The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  “It breaks you down,” said Daniels. “My father told me all about how it goes in war. Some things, you see them and they break you.”

  Philip nodded.

  “Oh, what a wonderful morning!” Mitford said, reaching his arms into the sky.

  “I did see something,” Philip said. “Explosions. Lots of shooting.”

  Daniels pulled out binoculars. “From which direction?”

  Trees striped the view identically from every vantage. “It was to my back. This is where I was sitting. That way.”

  “Goddammit,” Cooper said. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the way we’re headed,” Daniels said.

  * * *

  —

  There was a rhyme the children’s librarians used to recite: “Going on a bear hunt. Gonna catch a big one. We’re not scared.” Then the leader, drumming her palms on her thighs, narrated their obstacles. “Oh, look! Long grasses! Can’t go around it. Can’t go over it. Gotta go through it.” Philip chanted it to himself: “Oh, look! Gotta go through it. Oh, look! Gotta go through it.”

  They stayed in the woods, avoiding those hedged-in lanes where they felt like mice fumbling through an open-air maze.

  “You shoulda seen it out there. Four days ago,” said Daniels. “We were just getting picked off. Ten at a fucking time. Shot in the back while you tried to cut through the brush. Tanks going down every time they got over a hill.”

  Their boots crunched loudly with every step. Ambrose flinched when someone cracked a branch with his heel.

  “Sure would be good to see another person,” Mitford said.

  Ambrose hissed at him to be quiet.

  “Ain’t nobody out here,” Mitford said, then grumbled to himself. “You’re supposed to get to loving the guys in your platoon. There’s supposed to be some kind of bond.”

  Ambrose shushed him again.

  “It’s odd,” Daniels said, ignoring Ambrose. “Foreboding. Just the five of us in the woods.”

  “Don’t think like that. Shit,” Cooper said.

  Gotta go through it. Philip added increasing nausea to his list of concerns. The farther he walked in this direction, the farther he’d have to go back to that first field, if he ever found it again. After he got through this, he’d go back and find his way home. He pictured the church steps, heard Marie’s voice just behind him. But he couldn’t remember her face, or anyone’s face.

  “A situation is only as bad as you make it,” Philip said, panting. “Life gives you lemons. You know. Make lemonade.”

  Their silence was a wall. Finally, Cooper laughed. “Life didn’t bother sending any lemons this time.”

  Here was the case to disprove the mumbo-jumbo, Philip thought. Life wasn’t just what you made of it. Life was a jaw with teeth. You were sitting on its tongue.

  The clouds had gone grey, and the air was damp as a mouth. The sky was a cryptogram: in this foreign country, this long-lost time, did heavy grey clouds still indicate rain? Ahead of them, an answer: the distant lines of drizzle thin and steady as a baleen grin.

  These lines of rain were woven through with the vertical lines of trees, giving the world an architecture, as though it had been built to contain them.

  “At least in all this we can glorify God,” Ambrose said quietly. They were about to emerge from the cover of trees. Rain now fell steadily, beading on their wool jackets, soaking through the knitted holes in Philip’s sweater.

  Ambrose had been speaking to himself, but Mitford snapped his head around and gave him a vicious look. Mitford had not yet shown any rage, which made this Gorgon stare worse. The others stopped walking.

  “Don’t bring God into this,” Mitford said through gritted teeth. This switch in mood, thought Philip, mimicked the weather’s move from sunshine to chill rain.

  “A day to us is a thousand years to the Lord.” Ambrose didn’t raise his eyes. He looked heavier and heavier, limper and limper, as though he weren’t a man but an enormous ventriloquist’s dummy. His feet dragged across the ground. “Our eyes must be on eternity. Store up treasures not on Earth where man can destroy.”

  “I don’t want to hear this fucking bullshit. Does it glorify God to see bodies ripped open and ground up like meat? Does it glorify God for our bodies to be destroyed?” said Mitford.

  “Leave him alone,” Daniels said.

  “If Daniels had his way, we’d all get along, wouldn’t we?” Mitford said. “I bet you figure you’re the Christ of this operation.”

  “Our bodies are temporary,” Ambrose said.

  “And your God requires them. He’s hungry for young, fresh bodies.”

  “The Nazis. Not God,” Philip said. Earthworms happy for rain wriggled out among the roots they had to step over. The ground was prepared to decompose their bodies, and was, in its way, hungry for them.

  “Killing Krauts glorifies God.” Ambrose began walking again, head bowed, eyes hidden by the lip of his helmet. He passed through the group of them like a ghost through a wall, unperturbed when his shoulders hit theirs, when his pack knocked against Mitford.

  Mitford ran and got ahead of him. Stood like a boxer on quick feet, chest out, fists drawn. “Yeah? And who the fuck made the Nazis? Where’d Hitler come from in this pretty fairy tale you’re telling yourself?”

  Daniels jogged up to join them. Mitford was forced to walk backwards, while Ambrose kept doggedly on. Cooper took this opportunity for a smoke, his face expressionless, hands cupped over the squat cigarette to keep the rain out.

  “I sure would love to fight you, Private,” Ambrose said to Mitford.

  “Oh yeah?” Mitford stopped walking so that Ambrose would crash into him, but Ambrose stopped too.

  Pity came over Daniels’ face. “Look at this poor fucker.”

  The ground now squelched under their feet. Philip’s battered toes began to sting and tingle. “Something’s going to happen,” he said.

  As though he’d conjured it, there was a rumble of thunder, a lightning crack. A whizzing, a shriek, something cold and wet like a raindrop falling on metal. Then Cooper made a loud and incoherent sound and fell to his knees. At his shoulder, something red bled inky around a hole in his jacket.

  Shuck­ashuc­kashu­cka.

  Then it whizzed into the bare flesh at Cooper’s neck, taking a huge bite, blood not just blooming but gushing. Philip stood staring until Daniels’ screams got through to him, until he felt his arm being yanked.

  “Get back! Get the hell back!”

  They each found a tree to crouch behind and fired back, into the rainy distance.

  Philip pulled his body deeper into its crouch and held his hands over his ears. He fixed his eyes on Cooper, who was still trying to draw the cigarette to his mouth with his right arm, holding onto the wound at his neck with the left as blood pulsed out of it. Slowly, Cooper fell back on the ground, and released his grip on his neck. He succeeded in bringing the cigarette to his lips, but it had gone out in the rain. He sucked at it anyway. The leaves, the clothing, his hands and the cigarette were all rusted with blood.

  The firing stopped.

  “We get ’em?”

  “How many?”

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” This was Mitford. He stood and started running as though he were on fire.

  “Get the fuck down, Mitford!” Daniels shouted.

  Holding his knee and moaning with apologies, Mitford fell into rotted layers of leaves.

  Philip was frozen, hands over ears, eyes on Cooper, who at last dropped the cigarette into the rain- and blood-soaked earth. His eyes like pennies. Daniels was close enough that Philip could reach his arm out to touch him, and he longed to do this. Daniels reloaded his gun. A few feet away, Ambrose was at another tree. Farther yet, Mitford moaned.

  Daniels nodded at Ambrose, who pulled the pin from a grenade and threw it. Perhaps, thought Philip, they had forgotten that he was there. Perhaps now was the time to start crawlin
g away, retrace his steps and be saved.

  Then came the screams. “Nein! Nein! Nein!” Then the blast. Then a silence as deep as sleep. Not even a bird dared chirp.

  Daniels held up his hand, but Ambrose did as Mitford had done, and ran into the gap between themselves and their assailant. He ran past Mitford on the ground and kept running. For several seconds, Philip heard only the sound of Daniels’ hard fast breaths.

  Then: “It’s just one fucking guy!” Ambrose was laughing loudly. “One fucking guy!”

  Daniels stood and moved those few feet to Mitford’s side. Philip followed. Ahead of them, silhouetted in the grey light, Ambrose moved in a graceful dance, heaving something up and down again, a pick into ice, an axe into wood. Philip moved closer, blinking away rain. Behind him, Daniels told Mitford to hold on, he’d be fine. They were almost there.

  Almost where? Philip came closer and closer to Ambrose, who was still pounding something, but not with a pick or an axe or a pen. He was jamming the flat end of his rifle into the leaves, silently and without expression. Philip moved closer until he could see. He had to see. He got so close that he could see flesh splashing up juices with every hit.

  Philip turned around and looked back. Daniels still knew nothing. “Go back!” he yelled. He would keep Daniels with him, and they’d find port together. “Go back!”

  At last, Ambrose stopped. “He was shooting at us,” he said to Philip blankly.

  Philip wanted to run, but the rain was turning him to melted wax, fixing him there in the muck. He stared at Ambrose’s blood-covered face, two white eyes blinking out from behind a maroon mask.

  “It’s what they want us to do,” Ambrose said. He leaned against a tree and lifted his face to the rain. “It’s what we’re supposed to do. We’re the butchers.”

  Now Daniels patted Mitford on the forehead and moved toward Philip.

  “I’m not getting home, am I?” Philip said.

  “I’m sorry,” Daniels said. “We should have left you there. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

  “Nobody knows what they’re doing,” Ambrose said. “My father spent years in bed. Didn’t even have the balls to kill himself.”

  “I’m not getting home,” Philip said again. Something creeped over him, and he thought there would be a child’s small hands over his eyes. Guess who? The wet clay ground was shaggy as a carpet, the light as dim as a basement. “I’m never getting back there.”

  “We gotta keep going,” Daniels said.

  Ambrose laughed. In his hands was a pistol he’d taken from the dead soldier. Philip didn’t understand what he was seeing as Ambrose brought the pistol to his mouth, his thumb hooking the trigger.

  The blast echoed. Daniels turned Philip away, held him close as a father would a son.

  “I don’t speak French,” Philip said.

  Daniels nodded as though he understood.

  Bodies lay in all directions, and the ground began to bristle slightly with the lives of worms and snails too small and unknowing to be moved.

  Chapter

  10

  THE FAITHFUL

  From the stone steps of the church, Marie tossed a slobber-damp tennis ball. It hit the ground with a pop and went bouncing down the street, and these hard echoing sounds were followed by the skittering of Gus’s claws and the clink of his collar. The ball came back to Marie with one short bark, like an answer to a question each toss of the ball tried to ask. What now? And: Should I? She tossed it again, and the ball landed with a hard metallic bang on a car’s top and went dribbling down a windshield and onto the cracking asphalt next to the tire, where Gus, bored by this easy fetch, retrieved it.

  The shadows shortened until they were directly under their objects, retracted like tongues. Marie tossed the ball with all of the force of that morning’s emotions. At first it was only anger. Hot, the size of a tennis ball and burning inside her. Fuck you for leaving, Philip. Fuck you, Rosa; fuck you, guys. How could you all just leave? Only a dog stays, she thought, looking at Gus with self-pity. Her anger was as it had once been at the news about climate change, when in a rage she had passed by idling motorists and glared at them, later ranting to a customer or to Jason: “We’re committing suicide! We’re in a garage slowly suffocating on fumes!” Other people seemed to sort out that they were small in this universe, or they were in denial about that, but Marie’s own helplessness was always a new shock she couldn’t accept. How could there be nothing they could do?

  These cars along this street were dead, never to idle again. She had outlived them. Grass was like water was like the tortoise in the fable. The hares had burned themselves out on hubris and on fumes, and the grass and weeds grew through the cracks the ice had made in the roads. Maybe the car’s tires would melt into the asphalt. Maybe the cars would become habitats for rodents, become luxurious nests. Someday this road would be a forest again.

  Marie’s arm was growing sore, but it seemed necessary to continue this charade, to go through these motions of the dog owner and her dog, as though it were only very early on a Sunday, and the world was merely sleeping. Over a decade ago, before she knew Jason, every encounter was lonesome. Other people were unknowable, and she was unknown, invisible to others. With friends she didn’t understand she went drinking and experimented with drugs, with ecstasy and hallucinogens, and she woke up in their houses in despair. She had been down this way early on Sunday mornings, had walked home from the apartments of these friends. The quiet of the streets had calmed her. She used to look up at the bridges and the pedestrian tunnel under MacNab Street and try to take it in. Her city. The city of her youth, a youth, she’d believed, that was like none that had come before. She had admired edifices, the curl in concrete a gesture toward neoclassicism, itself a gesture toward Ancient Greek architecture, and she wanted to make art that would duplicate this feeling. A photograph was not enough; just to witness was not enough. One needed a brushstroke to capture in each small thing its delicacy.

  Gus retrieved the ball, and she took it: toss, pop, pop, skitter, pop.

  St. John the Divine had been Christ’s beloved disciple. St. John the Divine, saint of loyalty and love, whose name was on the church building, was now their saint. The steps of this church were their steps. These people, her family. What had come before this final ending had not been real. The ability to adapt and to make a strange thing familiar was the distinguishing feature of humanity. People were obsessed by novelty; they were predictable and knowable as lambs. Even Marie. So Philip had been right to think that they needed something to remind them who they were, that people were falling through port and losing their bearings.

  Toss, pop, skitter. Gus dropped the ball at her feet and panted at her, just like dogs were meant to do, full of energetic glee, so that you might laugh off anything and be okay. What did Gus need, really? Even Marie was programmed, her needs were easily known: need for companionship; need for a belief in the future. She was just like Gus, slave to instincts and needs.

  Behind her, shut behind heavy doors, the port was glowing with those needs. With Mo, she had hastily nailed the front doors shut with boards, but the port still seemed too close. It knew her, had stripped her bare, beckoned with a: Relax, relax, you don’t have to do this anymore. Why not just go through? No one was watching. She was alone in the street, had been alone all morning. Alone, you lost track of time. This had happened before she joined the group, for those few months when she kept to herself, learning to pick the locks of restaurants, cafés and stores. Days had swelled, moments pulsed, time was an emotion and not a fact. Except for the photos, she might have lost days, and even so, there were days when she couldn’t remember if she had taken the photo, rolls that she came to the end of too quickly. Had it been twenty-four days? There was her menstrual cycle, and there was the moon.

  Maybe she should go back into the church just to get the ledger, if only for its confirmation of numbers and days. Then, she could get a feel, put her finger in the air and see what port was
doing—whether it had changed the weather in the church as she suspected. People with time to kill, like prisoners, turned their energy to getting good at push-ups, and so Marie dropped to the sidewalk and managed fifteen wobbly ones, until she collapsed on her back. Gus ran over. He seemed to be wondering whether to be concerned. She laughed. He licked her cheek. “This does not bode well,” Mo had said, before he and Rosa drove off and left her alone here. “You sure you’ll be all right?” he said. “I’ll drop Rosa off, and I’ll be back soon.” They had driven off to find everyone else, and she would wait for them here and warn whoever came. They’d been too eager to get away from her

  Rosa nodded doubtfully. “Stay close, Gus,” Marie said. She had wanted Rosa to hear in her voice that she was afraid. Port inside, and not only that: a person in the city breaking windows, drawing Ss in red paint. They thought she was strong; they thought she would resist.

  Rosa and Mo sped off in her car, honking several times. Beep, be-be-beep, like a continuation of Mo’s nervous chatter, and then silence. Sometimes the wind stirred up dust and papers, sometimes it drew a brittle old pop can down the street, but otherwise she was alone. Anything might be happening anywhere, but for them, there would be no news. Whatever happened, all she would know about was what she could see from her own small frame, and from the frames of this handful of people whose interpretation she could hardly trust. She wanted a press release, a front-page story, a person who was in charge to float in with a pedestal and a microphone, with army medals, with some kind of badge. But there were no helicopters; the skies were silent.

  * * *

  —

  This is the way the world ends:

  Many years ago, Marie and Jason had watched his father die. There were people in this world—there had been people in this world—who saw people die every day. There were oncologists and soldiers and aid workers and trauma nurses, people who were accustomed to what Marie and Jason had both found unthinkable. “How is it that this happens to all of us, to every living thing,” Jason said. They were nearly hysterical all the time, having what they believed were calm conversations about the idea of death as they rounded corners on the way to the hospital on the escarpment. Neither of them got any work done for weeks. Jason’s formulae hung suspended, awaiting his return. The first skeletal layer of Marie’s prints hung without being filled. They drove a car his mother had lent them for this purpose; they drove his father’s car, and they rounded corners on the way up the escarpment and rounded corners on the parking structure, and they pushed buttons on the elevator, and they had conversations about death, while his father lay dying. His father would die in a few months or a few weeks; cancer was eating him up, and every good cell was being replaced by a bad one.