared out the window pretending to play the number game again. It didn’t work.
“———‘s crying,” J J said. It was true, but the truth can still be a betrayal. I whipped around to let him know that he had broken the code, the combination of our new friendship. His shrug said he didn’t care. And that he’d be telling kids at school, too. That was the last time I had gone to the beach.
With the sniper’s wallet pressing against my weeping wound, and my feet feeling slammed with every step, I suddenly found myself sinking. Every step was a dent into mud thick as clay. I couldn’t see where I was, so I tried to reverse my direction. Sand again. Quicksand, I thought. A booby trap. Maybe this was Africa. This city was built on a jungle. I panicked only to fall deeper. I was now up to my knees, each lift and separation taking strenuous effort. My heart pounded in my belly. Blood crawled warm across and down onto my hips like a wide spider. I finally couldn’t lift my second leg and keeled forward onto my hands. I grabbed for the wallet to keep it above the suction of the earth. Useless and exhausted. I yielded and lay my face down onto the surface as my hands were sinking, too. Up to my elbow. This is how I will go, I thought. Neither victor nor vanquished. Just an unfinished sentence swallowed by the mouth of earth. Then it kissed my lips. Weakly, shy as a good-night. There was no aroma. The air was crow-black and smelled of the dead and their killers. Another kiss. Wetter. Saltier. Happiness, I thought. This isn’t the earth. This is the sea.
