Angels Unawares

by Jeffrey Anderson

  Part of her winced at her exclusion from this listing. She also noticed that Laura’s name was missing, but then who ever lists ex-spouses. So far as the world was concerned, Josh’s only living relative was one Angela Brock Earl.

  This fact had been enforced on Devon earlier in the afternoon when, after wading through more than a dozen touch-tone responses and being placed on hold for over twenty minutes, she’d finally spoken with a Defense Department “Family Liaison Officer” and asked if she could be placed in contact with Lieutenant Angela Earl.

  The stern male Family Liaison Officer asked, “Who is making this request?”

  “Her half-sister.”

  “Regarding what matter?”

  “Her dying father.”

  “Please hold.”

  Thirty seconds later, the liaison came back on the line and said, in a voice even more stern that before, “Lieutenant Angela Earl has no half-sister.”

  “Not that she knows of.”

  “And you would know better than she?”

  “In this case, yes.”

  “Why hasn’t her father contacted her?”

  “He’s presently comatose. As I believe I mentioned, he’s dying. He can’t come to the phone!” Against all her training, Devon was losing her patience.

  The liaison was unswayed. “Access to our troops, especially those in a warzone, is highly restricted. Normally, such contact can only be initiated by the listed next of kin.”

  Devon took a deep breath. “I understand. I also desire maximum security for our troops. But I believe it is critically important that Lieutenant Earl be informed that her father is gravely ill and could die at any moment.”

  “Please give me your contact information. I will forward your request. Someone will get back to you within forty-eight hours.”

  Devon’d thought, “That may be too late,” but gave the Family Liaison Officer her cellphone number.

  Devon looked up from her laptop. Either the light, or her eyes adjusted to the computer screen, or Josh’s skin tone had changed. Whatever the reason, her father’s face in profile appeared more alive, his skin color and texture that of a living soul, not a corpse. She felt a sudden deep sadness for him, not due to any direct connection with him (such attachment, if it ever came, still felt far off) but rather the opposite—as an unbiased, uncommitted observer allowed into the center of this good and intelligent and well-regarded man’s last moments on earth, given rare privileged access to the simple truth that all of one’s worldly possessions and accomplishments condense to this one reality: you alone see the steady approach of death. It mattered not how many spouses or children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren or friends or dignitaries or awards you’d accumulated throughout your life—thousands or none: that final walk would be solitary. And to this privileged observer who spent her entire conscious and unconscious life seeking and nurturing durable connections, this man’s loneliness in his closing moments was almost too much to acknowledge, let alone bear. Yet bear it she must.

  Devon whispered a sudden spontaneous prayer—“In your hands,” not knowing if it was his life or hers she was asking to be borne up.

  She looked again at her laptop screen, typed in the address Laura’d given her for Angie’s blog, and breathed a sigh of temporary relief at the sudden flood of backlit words apparently authored by her half-sister a third of a world away under constant threat of maiming or death, and yet a world that nonetheless seemed a veritable sanctuary compared with her present perilous watch beside their father.

  Unlike Josh, who’d scrolled back to Angie’s earliest entry and read them forward in time before being balked at the account of the Bradford pears, Devon started with the most recent entry and read them backward in time.

  The most recent entry had just been posted, carried today’s date and a time three hours into the future—an 11 PM posting when it was about 8 PM when Devon started reading. When adjusted for the time-zone difference, this meant Angie had posted the entry some four hours earlier, but Devon chose to ignore the time-zone adjustment and pretend that her half-sister actually had the ability to speak to her from the future, might somehow in that capacity guide her through this present.

  April 27

  How many G.I. Joes and Janes can you fit in a ruthless dictator’s pool? Sounds like a riddle from high school, right? “How many cheerleaders does it take to unscrew a light bulb? Answer: Can’t be done—cheerleaders only know how to screw.” Or like a Guinness Book challenge—How many college kids can you fit in a phone booth?

  But this pool thing was neither riddle nor challenge but a fair summary of a recent trip I went on. The whole company received a two-day in-country furlough (Strat. Commands rather lame attempt to try to make up for last week’s three-month extension of our tour) and was bundled into armored busses and given gunship escort to one of Saddam’s desert palaces, a polished-marble oasis luxurious beyond imagining or description. The female reservists were housed in a wing of the palace covering more than an acre, with some forty bedrooms arranged around a central enclosed courtyard covered by hundreds of glass panels each with its own remotely controlled retractable shade. Each bedroom had its own huge bath with sunken whirlpool tub, walk-in shower, marble vanity and make-up tables, mirrored walls, and huge walk-in closet with mahogany shelves, rotating closet rods, and conveyor-belt shoe racks. Each bedroom had a king-sized mattress (and, in some cases, canopy) customized to suit the tastes of its occupant. And in the middle of the floor of each bedroom was a mosaic portrait of that room’s occupant—in my room, an azure-eyed, raven-haired beauty who looked to be no more than sixteen (but who knows—may have been a forty-year-old hag who bribed the artist).

  Of course, this was the harem’s wing—the poor end of the palace. The male reservists got the fancy rooms, though they had to bunk four and five to a room since there were so many more of them—still, not a bad gig given the sheer size of their rooms.

  And the food, prepared by Saddam’s own palace chefs (who, after being carefully screened by security, were kept by Provisional Command in a rare show of administrative wisdom amidst the transitional chaos), matched the décor—the best fresh fruit and vegetables in limitless supply (some of which I “borrowed” for bathing in my tub—got to love those mango shampoos and pomegranate facials, not to mention those cucumbers!), all manner of meat, poultry, fish, and shellfish exquisitely prepared, cheeses and rolls and fresh-baked breads of every description, and the desserts—ohh, the desserts! If you’re ever looking for a more than adequate substitute for sex, make your way through all those minefields and IED traps and razor-wire checkpoints to the dessert trays at Saddam’s Palace #3. ‘Nuff said!

  Now, back to the pool—knowing that we’d soon be piled back into our armored busses and ferried back to base under cover of dark and by an alternate route (to avoid a rumored ambush), we decided to see if we could fit every member of the company into Saddam’s main star-shaped pool. And with all our bathing suits and other clothing already packed and on its way back to base ahead of us, we had the choice of jumping into the pool in our Army-issued desert uniforms or stripping to our underwear for a modified skinny dip. So we all turned to our CO (a woman as stern as she was fair and forthright) and she stared back at us for a tense twenty seconds before quickly stripping to her bra and panties (matching in hot pink) and being the first to jump in! She was soon joined by every single member of the company, even the old stick-in-the-mud requisition clerks. And we made it! We all fit—though we were so cramped we couldn’t have turned around if we had to, and most of us got enough free feels to last us through several months of lonely nights (I felt at least five different hands brush my thighs and waist, and at least two of them had fake nails!). One of the palace’s security contingent took a wide-angle photo on his cellphone and promised to send it to our company’s information officer—encoded and on a secure server, of course.

  Then we all crawled out of the water, dried off on Saddam’s textured marbl
e pool apron with Saddam’s infinitely plush towels, pulled on our desert fatigues and boots and boarded those armored busses for our circuitous ride back to base, an uneventful trip under the cover of dark and allowing each of us to rest along the way with dreams of a life in the Arabian Nights.

  As I write these words, I can still smell the chlorine in my frizzy hair from several days ago—so it wasn’t a dream!

  Or maybe all a dream—the chlorine in my hair, the furtive touch of fingers on bubble-coated skin, fingers that tomorrow (or later tonight) will be couched in latex-free gloves probing blood-soaked skin to find the shrapnel entry point in hopes of prolonging one more life in this pervasive, never-ending bad dream.

  Devon paused, then read the entry that Laura had read just last night, an entry dated April 22 that began with two stanzas of consonance:

  descending desert’s darkness danger

  daring dissolves disaster’s distance

  and went on to describe the weight of the desert’s formidable and infinite night and Angie’s fear and vulnerability in the face of such yawning infinity.

  Devon returned to the second line of Angie’s two-line poem, spoke the words aloud in a firm but quiet voice—“daring dissolves disaster’s distance.” She wondered how much her half-sister was aware of the power and transferability of these words. Could daring—a blind leap into the unknown—actually trump fear, become the method by which the chasm of fear and timidity was bridged, terror dissolved? Was Angie prepared to make that leap by returning to her father’s deathbed? Had she, Devon, already made that leap? Had Laura? Had Josh?

  She looked up at her father’s dimly lit profile and spoke the words to him this time—“daring dissolves disaster’s distance.” What was he seeing behind those closed lids, within his brain’s maze of neurons and synapses that Sherri said were firing away like crazy, in an apparent state of active dreaming? What daring had been called for and deployed within that mind that was apparently as alive and vibrant as his body was damaged and wasting?

  She leaned forward in her chair, out over the bed, closing the gap between her and Josh to mere inches. “What courage called for?” she asked in a firm whisper. Then added, “My father,” and closed the last few inches to kiss him lightly on his slick cool forehead.

  She leaned backward into her chair, hugged herself against a sudden chill, then noticed the computer on the night table, still open to her half-sister’s journal. She clicked on the next entry.

  April 16

  In war, life is simplified. For the body, simple—eat, sleep, survive till tomorrow. For the mind, simple—facilitate survival. For the profession, simple—have all supplies and equipment ready for any instant’s need (a nurse sets her surgical tools in order, an artilleryman his targeting maps, a machine gunner his ammo belts).

  Such warzone simplicity applies to groups as well. For the platoon, simple—watch your buddy’s back while he’s watching yours. For the company, simple—bring everybody home. For the corps, simple—achieve your mission. For the nation, simple—win.

  But such simplicity begins to break down as the war experience wears on, the initial imperatives whittled away by time and introspection and doubt. The body’s imperative for survival is compromised by fatigue. The mind’s call to facilitate survival begins to be blurred by a creeping question—why? And all the other simplicities are assailed by similar time-spawned doubts and questions—what if I do survive till tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? what will be left on the other side?

  Before being deployed, I read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I know—great choice of a read before going off to war. Don’t ask me why I chose it. It’s a depressing book; it’s interminably long; all those Russian names are confusing as hell; and it’s about a society and a culture that is unrecognizable to this 21st century American girl. Yet (and you had to know this was coming), despite all that, the book opened a window on a fundamental question for me and, I’m bold to suggest, for our country—How do I/we find our way back from a mortal mistake?

  And the book makes one thing emphatically clear—the endless hours and days and weeks and months (and pages, pages, pages, pages!) of waking and dreaming reflection on the mistake and all the choices that led up to it are not a pathway beyond it. To the contrary, such rumination and recrimination only imprison one in the mistake.

  So what leads one out of the past and beyond the mistake and into the possibility of a hope-filled future? I could be coy and say “Read the book” (all 856 pages, in my edition). I could be vague and non-committal and say “It’s complicated.” Or I can borrow from wartime’s simplicity, clarity, and efficiency and say—confess (your sin), accept (your punishment), and receive (your future).

  Now apply that to your life, your war.

  April 9

  TRUST—in a warzone, this word, this concept, this fundamental human emotion and desire (or fear) takes on an entirely different meaning, an entirely different dynamic and urgency, so much so that there should be two separate words—as in war-trust versus peace-trust.

  Back there in the “old” world, which is to say 21st century peace-time American society (and forget all that crap coming out of politicians’ mouths that we’re “a nation at war”—the average Joe and Jane on the streets and in the malls of America have no awareness of or concern about the faraway conflicts being fought by professional soldiers that seem to them more like hired mercenaries than their brothers and sisters. And I should know—I was one of those average civilian Janes until about a year ago, and I could’ve cared less about where we were fighting or why), to these folks the word “trust” means shallow and generally harmless things like a willingness to loan someone your car, or spot your roommate a twenty till her next paycheck, or (heaven forbid) having sex with somebody without using a condom. And if you’re really daring and willing to go way out on the shaky civilian trust limb, you might believe someone enough to think he won’t screw your friend behind your back (or in front of it) or leave one day for good with no explanation or forwarding address.

  But wartrust is like this—you risk befriending someone at lunch knowing that person might have his or her head (or arms or legs) blown off before dinner. Or you take the time to look another in the eyes, make that empirical human connection, only to stand there helplessly as the light goes out of those eyes for good. Or you part your legs in the dark to receive an individual’s viable DNA wrapped in his motile sperm cells only to discover by daylight that your vagina now holds the sum-total of all that remains of that man’s living DNA, and it now slowly dying cell by cell in those dark recesses, no chance for replacement or renewal and no egg fertilized (would that you could at that moment and in that knowledge unfetter that cloistered egg and make it available to one of those lingering sperm cells, and thereby perpetuate some part of that man’s now extinguished life?).

  Forgive please that momentary lapse into graphic detail. In the interest of full honesty and disclosure, I must admit that such a tragic unfolding has not occurred to me, at least not yet. But last week one of my closest nurse pals stumbled into my tent, collapsed into my arms, and sobbed for a full fifteen minutes before finding her voice between the sobs to tell me of the death of a private in Recon who had shared her bed and her vagina the night before. Crazy with grief and shock, she suddenly stopped sobbing, stared at me with wild desperate eyes, and asked if I would help her swab her vagina so that she might freeze his sperm till she could go off the Pill and fertilize one of her eggs with that preserved sperm. Writing it all down now, it sounds like the subject of an ethical debate for third-year med students, or an episode on Jerry Springer. But living it, in wartrust, the immediate concerns were not ethical or sensational but practical—how many swabs? what kind of hermetically sealed container? where was the nearest liquid nitrogen? how to label the container so that it would not be discovered or discarded? In the interest of preserving the privacy (and deniability) of all involved, I’ll leave open the question of whether or not we
followed through on her rash plan.

  But as long as we’re in the realm of graphic detail (and as partial penance for the preceding coyness), I’ll venture to add that sexual congress in wartrust is so different (and better) than sex back in the real world as to be a totally different (and thoroughly untamed) animal, so different in fact that it’s taken as common knowledge that once you’ve screwed in a warzone you’re ruined for life—you’ll never find that intensity or release back in the real world. I mean, think about it—you’re engaged in a procreative act slam in the face of DEATH! How better to defy the Reaper? And it matters little if actual procreation is blocked by mechanical means or hormonal ones—to the heart and soul, it feels like procreation in the face of extinction, it feels like the ultimate affirmation of life in the face of death. (Or maybe, for the guys especially, it’s just a huge adrenaline rush—still better than any lay you’ll find back home!)

  April 1

  One thing you get used to in a hurry is the constant whir and roar of helicopter rotors. All times of day and night and in all kinds of weather (except sandstorms, of which I’ve seen only one so far), those choppers are taking off and landing, roaring by high and oh-so-reach-out-and-touch-the-skid low. Sometimes they land on the makeshift tarmac we have between the three surgery tents, but mostly they land over at the main depot, where most of the troops and supplies are. They have a huge maintenance hangar over there that’s humming with activity twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week as the grease monkeys and avionics geeks try to keep this myriad flock of helo-birds airborne. I once complained to Sal, a friend from the helo-shed, that the choppers get better facilities and equipment than the doctors and nurses, and he said, “No choppers, no need for any docs or stitchers.” He says it’s the damn sand that chews through the choppers’ parts—cuts the life-expectancy of all exposed metal by sixty percent or more. I may not know about chopper parts, but I can attest to the wear and tear sand causes on just about everything, and everybody, else.

  This morning I was eating breakfast with Sal. Now since being in-country, I’ve learned to tell the difference between the rotor noise of a Chinook and a Blackhawk, the turbine-assisted roar of an Apache and the near-silent whir of those little scout toys I call “Keys.” But Sal can tell every chopper in the fleet just by its rotor noise. So eating with him is always interesting, if a little distracting, as he’ll pause in mid-sentence to say something like, “That’s Biscayne returning from Baghdad” when the chopper is barely audible to me, or “Viper’s headed out on a turkey shoot” as an Apache passed by so low and fast it made my hair go straight. And I always wondered if he was making it all up (who could check him?) or if he really knew every chopper by its sound?

  Wondered, that is, till this morning. I was finishing my scrambled eggs and Sal was into his fifth cup of coffee and we were talking about the latest Harry Potter that’d been shown in Rec two nights earlier when suddenly Sal jumped up, spilling his coffee, and said a sharp “No!” I said, “No, what?” He said, “Please, no.” By then he was gazing out the mess tent’s open side into the brilliant desert sun. I looked past him and saw nothing. I listened intently, but heard only the chatter of Army-issued cutlery on plastic plates. Then Sal sat again with a thud, his face white, his shoulders slumped into his body. “Too late,” he said. “Too late for what?” “Too late for Billy and Frank.”

  Then I and everyone else on base heard the explosion. Two miles out, an Apache was returning after night recon. Sal had heard that even when none of us could. And somewhere out there (there’s a mud-hut village in the area, supposedly clean) the Apache had taken some small-arms fire—a not uncommon risk for these low-flying birds. But unlike most such incidents (that end in little more than small tears in the titanium skin), this time the bullet hit a vital component—Sal muttered something about a “tail union”—and the bird went straight down. That’s what Sal had heard—the broken tail union that doomed the Apache.

  And it was “Billy” and “Frank.” Sal begged me to go on morgue shift (not my normal duty or desire) to confirm for him the identity of the two men, and to “be sure they got Frank’s toe ring for his fiancée.” So I called in a few favors and served as Sal’s eyes as they brought in the two officers, their bodies not too terribly mangled despite the violence of the crash.

  And I have Frank’s toe-ring on my finger now. Sal will get the address of the fiancée (a woman Frank had proposed to but not told his family about) and send it to her, even as the rest of his personal effects are returned along with his body to his family—their April Fool’s Day present from Iraq.

  March 25

  So what’s the deal with God? Is there one? None? Several? Hundreds or thousands? If there’s one, is he, she, or it nearby? Inside us, outside us, both, or neither? And if nearby, always or sometimes? Or if far away, how far away?

  Idle speculation, you say; and I’d have to agree. But as I’m currently deployed at the center of a conflict where the word “god,” and all the freight that word regularly drags around behind it, is frequently invoked in public, professional, and private discourse, the above questions, however speculative, seem empirical and imperative. Yet, as often as the word is used—in every form and meaning from greeting to curse to explanation to justification—the above questions are never posed or meaningfully discussed.

  Our leaders—from the evangelical proselyte turned President to our generals and division commanders to our civilian administrators and their Iraqi counterparts—regularly punctuate their speeches with the word. If I hear or see the phrase “may God bless you” attached to another order that will result in the death of many of those same “blessed,” I will vomit on the spot—on the speaker or the cursed order. Better to say, “May God have mercy on your soul” which is all that’s left of some of the “blessed” after the order is executed. Or, better yet, let the divinity-invoking leader say, “May God strike me dead” if my decision harms you or the world in any way. Then let’s see how many bone-headed orders are issued, or how many numb-skull leaders are left.

  And of course the word gets into our daily conversations and actions. Being in a Muslim country and dependent on many Muslim workers, God—or their word, Allah—is invoked in my hearing hundreds of times a day, from their names (myriad versions of Allah) to their greetings and farewells to their fatalism (which they call faith) as evidenced by the endlessly implored “God willing,” when history endlessly indicates that He (or She or It) is so rarely “willing” to fulfill any of our desires or expectations or calls for fundamental fairness and care.

  And as if the Muslim “God culture” (read prison) isn’t enough to weary one on the matter, everywhere I turn in our company I see or hear or smell or touch references to our chosen deity dozens of times a day. I see it in the collars of the chaplains, see its touch in the sign of the cross made by some before starting a shift, see its imprint left by a worn cross or Star of David on the surgical smocks of certain doctors and nurses as they lean over a patient. And of course God audible everywhere in the whispered prayers of the dying and their caregivers, God touchable in the crosses drawn on the foreheads of those dying (sometimes leaving a faint trail of blood turned near black in death), God smellable in the odor of incense on the priest’s clothes, the fragrant scent of the anointing oil of Last Rites, and in the unmistakable odor of C4 explosive on the body parts of the suicide bombers brought in for identification and forensics. And I touch God all the time—in the ubiquitous cross tattoos on the lifeless forearms of so many of my patients, in the blood pulsing out of severed arteries, in the last breath of a life extinguished, or the first breath of a life restored.

  God damn you God! Where are you? What’s this all about?!

  Today they brought in a sergeant. I didn’t know him personally, but I’d been hearing about him since arriving. Seems he was a bit of a messiah to his men. He was on his fourth tour. He’d survived three IED explosions, four ambushes, two major assaults, and a sniper’s bullet tha
t left a three-inch scar across his temple and into the line of his close-cropped kinky hair (he was African-American). But what made him messianic was not his incredible good luck or divine protection in battle. What made him messianic was his love and healing power for his men. He was said to have staunched a battlefield hemorrhage with his touch, breathed life into three dead men with his breath, given strength and power to broken limbs with a word. All the enlisted men wanted to be in his platoon. All the commanding officers had grown afraid of his power and legend.

 

  Well, his commanding officers can rest easy. This sniper’s bullet didn’t plow a harmless furrow through his scalp; it punched a ragged hole through his heart. There was no gushing blood—just a tiny hole punched by the armor-piercing bullet as it went through his sometimes-but-not-always bulletproof vest. On the stretcher, he looked as peaceful and composed in death as he had been peace-giving and consoling in life.

  As I was marking the time and cause and location of death on his chart, one of his men (a chubby-faced white private from Alabama) burst into the tent, took one look at the deceased sergeant, unleashed an animal moan from the depths of his sizeable gut, and ran back out of the tent. The doc on duty took the clipboard from my hands and gestured in the direction of the grieving private’s exit. I took that gesture as an order and headed in the direction of the private in my surgical booties, smock, and latex gloves, not sure exactly where I was going or what I might do when I got there but compelled by my CO and something else, something that must’ve been—dare I write the word—God.

  The private was kneeling in the sand between tents. He’d already torn open his flak vest, his mottled battle fatigues, and his sweat dispersing t-shirt; and he was clawing at the pale and flabby skin of his chest. He’d managed to gouge open the upper layers of the epidermis, even torn some muscle tissue, and looked like he’d reach the breastbone any second. I have little doubt he would’ve succeeded in his apparent goal to tear out his own heart, though he might’ve fainted from loss of blood first.

  But before he could reach either of those tragic ends, I knelt before him, grabbed his chubby hands, and said, “He’s with God now.”

  The man’s arms went slack, but his eyes remained wild. “How do you know?”

  And I said what I knew to be true at that moment. “God told me.”

  But that wasn’t enough for him. “Then what should I do?”

  I looked at his face, then at his hands covered in his own blood and holding large shreds of his own skin and said, “Live for him.”

  He considered that order for a minute, apparently contemplating the chain of command that had issued it, then said, “O.K.”

  Muscle tone and strength returned to his arms. We stood together. I became dizzy and fell into him. He steadied me awkwardly against his bleeding chest till my dizziness cleared and I stepped back.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No, thank you.”

  I shrugged. “Just the messenger.”

  He nodded then looked at his torn-up chest. “Guess I should go to the infirmary.”

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  I left him in the care of a young black nurse from another company, apparently just arrived in-country. When she asked the private, “Cause?” I raised my hand to silence him and said, “Field injury,” a catch-all category between combat injury and self-inflicted.

  Then I left him to his fate, God-determined or otherwise.

  March 18

  A few days ago, they brought back that baby we’d delivered by C-section from his dead mother. Seems the High-ups saw opportunity in a human-interest piece (i.e. propaganda) on the incident for distribution back in the States—trying to boost flagging public support for the war, show some of the “good” we’re doing over here.

  Can you blame them? It’s the perfect touching tale for a two-minute filler piece at the butt end of the evening’s bad news—pregnant woman blown up by a car-bomb (or so the script said), humankind-serving and nationality-blind U. S. Med Corps receive the victim and, after a valiant struggle to save her, commend her to God but deliver a healthy baby boy from her lifeless body, then deliver the boy to his half-smiling, half-grieving father: life delivered from death.

  It’s a good story, it really is.

  But the High-ups gave the project over to a private contractor—some public relations firm in-country with a multi-million dollar mandate to try to improve the public’s perception of our efforts over here. Seems like everyone in the civilian command hierarchy—from the President on down—is tired of all the negative stories and videos and pictures being shown on the non-stop news channels. No balance, they say. No fairness or objectivity, they complain. So they brought in this PR firm to help out with the “fairness and objectivity.”

  And this PR firm did our story up to the hilt—brought in the cake and the balloons and the crape-paper streamers and turned our back-up surgical tent (which we’ve never used) into a party hall to celebrate the baby’s one-month birthday. They brought along the baby’s father and grandparents and great-grandparents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins, maybe fifty locals total, all shipped into the camp on two armored busses. And they got pictures of me and Dr. J and the rest of our surgical team (including a half-dozen who weren’t even in-country when the baby was delivered), all of us fully-attired in our surgical scrubs (but no blood stains), standing in a line with the father holding the baby in the middle and all the relatives looking on with gratitude and wonder.

  Well, God bless their efforts. At least we got some cake out of it.

  Afterwards, as the crew was packing up their camera equipment and taking down the balloons and streamers, the baby’s father approached me and introduced himself (a name I won’t divulge, in hopes of protecting him and his family).

  “So you were the one who delivered my son?” he asked in surprisingly clear English.

  “I helped.”

  “You were there when they brought her in?”

  “Your wife?”

  “My wife.”

  I nodded hesitantly, not sure where he was going with these questions.

  “She was conscious?”

  “No, not by the time I saw her.”

  He nodded then looked at the floor. “Did she suffer?”

  “She didn’t suffer.”

  He continued to stare at the floor.

  I felt compelled to add, “I’m sure she’s at peace knowing your son is alive and healthy.”

  He looked up at me, tears streaking the dark skin of his face. “I can’t look at my son without thinking of her.”

  “One day I hope that will bring you more comfort than sorrow.”

  He nodded, though his eyes showed little relief from my words. “Thank you for your kindness, and for saving my son.” Then he walked back into the mob of locals who may or may not have been his blood relatives.

  And I walked through the drawn flaps into the main surgical tent, ready—or maybe not—to become part of the next story to be spawned by this vast human drama called war.

  March 10

  What’s the point of longing to go home—home to what? Oh, sure, I had a life in Lawrence, Kansas—a good job at the university hospital, a decent two-bedroom apartment in a nice part of town, two cats and a zippy red two-door import in the parking lot. I belonged to a jogging club, knew all the trails along the river, took annual splashy vacations ranging from wilderness excursions to oh-so-luxurious spas. You know, a well-trained nurse with no debt and no family obligations can live pretty high-off-the-hog—and believe me, I did.

  But I joined the Reserves for a reason. I knew where I would ultimately end up, and that’s why I signed up. It was my passive-aggressive way to turn my life on its head. Just sign here, I told myself—two weeks a year training, one weekend a month: no big deal.

  Well, yeah, except for that little asterisk that says with as little as twelve hours’ notice they can call you to activ
e duty, bundle you up and pack you in a truck or a plane and send you anywhere in the world for as long as they choose (you can forget about that “tour-of-duty limits” crap—not worth the price of the toilet paper it’s written on).

  And some part of me buried way down thought, “Hot damn, let’s go!”

  Don’t get me wrong. All other parts of me were scared poop-less and still are. I miss my cats Zoe and Chloe (well cared for by a friend—I downloaded their most recent photos just a few minutes ago); I miss my plush bed and down comforter; I even miss that bitchy Nurse Super who was always riding my case. All that stuff was fine. I had a good life back in the States.

  Or did I? I mean, here I am, and I didn’t come kicking and screaming or tricked by some over-zealous lying sonofabitch recruiter needing to fill a monthly quota (some of the stories I hear about recruiting deceptions make me think we ought to be pointing our guns at the recruiting stations).

  No, I’m here because I needed to change my life, needed to kick myself out of the comfort and complacency that seemed to have as its only goal more comfort and complacency. Call it a mid-life crisis—the big Three-oh fast approaching and what lies beyond that threshold?

  So I repeat—going home to what?

  Let the bombs and the blood shake me up and spit me out. We’ll see what’s left on the other side. In the meantime, I laugh when I can, cry when I must, love when I choose, and hone my skills. At the very least, I’ll make one hell of a trauma-center nurse when I return to Kansas from this Oz.

  If I do.

  Devon next read Angie’s March 6 entry, the account of the Bradford pears and how their blooms marked for Angie the start of spring in her childhood home, the account Josh had read just that morning (though Devon didn’t know that) before sliding into his deep unconsciousness. And from there Devon read backward through all the entries to the start of the blog, including Angie’s matter-of-fact introduction and statement of intention to the vast anonymous blank of cyberspace.

  On completing the blog, Devon leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath. Who was this woman, the author of these sometimes cynical, sometimes callous, sometimes oh-so-honest and vulnerable accounts? Could she really be her half-sister? (The very thought of that hyphenated noun made her head spin—did she really have a blood sibling out there? If so, how much, if anything, did they share beyond a few strands of DNA and this dying father?) Was the life-hardened author of this blog the same person as the bubbly fresh-faced teen in the photos on the wall in the room down the hall, her room at the moment? How much of the woman behind these words was still in that room—fingernail clippings under the bed, strands of her hair in the carpet, maybe even a trace of her scent on the pillows? She wished the blog had some photos, recent pictures of Angie in her current environment that might help Devon connect the dots of Angie’s past in this house with the nurse in Iraq, and help fill the yawning chasm between her and her half-sister. But no pictures—just words with gleaming edges sharp as razor-wire.

  Devon looked up to Josh, the only physical link to the far off and slippery Angie fading in and out of focus. Josh at least was solid flesh, however imperiled it might be. The irony of building her new world around the physical reality of a comatose and dying man, and using this dying man as a link to an even more elusive sibling, was not lost upon Devon. But then that was her present situation, that was the reality Fate or God had dealt her.

  She looked again at the laptop, closed Angie’s blog and opened the Instant Messenger window. Wake up, Bunkie! she typed and hit send. She prayed Jocelyn would respond. But seconds later, the computer screen flashed the message friend away.

  She’d talked to Joce last night, after the initial meeting with Laura. But she’d not had the time or the presence of mind to call her since the dramatic events of the day. Suddenly she felt a desperate need for the consolation and support of her partner. She considered calling her but saw the late hour (it was past eleven) and knew Jocelyn would be asleep and also realized she wouldn’t be comfortable talking about her father while seated beside him, even if he was unconscious.

  So she typed this short-hand update:

  Body O.K. Mind spinning. Heart hurting. Longing to lay my head on your chest, feel your breath in my hair, taste your sweetness on my tongue. Would that you could be here with me—but of course no. As you said—my trial by fire. Little did you know. More tomorrow. Love. D.

  She hesitated a moment, then hit send.

  She signed off the Internet, shut down her computer, and set the laptop aside. Without the tint of the computer screen’s silver-green glow, the bedroom lit by the one low-wattage bulb of the bedside table’s lamp seemed a warm, safe, and nurturing cocoon. Far from the threat he’d seemed earlier, Josh’s peaceful resting body now seemed a guardian for her, and a companion in this room that had become a world unto itself, a ship sealed and safe against the dangers of the night, the perils out there waiting. Devon’s eyes drifted shut and her head rolled to one side against the cushioned back of the chair.

  A safe ship travelling it was for Josh also at just that moment locked as he was in this persistent unconsciousness that was not prison but seemed at the moment home.

  And within that home as if no time had passed but indeed as if all time had passed and was still passing, he walked with the eternal migration neither tired nor winded and still walking, and watched that migration from the dry hillside above with the other behind.

  And now a new layer of understanding, a new layer of distance and removal that was simultaneously more intimate and proximate as Josh saw the migration and his observation of it as a ship floating on the sea of space and time, floating so easily and imperceptibly that he’d not noticed it before, but now discovered he was both shocked and dazzled by the knowledge.

  “How could I not have known?” he asked aloud to no one in particular.

  “If you had known, what would you have changed?” It was Vicki sitting across from him at the breakfast table, cup of coffee in her hand, morning sun backlighting her in a blaze of fire.

  “I would’ve knelt before you, laid my head in your lap, and never left.”

  “With the knowledge of the ship of life—”

  “Ship of love,” Josh interrupted.

  “Life is love,” she said. “Otherwise, why bother?”

  He stared into her eyes across the table. They opened onto the vast darkness of space. He pulled his focus back from that yawning blank and studied her skin. It was fair and soft and perfect—her young skin restored or never gone. “Life is love,” he repeated, one more simple fact he should’ve known but hadn’t.

  “Dear, dear Josh,” Vicki said. “Even now, still longing to return to the womb.”

  “Is that so bad?”

  “Source of all your pain.”

  “And pleasure,” he added.

  “And product.”

  “Angie.”

  “You need her here.”

  “What will I say?”

  “What she needs to hear. What you need to tell.”

  “And if she doesn’t come?”

  “She will.”

  “Who will call her?”

  “The one beside you now.”

  “Who is she?”

  Vicki was gone. The kitchen table and the morning sun were gone. In the valley below the human migration continued. Josh watched, felt the gravel beneath his feet, tasted the dust on his tongue.

  Beside him in the chair, Devon slid into a shallow dream of her own. She was lying on a beach in a brilliant summer sun that turned everything white—sand, sky, water: all gradations of shimmering white. She loved the beach and the hot sun on her skin; it was what she most loved to do, the place she most wanted to be. She closed her eyes against the brilliant light and rested in this gift.

  But some sound or perhaps lack of sound raised her from her rest and she opened her eyes on the same brilliant white world but felt it had somehow changed. What had been gift and pleasure had become threat and f
oreboding. Suddenly frightened by the vast brilliance and intensity of white, she tried to rise to flee but couldn’t move, was locked in place by a paralysis of unknown origin. She tried to shout for help but no words came out. She started to cry but no tears fell. She closed her eyes and prayed to wake from this nightmare, this prison of light and fire.

  Somewhere in the distance arose the sound of Jocelyn’s voice. She looked about but couldn’t see her in the dazzling light. She struggled mightily to shout out in response, but no words came out. Jocelyn’s voice grew fainter by the minute, fainter and fainter then nothing.

  So this is it, Devon thought within the dream—left alone to die in this brilliant prison. She surrendered to the inevitability of it.

  Then a shadow crossed her shut eyelids. She looked up and saw a figure leaning over her, offering some small relief from the persistent sun. It was a man; but try as she might, she couldn’t discern his features in all the brilliance. He was simply a silhouette against the white sky, a cut-out of head and shoulders offering shade at least but no hint of identity.

  “Will you stay here and shade me?” she asked.

  The figure gave no response, no sign of hearing.

  “I can’t move and might die in this sun.”

  Still no answer.

  “I thank you for your help.”

  Just then, the silhouette began to rise straight up into the brilliant background, slowly but steadily drifting away.

  “Please, no,” Devon whimpered, already surrendered to his departure. “Please don’t leave,” she said, but in a whisper—knowing he couldn’t hear, knowing he wouldn’t stop even if he did. “Thank you,” she said at the last, maybe aloud or maybe just inside her head.

  But throughout and within his fading, Devon just now noticed that she was also rising. She had no sensation of movement, but she saw she was still in the shadow of the now infinitely distant figure and was rising in his track, following at great remove. She rolled her head and looked down on where she’d been. There, imprinted on the white sand, was the outline of her body. And all around it, unbroken by plant or dune or structure, was more white sand, stretching off into the distance. And as she rose farther, she saw where this unbroken sea of sand ended, and where the sea that was the sea began—sparkling water in all directions with the circle of sand that had so recently been her prison at its center.

  She turned her head and looked up again and found that the silhouette that’d been so distant was beside her now, no longer a cut-out offering shade but a real person with a real face. It was Josh—his face that of the younger man in the photos with Angie, but unmistakably Josh.

  He smiled cautiously and extended a hand. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

  She looked back at the dot of sand in the sea of blue that had so recently been her home then turned to face her father. “I’m Devon, your daughter.”

  Josh chuckled at the thought and nodded. “What took you so long?”

  Down the hall asleep atop the covers of Angie’s bed, Laura was locked in an unfolding nightmare.

  She was seated in a simple wooden armless chair in the middle of a room so dark she couldn’t see floor or walls or ceiling but knew it was a room by the closeness of the space and the absence of outdoor light or sound.

  Reaching out into the blackness, her hand sought some sign of where she was. But she felt nothing within arm’s reach above or around her—no walls, no light switch, no window, no person, no object. She didn’t dare stand for fear of falling into the chasm she now imagined surrounded her.

  But her feet in shoes rested on something solid, so she slowly slid her hands down along her thighs, past her knees, over her shins. She felt her ankles covered with soft socks, her feet in what seemed jogging shoes with padded tops and thick laces. Beneath the shoes, the floor was hard and cold—perhaps tile or concrete. She explored the cool, slick surface far as she could reach with her hands without rising from the seat.

  She discovered her fingertips were wet with a tacky liquid the exact same temperature as the floor. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before. She cast her hands out and found that the liquid surrounded her chair, far as she could reach in all directions. She raised her hand close to her face, rubbed the liquid between her thumb and forefingers, sniffed it. It had only a faint odor, vaguely familiar but not something she could place.

  She cautiously extended her tongue, dabbed her finger on its tip. The cool liquid had a slight saltiness, a faint metallic tang, and a deeper earthiness. Her curiosity grew. This was a familiar flavor. Her mind raced through the possibilities. She licked her fingers again.

  Then she sat bolt upright, grasped the chair with straining hands, yanked her feet off the floor. The liquid was blood. Though unfamiliar in its coolness and slightly tacky from drying, the taste second time around was definitely that of blood. But from whom or what? And why? She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them, pulled herself into as tight a ball as she could manage.

  Only then did she notice the dampness leaking from her core. Only then did she know the source of all that blood, cool now and drying.