The Road Ahead

by Adrian Bonenberger

  Maybe she miscalculated. Maybe if she’d opened up to Darrel, everything wouldn’t have fallen apart. Camille convinced herself she was brusque for his sake; she didn’t want to worry him. But there was more to it. Though packed with people, something about the FOB gave her a loneliness even he couldn’t fill. She could confess that she was weak and needy, but then it would all flow out and she might not be able to stop. Besides, he wouldn’t understand. It was best to compartmentalize. For both of them.

  “It makes me uncomfortable that you’re always hanging out with guys.” The gruff voice on the line didn’t sound like Darrel. Probably the connection, Camille thought, but she knew better.

  “There’s like five other women here, Darrel. What am I supposed to do?” She could feel her temper rising in the heat of her cheeks and the tightness of her jaw. She cupped her hand around the receiver, as if that could keep this conversation private in the crowded MWR building. “I hang out with guys at Nellis too. It’s not like I’m fucking all of them.”

  “So just some of them then.”

  Camille let out an exasperated grunt, loud enough to make several soldiers turn their heads. “Where is this coming from? I’ve never given you a reason not to trust me.”

  “You’re right.” Darrel’s normal voice was back. A sigh crackled through the phone, and Camille heaved one of her own. “Sorry. It just sucks here without you. And I worry about you.” His voice shifted again. “But I mean, you’re a mechanic! It’s not like you’re doing anything dangerous.”

  She slammed the phone down and stormed out of the building, not caring who stared.

  A lot can change in a year. Darrel moved her boxes to a storage unit. Camille’s parents said they were sorry, but they couldn’t hide their relief—after all, she’d learned evasion from them. She was surprised how much she didn’t miss him. Not his voice, anyway. Not the nightly trudge to MWR, the waiting in line for stilted conversation. Not the stress that came with knowing someone else was wrapped up in her well-being. She was free now to be lonely by herself, and to savor male attention without judgment.

  Before she left Afghanistan, Camille found the cheap, furnished temporary apartment online and paid the first month’s rent sight unseen. She moved in, but couldn’t bring herself to unpack. The boxes were vestiges of Old Camille. The Camille who stressed over trivial things like a yelling boss or a late report. The prudish Camille who never let her hair down. The Camille who loved Darrel. She wasn’t sure who she was now, only that she was changed, and empty. She needed to find a new normal, away from Afghanistan and away from Darrel.

  She could do anything, as long as it was different. She thought of her old suitemate, the sparkle in her eyes when she came home after each conquest. She thought of the people she deployed with, how they seemed to cope so much better than her. While Camille was calling Darrel and pounding her stress into the treadmill, Mills was cheating on his wife. Bailey and Donahue were fucking behind the latrines. Maybe the Desert Queens were onto something.

  So Camille would become a queen, she decided, in this Nevada desert. She needed sex. Not just to feel desirable. Not just to remind her that she was a woman, but that she was human and that sensations existed besides melancholy and loneliness and fear.

  Tonight she’d call a cab. She’d fold her long, satin-and-leather-encased body into the back and tell the driver to take her to Fremont Street—a place she’d never been but had heard about, where it was big and loud and crowded enough to be anonymous. She would pick a bar, have a drink or two to counter her restraint, then let alcohol and music lead her to the dance floor. She would find rhythm with the sweaty writhing bodies, until one body pressed against hers. She’d let her arms wrap around him, let her lips search his neck, his ear, his lips, taste his sweat and desire. And she would let him take her somewhere for the night that was full of color and warmth.

  She would fuck her way to normal.

  Someday.

  Camille sighed. Her reflection looked tired. Her knees ached from the heels. The wine was spreading quickly across her brain, and the shadow and mascara made her eyelids heavy. She kicked off the heels. She lifted the purse over her shoulder and draped it over the knob of a dresser drawer. The blouse fell in a dazzling blue puddle against the beige carpet.

  Camille locked the door, shoved the heavy “Small appliances” box in front, and slipped naked under the cold white bed sheets. She closed her eyes and strained to hear something familiar: Humvee engines, helicopters, crunching gravel. Tonight she would fall asleep in silence. Alone. But she had plenty of time. She would try again. Maybe it would help. Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe she’d find out tomorrow.

  ANOTHER BROTHER’S

  CONVICTION

  by Christopher Paul Wolfe

  So a Dominican, an ex-con, and a white girl walk into an Arab-owned corner store and—

  Wait. That sounds like a bad joke.

  Let me try to explain it like this:

  If I had to guess, 90 percent of the adult population in Bedstuy starts off its day in either an Arab- or Latino-owned corner store. And I’m part of that 90 percent.

  “What’s up, Akh?” I usually say to my man, Akhbar, who’s supposedly from Iran. I say supposedly because everyone’s story in New York is “supposedly” until it’s been confirmed by an independent outside source that can upgrade it to likely. So yeah, Akh who, for now, is supposedly from Iran, owns the corner store at the end of my block and is an overly sentimental motherfucker who still feels horrible about the day the towers fell. I know this because he tells me so every morning after I say, “Yo Akh, let me get an egg and cheese on wheat toast,” and then he says, “Egg and cheese! Wheat toast! Coming up!” and then I say, “Just one slice of cheese though, Akh. I want to be able to take a shit this week.” And then he laughs a bit, and then I laugh a bit, because in the chaotic lifestyle of New York City, our brief exchange will be the only moment in our day when life feels like we might be living it right.

  But there’s something that happened on this day, the one I’m trying to tell you about, that made it quite different from every other one in which I’d walked into Akh’s corner store. For starters, when I said, “Yo, Akh! Let me get an egg and cheese on wheat toast,” instead of saying, “Egg and cheese! Wheat toast! Coming up!” this motherfucker says “Just one slice of cheese to shit, yes?” and then waits for me to respond.

  “What the fuck was that, Akh?” I say, looking at him and thinking that he’d just taken my line and rolled it into his own sort of remix to our daily routine. But I’m of the mindset that the best remixes belong on wax, not in a sacred morning ritual that’s been practiced for more than five years. Akh’s ad-lib meant nothing to him, but to me it was a signal, a tremor, one of those soft ripples at the center of a lake that ends as a wave at the shore, and unfortunately I had been trained to sense it, which meant that only I was left to worry about it.

  Before making a move to the ATM, I look at Akh and see him smiling at me like shit is copacetic. I want to ask him why he did it, why he switched up our lines, but our moment alone is interrupted by the screeching voice of a white girl stepping in from the curb in sunglasses, a lime-green windbreaker and a Livestrong bracelet. Her aesthetic choices are a lot to take in before having a first cup of joe.

  She eases up to Akh’s counter and before she places her order, she stares at me like, “Who the fuck are you?” only to see me staring back at her like “Who the fuck are you?” And somehow through one of those strange unwritten rules of New York nonverbal communication, our two “Who the fuck are yous” seem to cancel each other out. So I turn toward the ATM to get my money while she stays at the front of the store doing some white girl shit that I really don’t care to hear or see because between the ripple and my egg and cheese I have enough on my mind.

  I enter my PIN into Akh’s ATM and wait for it to access his cheap-ass, Third-World dial-up connection, which is intentionally set up to make my eyes wander around his shop for a few unint
ended minutes. He’s hoping that I will peruse and maybe purchase a few bags of Skittles or pork rinds or some other form of salt and refined sugar that will help him push more volume, because a corner store is a volume business, not a margin business. But unfortunately for Akh, my doc at the VA told me that I have a touch of hypertension and am borderline diabetic (it runs in the family), so I continue to wait for his machine to give me my money. And it’s just when it finally connects and commences to spitting out twenties that I hear the exact words no one wants to hear when they’re holding a handful of money totaling in the hundreds.

  “My nigga!” The Dominican. “I know you didn’t just get back from where I think you just got back from. Yo Akh! Papi! Let me get a Dutch! My dude just did five years!”

  Son of a bitch . . . the ripple. I just want an egg and cheese . . . on wheat toast . . . with one slice of cheese; not whatever-the-fuck this is going to be. I look over at Akh and see him standing in the large wooden frame of his countertop, his eyes steadily glancing up at the security cameras, like he’s wishing that those shits were actually working. The Dominican is short and stocky and his friend, the ex-con, seems . . . well, different. He’s wearing clothes about a decade too old, and when he speaks his eyes stay oriented toward the ground like he’s still processing the fact that he isn’t seeing a cold prison floor this morning. He’s got the look of someone who’s returned from—

  “Five years, Akh! On Rikers!” It’s the look of someone who’s made it back from a place that he’d come to believe that he never would. It’s the same one I had when I had just gotten back from Iraq.

  “You should give us that Dutch for free, Akh. My nigga’s home!” says the Dominican. Like congrats on surviving prison; here, have some lung cancer. He puts his arm around his friend, this ex-con, and says, “Damn, boy! When did they let you out?”

  “I just got out last night.”

  “Why didn’t you call? I would have came and got you.”

  “I don’t have a phone, kid. And you don’t got a car so I figured—”

  “Nigga, it’s been five years. How the fuck you know I don’t have a car?”

  “You got a car?”

  “No. But damn, it’s good to see you, kid. It’s been five damn years!”

  My eyes make their way around the room, and upon taking in each of us, I come to believe that they—the Dominican, the Arab, and the white—

  Wait. Where did the white girl go? Damn, she broke out quick as hell!

  Anyway, I believe that they—the listed stated earlier, less the white girl—are all in disbelief that they are making the same seldom-seen, firsthand observation of a man who has literally just walked out of prison, supposedly rehabilitated, reshaped, maybe reconditioned to be a productive, or at least less destructive, member of society. But for some reason I’m okay with it, and when I look at him I can’t help but to see myself and empathize with his current state of mind. The only thing I’m wondering is: what’s a motherfucker got to do in this country to earn him five years of living in a concrete box with a very limited wardrobe?

  He probably sold crack, right? Or pounds of weed that he kept stacked inside his bedroom like an igloo. Wait. I should know better and be more open-minded when scrutinizing another brother’s conviction. Because if I don’t, then who will? Plus, if he just got out today, then I have to believe that a judge wouldn’t have given him five years for weed when it’s now legal in two states and medicinal in our nation’s capital. How fucked up would that be? He must have done something a little bit more sinister, some straight up negligent shit that undoubtedly put his fellow man at risk, something like—I don’t know—lied to the American people about chemical weapons in Iraq then sent the whole damn country into a war that lasted over a decade. Yeah! That’s the type of shit that should get a motherfucker like twenty years! But if you’re young enough and connected enough and a first time offender then you could probably get it down to five, right? Yeah, that’s at least five years, right?

  “Yo Akh . . . that Dutch man?”

  I could hear Akh rummaging through a cigar box behind his countertop just before he says, “You want grape or vanilla flavor?” And I’m like Akh do you really think they care. Jesus, I could’ve grown the tobacco, and rolled it myself by now.

  “Man, let me get vanilla. Grape is nasty as hell.”

  So I was wrong, but that’s not important—everybody gets it wrong; just ask the ex-con—what’s important is that I put my hand to my back pocket and couldn’t feel my wallet. Where’s my wallet? Oh, it’s in my hand, along with my money. I’ve got to put that away.

  “So you just left Staten Island, huh?” says Akh, trying to make small talk, but only straying further into ad-lib abyss.

  “No, nigga. Rikers,” says the Dominican.

  “Same thing,” says Akh, and from what I know of the borough, I actually believe he can make a strong case for a close comparison. But with having no dog in this fight, I keep my opinion to myself.

  “Five years . . . on Rikers, Akh . . . is not the same thing! Five years? Damn . . .”

  The Dominican sounded like it pained him to say it, like he’d served out the sentence himself. But the ex-con kept quiet, his head still aimed at the floor as if there was some weight or chain that the prison guards had forgotten to remove from his neck before he left. He was a handsome young man, about six feet tall. If he were me then he’d average at least four booty calls a day. Think about that. Four booty calls a day for 365 days over five years. I reach for my phone to do the math and remember that it’s an iPhone and that the ex-con currently has no phone, which means that he might want my phone so I decide to use a more rudimentary method to get to the answer: zero, carry the two, carry the two; zero, carry the three, carry the two and . . . that’s 7,300 calls. Damn that’s a lot of booty calls he missed, all because he probably did some truly ignorant and tragic shit like walked up to a big nigga selling loosies on the street and choked him out for no good reason. Yeah, that’s probably what he did. That’s got to be worth at least five years, right? No?

  Or maybe he was involved in something a bit more complex, a situation where the ability to discern between right and wrong was a little more convoluted. Maybe he was a soldier . . . Yeah, a soldier in the middle of the desert who stood guard outside a room that he saw a man enter with yellow zip-ties around his wrist and a black blindfold across his face, but how he saw the same man leave was in body bag flung onto the back of a pickup. And maybe as he watched that pickup pull away and its taillights collapse to red pinpoints in the desert night, he could feel that he’d been a part of something that he’d come to regret for the rest of his life. And maybe I knew that although I hadn’t just killed a man, I sure as fuck hadn’t saved him and that there was no difference between the two. I could only hope that when I got back home to my country, that my people, if ever feeling the need to scrutinize my conviction, that they would be open-minded and come to see that: as I stood guard outside that room and played my part in something I’d come to regret, I had no conviction. There was no conviction. There still is no conviction . . .

  There’s just Akh and the Dominican, the ex-con and his five years, and me and my egg and cheese. And somewhere, out there, in the streets of Bedstuy, there’s a missing white girl.

  FUNERAL CONVERSATION

  by Nate Bethea

  First Lieutenant Alan Longo, from an interview given at the Paradise Lounge Dining Facility, Contingency Operating Base Ghormah, August 30, 2009.

  A car bomb detonated at the Khayr Kot Castle entry point. Two Afghan soldiers and an American died in the blast, and another American soldier was missing. We weren’t sure if he was still alive, but the rules of the game stated that we’d find him regardless. My platoon received a mission: be ready to move at the FOB Ghormah pickup zone in four hours. All regular patrols cancelled. I passed the word to Sergeant Kossick, my platoon sergeant, and set about collecting all the intel that battalion had. Which wasn’t much; a few sate
llite photos, a few PowerPoint slides showing each house in a village with a number written over each roof. I briefed the plan as we awaited our helicopters.

  “They want us out there to find this guy Ellis,” I said. “He’s a private in Blackhorse Company that got captured. We’re gonna cordon and search this entire village, then set up a blocking position afterward. If they’re sneaking him through our area, we’ve only got so much time before he’s gone for good. So, we’re gonna be thorough. Pay attention to anything and everything.” I told them all that I knew. Which was almost nothing. As the platoon leader, you can never let your guys know when you think the mission is bullshit. Deep down, I knew it was.

  Battalion told us that we would be out for about twenty-four hours. They told us to take assault packs—basically schoolbags, not full rucksacks. We would hit a village called Adam Kalay in Ghazni province. Battalion figured the insurgents would smuggle Ellis to Pakistan through the Polish army sector in Ghazni—if he was alive, of course.

  Because guess what? The Poles don’t do shit. East of Highway One, the Taliban controls the entirety of Ghazni province. They’ve burned down all the district centers. There is no government. They’ve co-opted or killed anyone who might work for Karzai. People like to call it “No Man’s Land,” as if there were some doubt, as if it were up for grabs, but it’s not. It belongs to the Taliban. They run it unopposed. We just don’t like to admit that we have all these monumental US bases so close to a place we can’t control. Battalion sends us out on missions to do meet-and-greets with the locals, to ‘establish mutual trust and respect,’ as the counter-insurgency manual says. But the locals know that we’re powerless, and no Afghan will respect that.