He takes off his hat. Then he sets the hat on the floor, sideways, and rolls the ball into it, very slowly. When he lifts up his hat, the bowling ball looks like it is going to drop right out the bottom. Then Mr. Loomis looks at us, and he makes another face. He looks at the hat. He looks at us. He looks worried. And then, bam, quick, he slams the hat on his head with the bowling ball still in it. The ball is so heavy, it makes Mr. Loomis’s knees buckle, and he says, “Ouch!”
We are all laughing.
Later Mr. Loomis gets out a big sketchpad and a black marker. He asks us kids what he should draw, and we all yell out, “A dog!” “An elephant!” “The Eiffel Tower!” and stuff like that. And Mr. Loomis draws what we yell out. Then he has some kids from the front come up and reach into his pockets. And they pull out the things he has already drawn on the sketchpad!
How does he do that? It is so cool, and we are all laughing, and I am wondering if Mr. Loomis will ever call me up to the front, and then Mr. Loomis gets a funny look on his face. He puts his finger to his eyebrow again. And he walks all over, like he’s looking for something. We are all wondering what he is looking for. We ask him, but he doesn’t answer us.
He just takes out the sketchpad and draws a bowling ball. So, of course, we start yelling, “It’s in your hat! Look in your hat!” Mr. Loomis keeps walking around, pretending he can’t hear us. So we are all going crazy, and some of the teachers stand up to remind us that we cannot get too wild. So we keep yelling, but quieter, and Mr. Loomis just can’t figure it out. He keeps looking and looking.
And then he takes out his sketchpad again, and he points at the bowling ball. And we yell, “Your hat!” And he keeps pretending he doesn’t hear us, and then finally, when we are about to go insane with trying to get him to look in his hat, he mouths, “My hat?” And we say, “Yes, your hat!” And Mr. Loomis—this is so funny—he draws a hat next to the bowling ball. “Oh no,” we are all thinking. And then Mr. Loomis—this is why I like assemblies so much—Mr. Loomis takes the sketchpad, and he shakes it real hard. Boom! The bowling ball drops right out of the sketchpad and onto the floor. We go crazy. Mr. Loomis stops the bowling ball from rolling with his toe again, and then he takes off his hat to show us that it is empty. And bows.
It is the coolest thing I have ever seen. Nene isn’t even going to believe me when I tell her. I wish I could be a magician. I wonder if a magician makes enough money to buy a house. I am going to buy a house for Nene. If I were the Hard Rock casino, I would pay Mr. Loomis a lot of money.
AFTER THE ASSEMBLY, WE ONLY
have an hour until the end of the day, so Mrs. Monaghan says we might as well have a talent show. Mrs. Monaghan says that anybody who has a talent and wants to share it may do so. When Carrie asks if she can practice first, Mrs. Monaghan says no, this is a spontaneous talent show, which none of us has ever heard of before. Mrs. Monaghan says she will go first.
I wonder what Mrs. Monaghan’s talent is. It turns out, she can dance a jig. She says she learned this in summer camp in Australia. “When is summer in Australia?” Mrs. Monaghan asks. “In the winter!” we yell back, because this is one of her favorite questions to ask us about Australia. Then she dances her jig, which looks just like Albanian dancing, but I don’t tell her this.
Some of the girls can also dance jigs, or something like them, so they all get up and do this for us. Mrs. Monaghan has an iPod player in her room, so she lets the girls pick a song called “Hot N Cold,” and they all dance, and since it’s a spontaneous talent show, it looks a little bit like everybody just doing what they want. Listening to “Hot N Cold” makes some of the other girls want to sing “So What,” and Mrs. Monaghan has this on her iPod, so they do that too. Carlo says it is time for a boy to show a talent, so he demonstrates his jumping ability. He jumps straight up a bunch of times, and then Mrs. Monaghan lets him move the table in the front, so he can jump out too. Carlo is a very good jumper. Then Danny says he is a good drummer, so Mrs. Monaghan lets him show off his drumming on the desks. He doesn’t have drumsticks or anything, but it is still pretty good.
I think this is the best day I have ever had at school, and I wish that it wasn’t going to be Thanksgiving so soon. Mrs. Monaghan asks me if I want to say something in Albanian, for my talent, but I say no. She doesn’t mind, and then Araceli and Ricky say that they want to speak in Spanish, so we listen to their talent. When Dr. Moore comes in to tell Mrs. Monaghan that we earned a party next month for getting the most “Good job” stickers from all the specials teachers, we say, “Can we have a talent show party again?” Mrs. Monaghan says yes, we can have a talent show party. And Dr. Moore says that she will supply the pizza and cupcakes, so we all leave for Thanksgiving break happy.
THANKSGIVING IS NOT AN ALBANIAN
holiday, so we don’t have turkey dinner at my house. Before Tirana was born, we used to go to Thanksgiving at Catholic Charities Refugee Center, and I still remember what stuffing and cranberries taste like. I don’t know why we don’t go there anymore, except one year the mayor came, and Baba doesn’t like mayors. Baba also doesn’t like holidays if it means there is no business for the ice-cream truck, but he likes Thanksgiving because there is a big soccer tournament on the other side of town, and Nene got us a permit so we can sell ice cream there. We don’t actually have to sell anything on Thursday, but we spend that day cleaning up the truck and filling it extra full with ice-cream treats.
You might think that people don’t want ice cream at Thanksgiving, but Las Vegas is hot, and especially if you are playing soccer. There aren’t very many places to eat by those soccer fields, so we sell a lot of ice cream to people who wish we would sell hot dogs or something. We can’t sell hot dogs because that takes a different kind of license, and Baba doesn’t like licenses. Sometimes Nene says that we should get a lunch truck, but Baba says that she should not trust America so much.
Anyway, we will be really busy all weekend. I don’t think kids mind having ice-cream treats for lunch, not as much as grown-ups. We all have to be there, even Tirana, who is kind of a lot of work, but there is no one to watch her at home, and Baba and Nene need my help.
This year, our truck is facing Field D, so we can watch the games a little bit. I have never played soccer, though I have a soccer ball, and Baba sometimes kicks it to me in the park. He says he is an old man, and can’t play futbolli anymore, but he is really quick. He can kick it with either foot, and he switches his feet so fast, I can’t find the ball when I am trying to get it. Baba loves soccer. He keeps yelling at the players on Field D.
“Hey, you, number three! Go up the left! Use your left foot. Go up the left!”
He yells so loud that it surprises the people coming to buy something at the ice-cream truck, but I don’t think the boys on the field can hear it. I hope not, because they look about my age, and I don’t want it to be someone I know from school. Lots of kids at Orson Hulet play soccer.
If I were on a soccer team, I would like to be a striker. That’s the person who shoots the goals, and everybody always likes the striker. Even if the striker misses, everyone just yells for him to try again. I wouldn’t want to be a back, because everybody gets mad at those guys. They can block ten shots, but if they miss one, everyone is upset. I would hate to be a back or a goalie, because it would just make me feel sick.
“Hey, what are you doing selling ice cream? Why aren’t you playing soccer?”
The man’s badge says Coach, and he seems nice, so I think he says this because maybe he is a big soccer fan like Baba. But my baba thinks he is being critical.
“He cannot play futbolli with these rich kids,” my baba says. “He has job. For his family.”
My baba does not realize that I do not want him to explain these things to the coach. The coach looks uncomfortable too, and he puts an extra dollar on the counter. My baba thinks that this is a good way to make more money, so all afternoon, he keeps talking about me.
We do seem to get more tips when Baba says these things, so there is no possibility that he will stop, but I am having a bad day. People keep looking at me, which I hate, and then they look like they feel sorry for me, which I hate even more, and I am just waiting, all day, to go home.
Nene knows that I am having a hard time, but there isn’t much she can do. The truck is really small, and if she says something to Baba about my feelings, he might yell at her. And we all know that when Baba yells at Nene in the truck, we don’t sell any ice cream.
So I stay away from the window as far as I can, and I make sure that the freezer drawers have all the different treats in them, and I play with Tirana, so she will not get too bored or cranky. My nene does one amazing thing. She slips me a dollar, which someone must have given to her when Baba was not looking, and I put it in my shoe. It doesn’t really make me feel better, but I know she wants it to. That’s the part that makes me feel a little better.
13
* * *
Luis
DR. GHOSH SAYS THAT human beings under stress are capable of extraordinary things: some good and some bad. There are people who have lifted cars in the air to save someone being crushed after an accident, and people who have survived days treading water after a shipwreck. There are also people who have drowned their own children or set themselves afire because they just couldn’t bear what Dr. Ghosh calls the “physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual” stress of certain experiences.
I memorized that list: physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Because that’s true. What happened to me was all those things, all at once. I don’t even know which was most important. You’re physically wrecked when you’re downrange. It’s hot, it’s dusty. Man, the dust in Kalsu is unbelievable. It gets everywhere: in your mouth, in your ears, in the skin of your neck. It’s in your equipment and in your food and in your bed. Nothing you eat tastes like anything you’ve ever eaten before anyway. Your CHU is like a tin closet, and it echoes. And you’re constantly going from complete inactivity to chaos. You’re either bored out of your mind or waiting to lose your mind to some homemade explosive.
And the spiritual piece. That’s tricky. A lot of guys pray. We even got a Muslim in my unit, and he prays five times a day. At first the guys didn’t like it. They said we were in this country because of the Muslims. But it’s different now. You spend all that time together, you get close. These guys would die for me, and I would die for them. What does it matter what name someone uses for God? At first I felt a little weird about the evangelicals praying to Jesus, like Jesus was different from God. I’m Catholic, so we’re careful about stuff like that. But then there’s this guy named Eric, who’s Jewish, and he told me it made him feel weird that Catholics talk about God like he has a human body.
Some guys get religious in a war, but other guys start being against religion. That’s kind of how Sam and I were. I prayed a lot, but Sam could hardly stand anyone praying. We didn’t talk about this. I didn’t pray in front of him, or at least not so he could tell, and he didn’t say too much stuff about religion in front of me. When you’re in a combat zone with someone, you stop focusing on how you’re different. The only way anyone is going to survive is with help from each other. That’s the real religion.
Dr. Ghosh says it will help if I can start to recognize the signs of stress in my life. I guess I’m pretty violent in my sleep, and some nights they tie my arms so that I don’t rip out my tubes or damage the equipment or something. I know that I am having nightmares at night, but I don’t remember them. Dr. Ghosh says that I should try to remember, when I first wake up, and he says the nightmares might be really bad, but it will still help if I remember them and talk about them.
It’s strange. I like Dr. Ghosh. But a lot of what he thinks I should do is the exact opposite of everything I needed to do to survive. I would have been dead months ago if I started thinking about my nightmares. If I thought about anything other than what the mission was, how to survive it, what were all the ways I could die that day. If you’re not thinking like that, if you’re not ready to do whatever you need to do to live, you aren’t going to make it downrange. You’re just not. That’s what folks back home don’t get. When you’re there, you’re living every single second with the possibility of an IED shooting nails and barbed wire through your head, with the chance that some maniac is going to use his vehicle as a weapon, with the reality that it could be a woman, an old man, a little kid. You don’t know what’s going to come at you, 24/7.
And when you’re in that situation, it’s bad. It’s really bad. But parts of it are weirdly good too. Like, you always know what the priorities are. Survival. Being there for your squad. There’s a bunch of little shit, like who prays to who or who eats what, that guys might talk about—they might jaw about just to release some stress—but nobody cares about it. When you’re in a combat zone, you know what’s important and what’s not. And the most important thing is what you will do for the guys around you and what they will do for you. That, and that you never let up, you never relax.
Which is the one thing I never figured out about Sam and that yo-yo. Because if there’s any guy over here who never let up, who never forgot what could happen, it was Sam. But when he got that yo-yo out, he did let up. And he did it on purpose. Maybe he knew he was still on, somewhere. Maybe he just had to let it go sometime, and he figured he’d rather die doing that than anything else available to do over there.
You gotta be able to react—no hesitation—if you want to live. If you want to have a good shot at living. Otherwise, it’s just dumb luck. And luck always runs out. This is what Sam and I figured out about each other on a mission. We both could make a decision fast and stick to it. Hesitation kills.
So Dr. Ghosh says now I should start thinking about my nightmares. Noticing what gets me upset during the day. What the triggers are. I don’t know. That’s going to be hard to do. He says the nightmares and the yelling and whatever else I do at night is not crazy. Even the way I get really angry during the day, sometimes over stupid stuff, I know it’s stupid, but I just can’t help it. There are noises these nurses make that kill me, I cannot stand this cart thing they have. Dr. Ghosh says all of that is the opposite of crazy. It’s a normal response to how I have been living. But it is isn’t going to work when I get out of this hospital, and I came damn close to killing myself—as close as you can get without doing it—and so I need to figure out what the triggers are before I try something like that again.
It’s nice when Dr. Ghosh says stuff like that. Like it matters to him. What I do. What happens to me. It feels nice and then it feels bad. Maybe that’s a trigger too. Someone acting half decent.
Dr. Ghosh worries about me trying suicide again. I can’t imagine it. It’s not like you can pop a soda can twice. It pops the first time, and then whether or not you pulled it open, the explosion has happened. That’s me. I popped. And now, what’s left in me is really bad, and maybe it will even build up again, but it’s not about to pop. That’s not what I feel like: someone about to pop. Maybe I feel like someone who is popped. But how would Dr. Ghosh know that?
DR. GHOSH SAYS I WROTE
a letter to an eight-year-old kid in Nevada. Damn. That’s a young kid. I was still sleeping next to my abuela’s bed in third grade. I would go to sleep in my bed, but in the middle of the night, I would go into my abuela’s room, and curl up on the floor with a blanket and pillow. I did that for years. I know I was still doing it in third grade. She should have stopped me. I was too old for that. Even though I never even remembered walking in there. I just always woke up on the floor. My abuela didn’t talk about it at all. She just woke me up when it was time for school, and I carried my blanket and pillow back to my room.
Thinking about
waking up, on the floor there, it’s making me feel really strange. I wish I could wake up there right now. I wish I were eight years old, and my abuela was waking me up, and all I had to do was take my blanket and my Superman pillow back to my room. I wish my abuela were downstairs, humming her bad music, making me some huevos. I wish I were eight. I wish I’d never grown up. I wish I could do it over again. Do this last year over again. I want to take it back. I don’t want to be a man who killed a kid. I don’t want to be the man who didn’t get killed, when Sam did. I don’t know how I can live with that. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. I don’t know how to get out of this body, this life. My abuela would never believe what I’ve done. I could never tell her. I’m never going to tell anyone. But what do I do with it? Why can’t I take it back?
How could an instant change everything? One thought. One instinctive reaction. I can’t take it back. I’d give anything to take it back. It doesn’t seem possible that I tried so hard to do the right thing, to do my job, to do it well, to be a good soldier. I wanted to be a good soldier. I was a good soldier. And then one split-second fraction of an instant, and everything is different. And I can’t fix it. I can’t change it. I can’t get that kid back. I can’t help that mother. I hear her crying at the back of my mind all the time. I can hear her wailing. How much she hurts. How much she is always going to hurt. There can’t be a worse sound in the world. She has lost everything that mattered to her. How could I tell my abuela this? How could I tell my abuela that I’m the man who did this?
Sam knew how crazy it was making me. And he covered for me. For the way I couldn’t concentrate, the drinking, what an ass I was making of myself. So is that what happened to Sam? Did I make a mistake? Did I let go for an instant? Long enough for him to get killed? I think that’s what I can’t remember, why I can’t remember, because it’s my fault. Because I fucked up, and Sam got killed. It’s the logical answer. You can’t let up, you can’t relax, you can’t get distracted. And I had that kid, and that mother crying, in my head all the time. All day, all night. I know I’m the reason Sam is dead. I just can’t remember exactly what I did.
We Are Called to Rise Page 10
