Deserts of Fire

by Douglas Lain

  I told my partner, Holly, about the dreams. She told me she was worried about me. She said I was like two people—sometimes I was a knight in armor, helping people, making them feel safe. And then sometimes I was just a guy looking for somebody to hit. She said I had to decide which one I wanted to be. As if it was that simple. But she had a point; I couldn’t do my job if I was afraid of exploding all the time. I decided not to be a cop, at least for a while.

  We were back in Iraq by then, and guys I knew were making two thousand a week working security there. One of them was a bodyguard for the proconsul. I liked the idea of that, of being back in front of the quarterback, but not in a game. Besides, there wasn’t anyone left at home for me to protect.

  It took forever to get the inheritance squared away. I sold the house and made up a will of my own, and then I got on a plane. Two weeks of training, then Iraq. It seemed like they were in a hurry to get us in place, but that was fine with me.

  When I got in they briefed me and told me I’d be driving my first mission the next day. Right away I saw that it wasn’t going to be anything like what I’d been expecting. The company had been subcontracted to cart supplies for some of the corporations doing reconstruction. They turned us into truck drivers, basically. My first and last job for them was driving a truck full of blenders and coffee-makers from one of the airports to the Green Zone. Blenders. I still can’t believe that. We took an IED for the sake of five dozen Cuisinarts.

  I never even heard it; my ears just hurt, and then everything on my left side hurt, and then it was quiet.

  I guess since you don’t have ears, you never heard that bomb you dropped either. You must have seen, though. Wreckage. Bodies covered in dust. Even if you didn’t know what you were doing before that, you did then.

  You know what eats at me? After five surgeries, eleven months of physical therapy, and eighteen of headshrinking, what bothers me most is I never got to return fire. It’s not like there was anybody to shoot at, just some wires and plastique and a remote control receiver. I don’t remember any of it, to tell you the truth. Sometimes bits of it seep into my nightmares, but when I think of it I remember leaving the airport and that’s all. Next thing, I woke up in the hospital.

  Innes told me your people—except people’s not the right word, is it? I mean, you used to eat humans alive. You’d put them in a trance and just tear them to pieces. That’s why they took your eyes out, right? So you couldn’t hypnotize us. They didn’t have any choice; it was you or them. You or us.

  We all survived. We’d have been on the news, otherwise, like those men in Fallujah. “Contractors,” they called them. Everyone at home thought they were construction workers.

  I lost the left leg a few inches above the knee. The truck was supposed to be armored; it wasn’t. They gave me a transfemoral prostheses, made mostly out of carbon fiber and various plastics. It’s light, but getting around on an artificial knee is tricky. I either move slowly or I fall down a lot.

  They paid me pretty well for my leg, I guess. I mean, if they were going to pay you for your eyes, what do you think would be a fair price?

  I tried not to say shit like that to the psychiatrist they sent me to. I did tell her about the fists, though. I was still having those dreams. I never saw the faces anymore, just the smiles.

  The psychiatrist thought I was blaming myself for everything. Not just the injury, but my parents too. She told me I needed to get a handle on my anger, but I don’t know what she expected me to do. I used to exercise to keep my head on straight. I ran eight miles every morning, and I never got sick; my lungs were clean and whatever might have been in my blood just burned away. When I got back and stood in the shower I always thought that the hardest part of my day was over, and I was usually right.

  I couldn’t do that anymore. I couldn’t do a lot of things. Maybe you can relate. You used to fly, but now you’re stuck down here in the dark.

  I took up swimming instead. It wasn’t easy with one leg, but I have strong arms. I kept lifting, thought maybe I could get what was left of the leg back to full strength. Denial. The psychiatrist told me about that. It sounded like a good idea to me.

  My days were too long. I’d work out for an hour or two and I’d go eat somewhere, and if I didn’t have therapy that day then I’d have nothing to do. I’d take long walks with the cane just to pass the time—the muscles weren’t strong enough for me to walk on just the leg, yet. I didn’t really like to hang out with the guys from my trauma support group. It brought up all kinds of things that I needed to keep in one place—does that make sense? Sometimes I’d see Holly, my old partner, but she’d gotten married and it felt wrong. She just reminded me how much everything had changed.

  I had enough money from the company and my inheritance that I didn’t have to work. I would have liked to work, but the list of things I couldn’t do seemed a lot longer than the list of things I could. I’d never liked TV much, so I swapped paperbacks at the used bookstore in my neighborhood and read two or three of them in a day. Mysteries, science fiction—I even read some of Burroughs’s books, but not the ones about here. Innes says the other ones are all made up.

  I started spending a lot of time on military bulletin boards and blogs. A lot of the people there didn’t know what they were talking about. There were some vets, but there were also a lot of people who’d just read a few books about the service and never actually been in it. I was pretty tough on those sorts of people until one day I realized that I wasn’t all that different from them. I’d spent four years in the army and never seen a day of action until I took a job making four times what the army guys were making to do the real fighting. And then, boom. I had this picture of who I was, you know? I was strong. I was a protector. I had parents.

  I think I might have lost it if one of the guys in my trauma support group hadn’t sent me that link. UndergroundSingles.com. He said he’d found it in his Spam folder, but it turned out to be legit and vet-friendly. So I clicked over there to check it out.

  It’s one of those sites where they ask you all kinds of questions, like would you rather go hiking or to the opera, and how important is your religion to you, and how happy are you on a scale from 1 to 10. The kind of thing where they tell you to be honest but nobody is, where people say they’re into camping even though they haven’t seen a tent in ten years.

  I decided that was bullshit. I told the quiz exactly how depressed I was, and how I wasn’t sure I believed in god anymore, and that I got angry a lot. It was funny at first, but it was also a look at myself that I didn’t very much enjoy. When I clicked on Finish I was ready for it to tell me that I wasn’t even fit for my own company, but instead it gave me Innes.

  She’s so beautiful: dark hair, and dark skin—not black, but sort of Arabic-looking. I don’t usually notice eyes, but hers are this sort of translucent green that just came right off the screen. She had this expression like … she was smiling a little, but the overall look was very intense and skeptical. Challenging. I wasn’t even sure if she was really a member. She could have been a model that the company put up to convince suckers like me to give up their credit card information, but I had to find out.

  There were things about the registration that were sort of odd. Like where they asked where you were from, there were all these strange places in the drop-down menu. Luana, New Phutra, the Unfriendly Islands—places I’d never heard of before. And Innes’s profile said she lived in the Land of Sari and taught solar engineering at Perry Military College. I wondered if maybe it was all a joke, but I guess I’m stubborn. If Innes was real, I wanted to talk to her.

  When you feel healthy and fit, confidence is easy. Before the injury I never had trouble approaching women. If I wanted a girl, I’d go talk to her, and ninety-five percent of the time I’d get her. I’m not bragging, I’m just saying. But this was online, and I wasn’t feeling nearly as confident. It wasn’t the engineer thing—I’d dated women more educated than me, and I could hold my own. I just
didn’t know if I could keep up physically. Innes had listed interests like hiking, hunting, and riding, all of which made her more attractive but none of which I thought I’d be able to do.

  I wrote to her anyway. I told her my parents were both dead and I was getting used to being alone. I told her I’d been wounded in Iraq but I was trying to stay in shape. I told her I had never tried an online dating site but when I’d seen her picture I had to write. After I’d sent the email I thought probably I shouldn’t have laid all of that on her right off the bat. She wasn’t a quiz, she was a real woman, at least I hoped so. I should have tried to be funny and clever, kept it light.

  I guess it didn’t matter, because next morning her response was there between a chain forward from an army wife I knew and my daily forecast from weather.com. I remember my pulse was up just double-clicking on the email, and I had a dumb grin on my face, like a kid with a crush.

  She said they’d been following the war on Iraq, and the way she said it made it sound like she was really far away. Like Mars. She said that a battle wound was a badge of honor. She said her dad was still alive, but her mom had died when she was little. Then she talked about what was outside her windows—birds chasing one another along the cliffs, vendors selling fruit at the market, her hyaenodon curled up in a splash of sunlight. I didn’t know what a hyaenodon was, but it all sounded nice. Better than my drab little apartment with its bare walls and the fall stealing daylight outside.

  I told her that, and I told her about my favorite mornings, in the Mojave where my unit had trained years ago—how cold it was, until the sun sent all the night life scurrying for their burrows. The desert was harsh but I had liked it. If I’d spent more time in Iraq maybe I would have changed my mind. Anyway, I wrote about that and about the things we were trying to do in Iraq, even though I thought there had been some mistakes. The justifications were complicated, but it was the right thing for us to be there. I remember that I said that because when she wrote back she said she didn’t understand the American obsession with justifications. “War is about survival,” she said. I didn’t know how to respond to that, but I didn’t really have to, because she said something else.

  She asked me to describe the sunrise. She’d never seen one, she said. That seemed pretty odd for a solar engineer, or a hunter. I decided she was just flirting. So I got up early the next day and walked over to the park to watch the sun come up. I wrote down all the colors in the order they appeared and the way they made the buildings look sort of unreal, and how the greens were stronger, like paint that had soaked in and spread. I thought later that she might have been looking for something more scientific, but she said she liked it.

  We wrote a lot. She told me about her work, that it was more hands-on than theoretical. She lived in a big house with her father; she called him “the General.” She asked me to send her more pictures—the one I’d put up at the site was my ID photo for the company—and she sent me some of her, too. Some of them were kind of sexy. We didn’t write every day. Sometimes she would write at odd hours, and once she didn’t write for a week. I was starting to wonder if I had pissed her off somehow when I got an email from her asking me to visit her.

  This was about two months after we’d started talking, and I still didn’t know where she lived. I couldn’t find the Land of Sari on Google Maps. Every time I asked her she would talk around it. “You’d have to go north to get there,” she said once, so I thought maybe it was a military base in Alaska or Canada. I asked her if she was one of Santa’s helpers, but she didn’t get the joke. She seemed to think Santa Claus and the Pope were the same person.

  She told me that if I decided to visit, she would tell me how to get there. It didn’t seem real at first. I was starting to get my confidence back, but I still wondered why she’d picked me. I figured she must get a hundred responses a day to her ad, and a lot of those guys must have had both their legs. It didn’t matter, though. I knew already that I was going. I wanted a change. I wanted her. She didn’t talk to me like it took me two minutes to walk down a flight of stairs. She talked to me like we were at dinner deciding whether to have crème brulee or each other for dessert.

  She told me I needed to get to Barrow, Alaska, and catch an Interior Air flight from there. I asked her where to, and she said they only flew to one place.

  When I got to Barrow it was dark. It was late December, and the sun wouldn’t be up for another month. The cold was vicious. I’d brought gloves and a long coat, but no hat. I thought my ears would snap right off of my head before I got inside the tiny little airport.

  All Interior Air had given me was a phone number. When I called for a shuttle the woman at the other end told me that a flight had left the day before. I asked her when the next one would leave, and she told me the same thing they’d told me when I booked the ticket: flights departed every one to seven days, and they would provide accommodations during the wait.

  I rode the shuttle with a guy named Drak who was nearly as broad as he was tall—not fat, but wide at the shoulders, like he was wearing padding under his short-sleeved button-down shirt. Drak the Loud One, he called himself, and at the time I didn’t realize that was his legal name and not just a nickname. I’d noticed him on the flight in; he’d snored most of the way. He wore sandals and shorts and didn’t seem at all bothered by the cold. He said he was headed home after a business trip to Bolivia.

  I asked him where home was and he said he lived near Sari nowadays. Then he smiled at me sort of funny and asked me if I’d been there before. I told him it was my first time. He asked if I was traveling on business or pleasure, and I told him I was visiting a friend.

  He said: “I hope she knows you’re coming for her,” and he patted my artificial leg. “Less chance of her getting away.” It took me a second, but I laughed. No one had dared to make jokes about my injury before, and I was surprised to find out that I didn’t mind.

  Drak held out his right hand, and then plucked it from his sleeve. An azdryth had bitten it off, he said. He kept the rubber hand for business negotiations, to break the ice. He’d shake hands with someone and let them yank the hand right out. He said it relaxed everyone.

  Interior Air’s headquarters were on the south shore of Footprint Lake: a square, three-story terminal on one side, a hangar on the other. I didn’t see any runways, but at the time I thought maybe it was just too dark.

  It wasn’t dark inside the terminal; the central atrium had huge lamps hanging above and smaller rooms surrounding it on two levels. There were stone tables scattered around the ground level, and palm trees and acacias growing in clusters with finger-leaved ferns. It was like a gymnasium-sized greenhouse.

  The security guard at the desk greeted Drak by name, and asked if he had anything to declare. He gave her his wristwatch and smiled like he’d just set down a weight he’d carried for five hundred miles. She put the watch in a drawer behind the counter and locked it. Then she looked at me and said, Hello, Thomas—not Hello, Sir or Hello, Mr. Tucker. She said she needed my watch and my phone and any other timekeeping devices I was carrying. I was sure I’d heard her wrong. I figured she’d need to see my passport instead, but she said the authorizations were all taken care of and asked for my watch again. She said I’d get it back on my return trip. She said it would all be useless inside in any case.

  I said to her, How can a watch be useless? She said this was all in the agreement they had sent me regarding my flight, and when I checked the fine print later, there it was. No timekeeping devices of any sort.

  Luckily I was traveling pretty light. I gave her my watch and my phone and my travel alarm clock. I remember it was 4:49 p.m., and that’s the last I knew the time.

  Drak and I settled down in the atrium; a steward brought us some wine and a platter of cheese and fruit, and we ate and drank and talked. Drak had been in the military too, he said—it was compulsory, even for someone with an injury like his. He said he was still sort of in the military, just on the supply end. He wa
s married and had five kids. They raised thags on a ranch outside Sari. It sounded like a good life, and I told him so. Then I realized he was asleep.

  I lay down in the shade, feeling like I was stepping off a trail into the woods. The lights stayed on. I kept forgetting we weren’t outside; I saw a bee at one point, and I heard something bigger moving around in the trees above.

  I lay there imagining what a thag looked like. I decided they were like horned sheep, and I counted them until an azdryth came up and started eating them. I still don’t actually know what an azdryth is, but in my half-dreaming state it was sort of a long-necked leopard. After a while I realized that Innes was sitting on the azdryth’s back, staring at me.

  When I woke up I noticed that for the first time in years there weren’t deep indentations in my palms. I hadn’t had the nightmare.

  The steward served us juice and coffee and omelets. Drak had taken off his shirt and sandals sometime during the night, and he sat at the table barefoot and bare-chested. He’d put his prosthetic hand away as well. The stump was smoother than I would have expected, just a faint line showing that it had been taken away rather than withheld since birth.

  Drak said it was too hot for all those clothes, and it would be hotter still when we got back. I didn’t understand that, but before I could ask him about it, they announced that our flight would be leaving in half an hour. More passengers arrived: three single guys and a man and woman together. I wondered if they were on their honeymoon but I didn’t ask. They were all dark-skinned people, none quite as thick-set as Drak, but big.