by Liz Harmer
“What’d you see on top of the hedge?”
“Nothing. Nada. Fuck-all.”
“Shoulda looked through the binoculars.”
“Fuck off, Cooper.”
A few more paces, and then Daniels stopped. “We gotta get our story straight. They’re gonna ask where we been, why so long, what we been doing.”
“We lost our comms. Not our fault.”
“We shoulda just kept walking till we got to Paris. I always wanted to see the Eiffel Tower.”
The sun was directly overhead. It burned Philippe’s eyes. They stopped to piss, letting the liquid stream lazily into the dusty earth, onto the dirt and roots and twigs.
“Maybe they think we’re all dead. They’ll just be glad to see us.”
“Here’s what we tell them. Some German comes around and grabs Daniels and takes him hostage. We see it happen. Daniels surrenders, but the Kraut’s got a knife at his throat.”
“That makes no sense. Why would that happen? This isn’t fucking Cowboys and Indians.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“How did I get free?”
“So Mitford sneaks around back and shoots him in the back of the head.”
“That doesn’t explain why we were gone so long.”
“Maybe we wanted to make sure there weren’t any more of ’em hiding out.”
“Jesus. You’re really bad at this.”
“What’s wrong with the story?”
“They’d never be all alone like that. They’d just shoot him. Why’d he need a hostage?”
“ ’Cause he’s scared. ’Cause he’s alone.”
“He woulda just shot him and then us. That’s what we woulda done. Why wouldn’t you just have shot him before he got his hands on Daniels?”
“Everybody knows what a sissy Daniels is. Sissies are as sissies do.” Mitford narrowed his eyes at each of them. Then grabbed his crotch.
“Leave him alone,” Cooper said. “You’re the one scared of rats.”
“No. Here’s the story,” Daniels said. He was still smiling a little, his eyes wide as though he were encouraged.
Ambrose smiled too. Mitford spit dramatically into the leaves. Philippe stuck his hands in his pockets, a child waiting to be picked for a team.
“Here’s what we say happened. The shooting started. We shot back at them. Greenblatt was beside me running and hit the ground. There was no time to look back. We ran until we lost them, hid out in the trees, but then it was dark. We had to go back for Greenblatt, but it was too dark, and we didn’t want to run out of battery for the lights, and Cooper’s hand-crank made too much noise. Blew the cover.”
“But that is what happened.”
“Yeah, well, we leave out the part where we stay at Philippe’s for twelve hours.”
“Sixteen hours.”
“Goddamn. Sixteen?”
Without his wheelbarrow, Philippe felt himself to be deeply vulnerable, disarmed. The sun above them blazed. “Where are we?” he whispered. Into his chest came a beating panic. Then a flock of birds lifted from the hedges and exploded, shrieking, into the sky.
“This is your land,” Ambrose hissed. “You tell us where we are.”
Philippe glanced around in bewilderment. His nearest memory was far away, that shag carpet, those little hands. He pulled out the damp and softened business cards and read their words again. There was something he had to remember and could not remember. Come back. Come back.
“When do we get to the end of this road?” Mitford said.
“I don’t think I’m quite awake yet,” Philippe said. The road might just keep spinning them ever forward. They had entered a terrible infinity. But just as he thought so, the light shifted up ahead, the hedgerows gave way to an open field.
“Well, wake up,” Ambrose said.
* * *
—
Philippe was sliding away from himself. There was no Philippe. These were not his people. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he said. The names of his children on the shag carpeting had floated like bubbles and then popped in his mind: Winston. Mary. Mary. Winston. He marched and tried hard to remember something else. His eyeballs were sore from the cross-eyed concentration this seemed to require. The smell of urine blended with other filthy smells, which must have been the men’s packs and shirts soaked through with sweat and damp and God knows what else. His legs were numb at the knee and hip, and his skin burned in rotating spots. Sharp like bee stings in his elbow and then in his buttock, exploding stars of pain, left then right, each moment proof that he was here now, in his body, captive.
The others had used the word Nazi. He had heard them say France. He had tried to say, “I don’t think I really speak French. I don’t think I really am French.” But this came out as “Je ne pense pas que je suis français.”
He saw Daniels share a look with Cooper: the old man is losing it.
He had always wanted to go to France. Though, of course, he’d had Paris in mind. And he’d always longed for courage to be asked of him, courage in the form of righteous soldiering. He’d wanted his life to be asked of him. Something better than the easy life he’d been given. Carpeted basement, transforming toys, two happy children. I’m forty-nine years old, he thought. Each small scrap of knowledge was as much a relief as the breeze.
But then the mystery: How am I here?
He pulled the business card again from his pocket. The surface of the paper was wearing away, the ink growing fainter, and now his thumb smudged dirt over it. What did it mean? Port. Remember port and the place you come from.
When he had wished to go to war, it had been in a much younger body. Before he’d grown the beard and started wearing dad jeans, as Marie called them.
Dad jeans. Dad bod. Marie.
Mary, wasn’t it? No, Mary was the daughter, long gone. Grown and gone, gone forever.
Gone forever?
Marie.
“Such a nice sunshiny day!” Mitford’s exclamations were growing in intensity. They were talking about things far away from here, about girls and what they’d do to their bodies, about the things that they yet planned to do, about future jobs and homes. Cooper had built his own house from the ground up with his father. Daniels was going to work in his parents’ diner until there was enough money for medical school.
“Aren’t we having a glorious vacation, boys?” Mitford grinned into the sky.
They moved quickly. The buildings behind them became specks; and later, when Philippe turned around, they were gone. Sun was hitting the trees hard from the side, and shadows were long bars crossing the ground. Sunset was now only an hour away.
“It’ll be good for it to be dark. Then we can’t be seen,” said Cooper.
“But also, we can’t see,” said Mitford.
No one noticed how little Ambrose was saying. Philippe could see the clenched side of his face, flesh drawn tightly into his teeth, jaw a sharp line.
“Daniels. You said we’d be there by now,” Mitford said. He vigorously scratched the back of his head under his helmet, and this caused Cooper, and then Daniels, too, to scratch at their heads and necks. “Fuckin’ fleas.”
Philippe now realized he knew words the others probably did not know. For example, he knew the word holocaust. Did they know the term D-Day yet? “It’s 1944,” he ventured.
“Thanks for the newsflash, genius,” Mitford said.
Daniels glared at him.
“Why don’t you just let me fucking be?” Mitford said to Daniels, who shrugged.
Ambrose seemed to be chewing the inside of his cheek. Philippe felt his life depended upon keeping an eye on Ambrose. The man glanced back at him, then spit gutturally to the other side.
“Where’d you get them cards?” Ambrose said.
“What cards?”
“The ones in your pocket yesterday.”
Philippe shrugged. “Yesterday?”
“Look, buddy. I’m not like the rest of these dummies. I know what’s going on here.”
“You do.”
“I know you ain’t what you seem. In fact, I can hardly remember anything about you before you showed up in the middle of the night. These other guys say they know you. But I trust my mind.” Ambrose tapped at his temple. “My mind is telling me to be careful about you.”
“I’m not a—” Philippe stopped. His toes inside his old loafers were numb. “What do you think I am?”
“Those cards are calling cards. Like a card some New York bank manager has. I don’t know where you got them, unless you got ’em off the body of someone important.”
“Says ‘Main Street Public Library’ on them.”
“That’s English, though, right? Not bibliotheca or something. Library.” Ambrose eyed him. “And now you’re guarding them with your life. ’Cause you know something. You a spy? And that’s a code, yeah?”
“Bibliothèque,” Daniels said quietly.
“Huh?”
“You mean bibliothèque.”
Ambrose stopped marching and turned around, stuck his finger in the hollow of Philippe’s collarbone. Philippe put his arms up and stumbled backwards.
“Ambrose. Buddy,” Daniels said.
“I don’t know what they mean. I don’t know where I got them,” said Philippe, his eyes filling with water.
“The old man’s crying, yeah? Big wah-wah baby tears.”
“Jesus, Ambrose. Leave him alone,” Daniels said.
“The sun’s going down. We got to find somewhere for the night,” Cooper said. “You guys can continue this argument after we lay up.” He walked between them, finally breaking Ambrose’s contact with Philippe.
They were all lit golden, as though they were on a Broadway stage. For a moment, they were figures frozen in a scene, Philippe accused, eyes open wide at Ambrose, Ambrose with teeth bared and wolfish, the other three still and watchful.
“We cannot continue this argument later. This guy might be from the other side.” To Philippe Ambrose said, “You are a sympathizer, is that it?”
“What the hell, Ambrose. He’s not even armed. He’s somebody’s granddad,” Mitford said.
“I’m only forty-nine,” Philippe said.
“You all didn’t see them cards he’s got. Mighty suspicious.” Ambrose rooted through Philippe’s pockets and passed the now nearly illegible cards back to the other three men. “Plus that shirt he’s got on. You ever see buttons like this?”
“What does this mean, Philippe?” Daniels said.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not good enough,” Ambrose said. “You think that’s good enough?”
“I think something happened to me. It’s not to do with you all. It’s not to do with war or anything.”
“Not to do with war?”
The men passed the cards around as the late afternoon turned dim and blue. At last, they walked slowly through the field toward the woods with a plan to sleep against the trees for a few hours. Ambrose insisted that Philippe walk in front of him and kept his gun aimed at his back, at the fat pale meat of his neck.
* * *
—
Everyone’s a lotus-eater, she whispered in Philippe’s dream. Marie. His Marie. Everyone’s a coward.
He was standing at some far-off distance on the steps of a church. The church had within it an otherworldly glow. He was unzipping it; he was gone. Marie’s voice grew faint, and there was a long nothingness, nothing but the glow of certainty that he would be healed, become a hero, be given a task to do. He floated through the nothing. It was joy.
But he woke up staring into the barrel of a gun. Ambrose’s eyes behind the length of rifle, one shut and the other wide. A mutated wink. Philippe’s body was so tired of these jolts that now, instead of a racing heartbeat, he felt a lethargic desire to vomit.
“I don’t want you to shoot me, please,” Philip said. Fill-ip. Fill-ip. Not Fee-leep. The dream had been about to unravel everything. “Maybe I can explain?”
“Maybe you can?”
The nausea returned. Philip could tell them nothing. What did he know, anyway? All he had to cling to was a suspicion that he did not belong here, that this was less real than some other reality.
“What does ‘port’ mean?” Ambrose had lowered the gun, and now pointed it at Philip’s crotch.
They were camped in a thick forest, and the only light came from the stars and moon. Above the canopy of trees, the sky was a rich grey-blue. Calm down, Philip told himself, though it felt as if all of the events to follow this one were on his back, crushing him with their weight. I’m from the future. No, you can’t say a thing like that. His mind was traumatized, playing tricks. There was no way to verify the truth of what he thought.
“A few years ago I had a—what would you call it?—a nervous breakdown.”
Ambrose lowered the gun farther and his eyelids flickered. Batteries dying in a toy. “Uh-huh,” he said.
“Port is a word for the thing I used to make sense. A talisman.”
“Right.” Ambrose’s disappointment was as obvious as his exhaustion. He lowered the gun and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands like a small child late for bed.
Seventy years of history and anxiety, technology and bombs. Seventy years and everyone would be gone. “I went crazy, mon ami, c’est tout.” Philip cleared his throat. “Sometimes I have trouble knowing what’s real.”
His words appeared to be hypnotic. Ambrose seemed not only to have bought them but to have expected them. Now his heavy eyes dropped closed.
“You have to stay awake,” Philip said.
But Ambrose slumped over and was snoring, finger still loosely poised on the trigger. The others, too, were children sleeping on a forest floor. The air had cooled, and Philip pulled the oversized sweater on over his head, though it was still damp with sweat and did nothing to warm him.
It was too dark to see what made the leaves tremble, what made those branches crack. Animals. Wind. He wanted to pore over the memories as one did an archive, to hang onto each morsel from the world he knew. Librarian. Philip McGuire, MLS. He wanted to page through his whole pathetic, lost life: the faces of his children at each stage, the backyard slide stuck with autumn leaves, his wife before the divorce with a red scarf in her black hair. But he was here.
Still, these images made up a self, and he felt as though he’d stepped into the waiting armour of his body, had fastened each of its parts tight.
Landing here and now was to be held under water by a bully. Under water—here—this was all there was. His eyes were open wide now. See? See? You happy now?
“I am most certainly not happy,” Philip whispered, though in the middle of the night he could find a certain kind of pleasure: a moment’s peace, the reward of rest after a long difficult day. Was his presence here a prank? Had everyone been thrown somewhere hard to land, bewildered?
“How do I get home? I want to get home.”
He tried to concentrate on the question of how he’d arrived in the first field. It was as if he’d been thrown off the back of a truck or dropped from the sky and become conscious only as he hit ground. As soon as he could, he’d turn around and go back to that field—though this plan seemed hopeless and thus filled him with dread. What, go stand by the old tree and wait for a bus to show up?
The rolling clouds animated the moon, which seemed to swell and thin. It appeared to be snickering. “I want to go home,” he muttered again. “I guess that’s what they all say.” The joke on him was that all soldiers wanted to be sent home to a bosom, a lover’s arms. He was being taught a lesson.
You should sleep, you should sleep, a crow cawed at him. Clearly, this world had been built around him. Each of its elements containing a message directly for him. His pleading had antagonized it. The sky, the ground, the trees, the birds. The men too?
Were his children lost somewhere, untethered?
The sky thundered and lit up in the distance behind him, so he turned to look. Not lightning but more explosions. Impo
ssible to know how close they were. He knew all the facts, better than most, had been the sort of child who liked war games and toy soldiers, who later flushed with embarrassment over the inaccuracies of the toys’ weaponry. But now he realized he’d misunderstood everything. He had not known the basic facts of life in combat. How difficult it was to know where one was in this landscape, in any landscape, and this was not a board game, and he and his companions were not being moved along, were not figurines between index finger and thumb, and could see only as much and as far ahead as anyone could see.
The trees had fingers, branches that seemed in his peripheral vision to stretch up to choke out the sky. But when he jerked up his head, the sky was still there.
He noticed now how many mosquitoes there were. To add swelling to misery. He smacked his leg. In a past life, any such suffering would have had him tucked into bed. Temperature taken and warm soup.
By the time morning was glinting through the trees, Philip knew where he was. Ambrose was fallen beside him, neck in sleep bent awkwardly over his pack. Time passed strangely, too quick and then too slow. Time didn’t pass at all. He, Philip, was a still point in the centre of time. The light between those trees did not shift. He felt no hunger, had no thirst. This was an afterlife, a purgatory, and perhaps each life was one doll nested inside another. Perhaps this one would open, and there would be another and then another.
But now, the forest had eyes and was watching him.
* * *
—
“You seem different, pal,” Daniels said to Philip, handing him a canteen.
Philip attempted warmth and compassion, because these men didn’t know they were imaginary.
“Do I?” he said, picking at his teeth with a branch. “You all ready to move on?”
“Anything happen last night? Ambrose said you were awake.”
Ambrose, crouched over the pack he was tying closed, empty-eyed, with the dumb wariness of a deer. He hoisted the pack onto his shoulders.
“He seems worried,” Philip said.
