War, page 7
By the time I realized how high I’d climbed, I couldn’t see R. anymore. The snow was sideways and wide, and I had little visibility to go higher. It took a shiver to tell me I was cold. A bracelet of wires around the bony wrists of remaining concrete was frozen over. The snow wasn’t coming from the sky above. It was coming from this floor.
A snowmaker? Not countless floors up in a city high-rise. That was for mountain resorts, for the rich to outwit the weather. It was windy too, and my footing gave way like an awkward skater’s. Memories shoved down and vanished as I walked toward the unknowable again. As I remembered I was at war. Whatever that meant. But it did mean strangers wished me ill. Unseen strangers. And that man had invented ten thousand ways to kill, and if this was one I hadn’t seen before, then all the better to kill me with. I tasted the passing snow. Tongued it for traces of poison, as if I could discern.
The chill was so confusing and my steps so uneasy that I didn’t know I’d reached the source until I’d gotten there. My hand touched freezing metal. Went to scrape off a ramp of snow and got burned. Not frostbite. The burn of a searing-hot cauldron took three layers of fingertip and palm before I could pull away.
I swallowed my scream, now certain I was in enemy territory, and slipped down below the snow. I was flat on my back, looking up at a blizzard shooting out above me. My hand scissored with pain. I jammed it into a mound of snow to soothe it. Instead, the snow melted, and the burn raged.
What was it coming out of, a hole in the side of the sky? I slid backward under the snow, and within moments the floor was firm. No ice! No chill. And no blinding blizzard.
In front of me was a two-hundred-fifty-pound bomb nestled like a baby in the manger of the building’s cooling system. A dangerous baby. Because the bomb had not exploded yet.
Its thermal-heated core was still cooking. And its proximity to the building’s enormous rooftop cooling system, still operating on fail-safe despite loss of power, had created its own front. War makes weather, too, I thought, darkly impressed. War is the ultimate possessor. War doesn’t destroy. It makes everything else into war.
I looked at my hand. The skin was purple with visible capillaries pumping like trapped insects in my fingertips. Part of my palm was missing from heel to thumb. I could see the snow was growing thinner on the other side. The bomb was heating. It would reach climax no matter how cool its target appeared to be.
Run. Run, I barked at myself, but I couldn’t. This swollen bomb, hungry to burst, was as mesmerizing as the sun. I wanted to see it rip open, throw its seeds across the white-sick air. I didn’t want to die, just see how this piece of metal fruit made people die. Who built this? What engineer dreamed it, craftsmen formed it, politician celebrated it, taxpayer funded its mass production, allocation, and ultimately its definition … boom. It was formed to come apart. Obsolescence in its own circular perfection. I stared, a visitor to the museum of this war. I’d paid for my ticket. I wanted to see the finale.
Then the bomb practically lifted its skirt and revealed itself to me. It had been covered in its own snow, but the heat was so intense now, the floor felt like cheese beneath me. It was the country’s flag above the weight demarcation. Three colors I had memorized in my training, but in sixth-grade geography class, not at the hotel. And then below the flag, another tattoo silvered into view. This one read “Made in the U.S.A.” That finally got me to run.
Back down through the snow, which was now more like sleet, slicking every surface. I fell into a tangle of wires, then shoulder first into a rebar so bent it appeared to be flexing its bicep. Metal pinched and tore at me, leaving fresh gashes and welts. Beautiful by the pool, I told myself. So many stories to tell. Just get down, get R., and have a mouth left to tell them with. But how many flights had I climbed? The building accordioned up at me, and, despite minutes of rapid descent, I still couldn’t see my CO.
The snow was now rain down this low. And the sun muscled farther up over the weighted horizon. Four seasons in one day. “R.!” I yelled, not afraid to draw fire now. This entire block would be barbequed before anybody could get lucky with a shot. “R.!”
“What?” He turned, only fifteen feet away. “The hell ya yelling for?” The melted snow had flattened his hair to his head. He looked like a middle-aged man in the middle of a haircut. I didn’t have time to explain, so I rag-dolled him up and squeezed his wounded wing to ensure he obeyed.
“Bomb,” I said, and then he was helping, too. We scrambled back the way we’d entered, even though it had been a hot spot hours before.
“Size?”
“Two-fifty.”
“Shit.”
We scrambled out, and as soon as we cleared the first line of vision, the bullets started. “Don’t these fuckers have anything better to do?” R. bellowed. He sounded like my father stuck in traffic. “You’re all gonna die, assholes,” as a bullet whizzed by my ear loud enough to scare out the wax. We stayed low, serpentined, did everything the good book said, and it was working. The shooters were missing like drunks at a carnival.
“There’s always one duck they miss, soldier,” R. growled, in sync with my thoughts. “Let’s be that duck.” Faster, and now it seemed I was hanging on to R. for my sake, not his. We shimmied and shook like athletes on television.
“Are we aiming for something?” I asked. Up ahead there appeared to be a clutch of former structures that could possibly provide cover. I couldn’t name any one in particular, because the rubble had a sameness to it.
“Preacher’s hat,” R. said.
“Which one is that?” I sputtered. “And what the hell is that?”
“Pope, who gives a shit?” Then I saw it. A tall, thin shaft shaped like the pontiff’s hat, as if the landscape were giving us the finger. We angled for it, bullets still stupid in their aim. Just outside the pope’s hat we realized it was a tractor-trailer full of unsold Japanese cars. The trailer had been blown up onto its nose, and white plaster and bomb dust covered everything in a pale patina. The cars on the trailer were all glassless but aside from that showed little damage. Even the tires appeared intact. “This ain’t it,” R. said as we took shelter from the barrage and tried to catch our breath.
I looked back toward the building we’d filed. A salvo pinged off the cars and flattened several tires. Our temporary hideout swayed from the hit. “I guess we’re not driving out of here.”
“Your funny isn’t,” R. spat, and we were on the move again. The shooters must have been reloading, because we ran for a football field without a sound. I couldn’t believe my hand hurt so much. It’s just a fucking hand, I thought. I wanted to cut it off. Every time I looked at it, vomit suctioned up my throat.
“I have to stop,” I said, puking before my feet had planted. I hadn’t eaten in so long that only bile and blood trickled from my lips like spit-out medicine. “Sorry.”
“Saw your hand. You touch it?” I nodded as another wave humpbacked me to my knees. “Can’t wait here.”
“I’m coming.” But I was going.
Before I could rise, the bomb blew, and so did we. Into the air, about forty yards. The flying was in slow, then fast, then too-fast motion. In the beginning I could see the two of us lift off the ground like birds in a dream. But those birds were light, and we had weight. Weight to be lifted, carried, and thrown. Since I’d been bent over, my flight was low to the ground. I could have touched the earth if my reactions had been my own. Lévitation, I thought, amazed at my own trick until I went ribs-first into the one standing light pole on the street. I felt my organs force forward like kids in the backseat. And then I was down, breathless but alive. Oh, yeah. My hand stopped hurting. R. had been rip-corded up and then slid down the air in the shape of a horseshoe. He landed with a gentle crunch, like he’d been practicing all his life. It probably took him ten minutes, but by the time I watched him limp up to me, he already seemed all right. He knelt beside me, with a wry grin. “No more snipers,” he said.
It was the brightest day since I’d entered the hotel. “What caught fire?” I asked. “There’s nothing left to burn.” R. didn’t answer, just checked my vitals, wiped blood off my face, bandaged my hand. His silence made me feel safe, and the distant aftermath of the bomb lent a tropical tinge to the warm air. “Hope it wasn’t nuclear.”
“Is my face melting off?” R. deadpanned.
“Your funny isn’t,” I mocked. Survival was always the soldier’s best social elixir. “Is it all right to be in the open?”
“Whoever’s left is tending to their wounded. No fighting for a breather.”
“Sometimes it takes a bomb to stop the war,” I said. “Sounds like a campaign slogan.” R. didn’t answer. “I think it was one.”
“It will be now.”
I wanted to tell him about the flag. And who made the bomb. If ever there was a time for a grunt to trust command, this was it. “I touched the bomb,” I offered.
“No shit.” R. was staring at the fires, looking for any details the added light might shed. He checked the sky. His broken watch. He stayed by my side, but he let his mind tether out like a weather balloon.
“I saw,” I said. R. still didn’t move, but his silence said the camaraderie was over. He either knew or didn’t want to know what was etched into the skin of the bomb. But he didn’t want to walk like a coward. So he stood there, close, and dared me not to say.
“Five minutes, soldier,” he finally ordered. “Can’t leave our shining asses out here all day.” R. limped away, straightening with every step. And I sat there, my ribs splintered, my hand beginning to burn again. And my mouth shut.
The detonation and its effects allowed R. and me to walk instead of run. Although we were still in a war zone, the bomb had brought an almost pastoral calm to the area. Since we had felt its impact so severely at our distance, we knew that whoever had been chasing us was no longer able to. And if the direction we were heading held hostile forces, better to tiptoe in than announce our presence like Christian carolers or paper boys.
Walking like this, with R. a few steps ahead like my father looking for where he parked our car, I felt strangely attached to him. Not that correlating him to my father accomplished that; that should have made him feel as alien to me as cop to criminal. Rather, it was the boldness in his step, his refusal to limp despite the seep of blood visible through his pant leg. It was the walk of a leader. It was what, back at the hotel, we had all longed for without requesting. Most men yearn for nothing more than shoulder blades to follow. Into a forest, across a trafficked street, authority feeling authoritative only as it walks away. Maybe I hadn’t liked R. at the hotel because he was never leading me anywhere. His bullets on The Run did inspire me in certain directions, but away from him, not toward. This walk, into the fire-bright unknown, felt like it was leading somewhere. And from three steps behind I could pretend he knew where that somewhere was.
Because of the light, I could make out several fresh details of the landscape. There were innumerable former automobiles, their thinned bodies jammed into the concrete like needles into a vein. The street was sick with them, and they were standing up so perfectly perpendicular, they appeared to have been dropped from a height. As we passed one, the trunk popped open, a gasp of hot air for hello. I turned my gun on it with paranoid speed, while R. never looked back. “Gotta learn, bleeder,” he said, “to be scared of the right things.”
“This isn’t your first war,” I defended myself.
“Don’t make it your last.” R. walked on, his pace slowing enough that I was catching up to him. So I slowed. I needed those shoulders to lead. And they did, guiding us left, farther away from the sea and the bomb. Within minutes we were in the most residential section I had encountered since quitting the hotel. There weren’t houses, of course. Barely the L of a scooped-out apartment complex. But the streets were strewn with personal items. Proof of lives.
I found a mailbox with a bright painting of a hummingbird. The bird practically glowed green and blue against the char of the metal box. The family name was melted away, but part of the number remained. 23. 23 what? Heliostrasse? Or maybe it was 2375 Al Sadr Street. 1231 rue d’Avignon. 231 Ramsallah. 237 Victory Lane. That was the street where I’d grown up, the name mocking all my defects. We’d moved into 714 Victory Lane when I was ten. It was an ugly house on a beautiful street, daring the new owner to tear it down. But the more my mother protested the faux wood and the aluminum siding, the more my father dug in. He liked ugly things. Helped to camouflage him. By the time I moved out, not a tile had been lifted. Not a shutter painted. It remained a stab in the heart of a beautiful neighborhood. It could have used an explosive renovation like this.
But this street, with its hummingbird survivor, deserved better. Each step took us deeper into family histories. A piano, cracked and cooked like lobster, held a family photo in the crook of its broken leg. The pewter frame had survived. The faces of the four family members all burned away, just like their futures. I could guess from the bodies of the photographed it was mother, father, daughter, son. Which one played the piano? Or had this photo been exhaled from the lungs of a house two blocks away? War brought people together, blood like glue, but only in death. The living just kept getting driven further and further apart.
R. barked for me to keep up, sensing my lag from the fade of my footsteps. He never bothered to turn around. “Leave it, soldier.” His voice now fifteen steps away. “It’s all gone.”
Yet it wasn’t. I found a chair literally unscathed, its dark oak color not stained that way by ash but original. I sat in it, and it held me like a parent’s arms. In front of it sat a stack of CDs that had congealed into a block of unplayable music. On either side were hand imprints where a teenager had probably tried to grab the collection, only to be burned away. I hoisted the chair over my shoulder and walked toward the shimmering image of R. up ahead. I thought, Anything that survives this shit is good luck. And it sat good. So when we did take a break, I’d have something solid beneath me. Or a gift to offer R. He’d probably laugh, call me bleeder, then take the chair.
Twenty feet ahead there was a wall that had refused to fall. It had yellow wallpaper with flecks of black and orange that might have been charred flesh and blood instead of a designer’s whim. In the middle of the wall, just off-center, was the outline of a body. Like the Shroud of Turin. Soaked right through the essence of the wall. The outline was smaller than me but most likely a man’s. Arms outstretched but not comedically like in a cartoon when the duck passes through rock and beam unharmed. This wall seemed to have drawn the man into itself. Absorbed him. Soaked itself with him, a possession. I touched the surface, and it was wet. Damp. But only inside the outline. I ran to the other side of the wall, but the outline wasn’t visible. It was as though the man were still inside the wall.
I set the chair down and pressed my ear to the flesh of the wall. The moisture made me shudder. “Hello?” I whispered, shy to be this crazy even in front of myself. I scanned for R., but he had disappeared over a swell of wreckage. I listened again. “Hello?” I took my boot knife, aiming for a rim just beyond the outline of the body. And began to cut.
The paper gave way like fruit skin, but the drywall clutched at my knife uncooperatively. It was tiring work, and my body bloomed sweat. “What are you doing?” I asked myself. I knew my delay could mean losing R. Abandoning my commanding officer and dashing what may have been my best chance at survival. Yet something compelled me to cut.
It was just around the elbow that the body fell through. It leaned out all at once, pinning me with horror and suddenness, until I found myself on the ground, looking up into a man’s open eyes. My instinct was to thrust him off, but I’d gone digging for this mummy. I was responsible for its care. Yet it wasn’t a mummy.
“Did it work?” he asked. Then quietly closed his eyes.
R. was long gone. Because he had assumed I would follow his lead and his order to catch up, he had never bothered to check. That would have been a dent in his leadership confidence and he could not allow that, but this wasn’t a game of pool. Sink your shot, but only after figuring out your next four shots. This was the situation. Deal with it or die. Or someone will die, either way. This wasn’t rational behavior. This was a hundred-and-fifty-pound man, his beard burned off down to the pincushion surface, asleep on my chest. I gently rolled him over and surveyed his damage.
Along with his whiskers and his eyebrows, most of his clothes had been incinerated. Patches of cotton and acrylic adhered to his skin as if he were trying to quit several addictions at once. His shoes had melted around his feet, making them as curved and brown as hooves. He appeared less a man than a giant baby, cut from the womb and laid on this unclean floor as welcome. But he wasn’t crying. He was barely breathing.
I wiped away a baker’s fist of drywall and dust from his mouth and began resuscitation on his breathless mouth. Every inhalation tasted like steak. We’re animals, I thought. Reduced to elements, we are animals. But an animal wouldn’t do this. Attempt rescue. Foolishly. Put himself second and the mystery first. Animals do only what they must, they never do what they shouldn’t. That was the heart then. Foolishness. That was why I could worry about R., forget myself, and try to spit life back into this burn victim. OK. But it was also selfish. This man knew what street we were on. He had answers, despite beginning our meeting with a question. He knew things I was hungry for, so I was going to yank him awake at least until I felt safer. Was that animal? Or was that just humanity at its best and worst, wed?
