“Thank you,” I yelled over the roaring air. “I respect you too.”
I don’t know if he heard me. The conversation broke off when a massive semi with the letter M on the side swung sharply into our lane, spraying gallons of water up through the wheel well and onto our windows. It was like driving through the ocean, through a lake, into the sky, as if someone had just pulled a bag over the car. Blonde Hair yanked the wheel to the left and then back to the right, pulling us into the other lane and what I knew would be my death, the hard smacking, the crumpled plastic, the naked impact I had dreamed of for many years, and yet there was nothing there, just more wet air. The tires squealed, spun water, and again caught pavement just before we hit 90 degrees. We straightened out, never slowing for a moment.
“You son of a bitch,” I whispered. “You son of a bitch.”
Black Hair crawled into the backseat with me. There was something wild in his eyes. He turned toward the rear window, the pint still firmly in his hand, close to me. I could smell its cherry scent and his greasy hair. My hands shook uncontrollably. They danced about my leg until I grabbed the seat belt firmly, pressing it against my fingers until they hurt.
“Jesus Christ. You see that?” Black Hair asked, his eyes far away from mine. “Holy shit, look at the pileup. It’s a massacre back there. It’s a fucking genocide.”
With each passing second the Oldsmobile moved down and away from the giant truck another car slammed into the wall the Oldsmobile had erected, dividing us and them, shifting the monstrous wet squealing dinosaur a little further down the highway toward us. But it would never catch up. It could never catch up with it going as slow as it was. The entire I-95 corridor could slam into that truck and we would still be only further away.
It was unfair. We were taking their movement, the velocity of their collision to propel ourselves forward. But we did not make this world. The cars to the left and the right of us were doing the same. We had so much power, so much energy. And they were nothing at all. Yet this was exactly how it needed to happen. It couldn’t happen any other way than this. This was how they died and this is how we lived.
“Fuck,” said Black Hair, his breath hot with whiskey, closer to my own face than I liked. My hands had not stopped shaking.
“I need to get out of here,” I said. “I need to go away.”
“We are getting out of here. Don’t you see?”
And we were. We were flying. My cheeks were no longer warm. Blonde Hair didn’t look back or speak to us. He briefly adjusted the rearview mirror, lit a cigarette by pulling his face close to the lighter, leaned back, and let out a blast of smoke. The small gap of open window sucked the smoke out.
“Hey, look at that,” Black Hair said, pointing with the half-filled pint, as he collapsed back against the other back passenger door, greasy hair hanging over his ears.
I yanked a felt strip out of the way. The sky was clearing up in front of us, and if you looked hard, if you had the sensitivity to see, you could just make out a spectrum of orange, purple, violet and a pale lovely pink rising up between the pulsing brains of cloud and last crimson sinews of sun.
THE CHURCH
by PJ Frederik
The water deployed in an unrelenting pulse, its steady undulations lulling me into a vertical daze. I had been standing under the showerhead for at least an hour, maybe two. Showers were supposed to be kept under five minutes, presumably so soldiers wouldn’t jerk off. I had flagrantly violated the letter of that law but kept the spirit intact.
Pale and pruned and pathetic, yet nothing untoward—just well-scrubbed is all. After church, after I’d soap-soaked my boots, I claimed sanctuary in this shower. Since then I had been scouring my skin and steaming my sinuses to be rid of the alkaline tang of blood.
The soap in my hand was billed as manly, with sandpaper embeds to strip off dead skin. At some point in that wasteful rinse I’d developed a routine, driving scratchy soap over and around my body like a slot car on a Möbius track. Shoulder-pit-belly-groin-thigh, thigh-belly-pit-shoulder, my left and right switching at the top and bottom of each lap.
These left-right-left soap-exchanges affirmed functioning process, assured me that nerve impulses still coursed as intended without getting lost along the way. The lack of twitches or other errata convinced me that my body worked, freeing the conscious mind to step back from the controls as the gritty soap chafed along its pink ribbon course.
Why not trust the body? It’s an impressive machine with capacity and precision. The hands alone are a masterpiece and we’re blessed with two, each sprouting four fingers and a thumb. The thumbs boast double-joints and fingers curl around three, these amalgams of bone and muscle holding endless possible action. Alone, hands caress, stroke, slap, strike, hit, hold, cradle, comfort. Given a tool, hands can write, rape, shoot, stab, suture, arouse. My hands have covered pistol grips, torn flesh, softer skin, my own stiff need. They are complicit in the best and worst of what I am.
Only complicit, never culpable. My hands are pawns, patsies, just following orders. I ditched the soap and wiped away the lather, taking a hand and holding it in the other. I rolled them around, feeling left with right and right with left. It seemed wrong to interrogate something so familiar and personal, to question the allegiance of my own flesh and blood.
I had to give it thought. The church left me no choice.
The night of the church was routine. I was wearing the same uniform, sitting at the same computer, next to the same soldiers. It was all the same until an interpreter gave a sharp knock on the plywood door. I opened it to find him with a cell in his left hand, his right hiding the mouthpiece.
“My brother is at church. There are men with guns there.”
His voice was excited but confused, as if undecided whether to anticipate horror or thrill.
“He called me and I have him on the phone. There are many hostages.”
We notified the ops center, the ops center alerted the quick-reaction element, and the quick-reaction guys rolled out. The interpreter muted his phone’s mic and put it on speaker. One guy had a radio to update quick-reaction but the rest of us just sat around, listening as the interpreter made sense of what we were hearing.
“It sounds like one guy is talking on the phone asking for prisoners to be released.”
“Now some people are begging the men with guns not to kill them.”
“People are reciting prayers. The men with guns are calling them unbelievers.”
“They are yelling at the police outside to stay away or they’ll blow everyone up.”
“One of the men with guns says he will start shooting people.”
The periods of speech and silence alternated for ten minutes until we heard shouting, foreign voices rising to talk over each other. The interpreter tried to follow but lost himself in a meaning that grew self-evident.
It was a few gunshots at first, then a rising chorus of begging, screaming, and crying. The crescendo arrived with the sound of 30-round clips emptied on full auto. We listened as his brother started to say something into the phone. A few syllables came across before the cheap speaker crackled and the line cut out.
The church was close enough for us to hear the boom. We said nothing. There was nothing to say, nothing we could do. Everyone knew what’d gone down. No one had to say to the interpreter, “Your brother’s dead.” It wasn’t yet clear if he had been shot or blown up or both, but that’s not an important distinction in the grand scheme.
A minute went by before a soldier radioed the quick-reaction team to not expect hostages, that they were heading into a mass-casualty instead. One-by-one, others in the room drifted away to eat. The interpreter found a chair in the corner and cried. The colonel caught me as I made to leave.
“Head over there and see what you can find.”
“Sir,” I nodded. The attackers were dead, the medics would evac the wounded, and it then became my job to gather evidence and make sense of the carnage. This task was called “
sensitive site exploitation,” but it was little more than scrounging table-scrap-data to sate our systems’ hunger. Occasionally we made a match and identified a bomber or bomb-maker. Usually we didn’t.
Our convoy snaked through the dark neighborhood between the base and the church, the slow ratchet of the turret-gunners’ swivel lending the procession an arrhythmic snare. We were quiet otherwise: no iPod-fed music over the internal radios, no bullshitting or wise-cracking. We drove with funereal solemnity, en route to meet the freshly dead.
The church was quiet. Elsewhere the injured were getting better or worse, but in the nave the only sound was the crunch of debris underfoot. A dozen quick-reaction soldiers milled about, bearing witness and pulling security; the local police stood to the side, waiting for their turn to do nothing. I started to take photos. There was a lot to document. Bodies lay on, between, and splayed across the rows of splintered pews. Bloodied bits of flesh clung to the walls, trapped in ball-bearing pockmarks. This wasn’t my first massacre, but here was more than the usual cordwood stack. This horror had dimension.
The victims fell as you’d expect. Still husbands lay crumpled over still wives. A few children were wedged beneath parents who’d failed to shield. One pew bore a fat baby turtled on its back, pudgy limbs reaching up to some god.
This charnel panorama filled my memory card quick. I switched from RAW to JPEG and deleted some duplicates. A soldier waved me over to the altar, his face a study in emphatic indifference. The soldier nodded down, encouraging my eyes to follow the barrel of his rifle. It pointed to a lump that lay away and apart from most of the carnage: a lonely hand, clutching a detonator.
I’d long since learned that movies are mostly shit. Reality usually underwhelms. Real bombs are often dusty clouds of flying metal, not billowing fireballs. The body doesn’t dramatically convulse from striking bullets so much as absorb them like half-assed kicks. But this bomber’s severed hand was cinematic and wholly manifest, right down to frayed wires and the detonator’s cherry-red clit.
It was a concise visual and I wanted it. I turned a plastic bag inside-out and snatched the appendage up, sealing the baggie around the evidence. The sharp-eyed soldier watched as I pocketed the hand. I gave him a nod in appreciation and he went back to staring away. I walked off after patting to check that the hand in my cargo pocket was secure.
Some other guys found the bombers’ heads. That was easy work, if slightly ghoulish. A bomber’s head corks off after the lateral blast snaps the spine, largely sparing it from disfiguring damage. I took photos of the heads where they lay, close-ups for facial analysis, and grabbed the biometric capture kit—with an annoyingly broken fingerprint screen—to record retinal signatures. For the lab at Main I swabbed some DNA-bearing goop from the jangle of ligaments and veins that had been a neck.
I wasn’t bullish on getting hits in the retinal, facial, or DNA databases. The classic fingerprint is still the most reliable biometric, and for that we needed more fingers. These fingers were probably on hands, hands which were likely connected to arms, but not always. Sometimes a hand is just a hand, like the death-vise paw in my pocket. All told, we had three bombers’ heads but only one hand, which meant someone had to find the five others sprinkled amongst civilian bits.
Our job was about done when more local soldiers arrived with body bags. The task of scraping up the dead fell to these poor guys, who’d then hand off the jumble to the local morgue techs charged with sorting commingled limbs. We left that macabre muddle and returned to base. The hand in my pocket wasn’t particularly heavy, but as anyone who has carried dead weight knows, it’s surprising. The hand bounced with every step I took from the truck to the plywood shack, tugging at my side like a toddler denied attention.
The office was empty; the dorm fridge in the corner wasn’t. I was exhausted and didn’t feel like running the fingerprints so I threw out three pudding cups to make room. I Sharpie’d a blunt DO NOT EAT on the bag and tucked the hand into the corner.
No one ate it before the next day when I ran the prints. The search turned up nothing, ditto facial recognition and retinal queries. I needed more exploitable info, additional data that might bring some clarity. Fingerprints on the last five hands were the last hope to salvage a postmortem who which might give us a why. The dead were dead but I was alive and had a job. And I was curious. Those hands had pulled triggers, slit throats, and depressed detonators in final obedience. Why? Why didn’t they save themselves?
No choice but to wait until the morgue got things sorted. The DO NOT EAT hand had outlived its dead usefulness but I didn’t really know how to get rid of it. Out of an abundance of apathy I pocketed the hand and walked to where I could throw it over the wall behind the motor pool, where none would see and fewer would care.
I stared over the concrete barrier with its concertina strands bundled along the top. There was a light breeze that morning and shredded shopping bags fluttered between the coils. I held the hand. It was fridge-cold and clammy and I wanted to be rid of it. Settling into a pitcher’s stance, I wound up to arc it clean over, but as I went to release my own hand tensed in sudden spasm. Its trajectory skewed, the bomber’s dead weight sailed low and into the wire, stabbing-still in the razor tangle.
The birds found it quick but made slow work. A couple times a day I’d sneak out back for a smoke and to watch the hand get picked clean. It had caught upright, its palm waving toward the base. With each passing day it seemed to wave less—the pecks were taking their toll. By midweek only bones and gristle were left. I didn’t see when the table scraps lost their purchase and tumbled over the wall. It was just gone.
The morgue called a week later after they’d put our humpty-dumpty-jihadis back together again. They apologized for the delay, explaining that the city was undergoing a sectarian cleanse and most days they had a line of bodies out of the door. I didn’t get why they felt the need to explain until we drove over.
If a few hours of cooling power had retarded a week’s worth of decomp I sure couldn’t tell—the fetid stench was totalizing. My bile did a jig but I kept it together in that back room. I’d learned that the secret was to forget there was a smell, to let go of it all. If you didn’t try to ignore it, if you zen’d-the-fuck-out and just fell away from the enveloping rot, you could outstep the realization that your every breath sucked in bits of mass murderer. Exhale used-up you, inhale putrefied killer.
On a dirty blue tarp they’d laid out the bombers in anatomical array. The two morgue techs stood back with arms folded, talking to one another and watching us, confident their work would pass muster. The younger one would occasionally laugh at something the other guy said. I imagined they made jokes like, “The fastest way to an terrorist’s heart is through the rib cage,” but probably they just mocked our knock-kneed soldier as he puked in the corner.
I took a few situating pictures then got down to business. I nicknamed the bodies alpha, bravo, and charlie and noted whether a hand was R or L before numbering the fingers, pinkie (1) through thumb (5). AL1—alpha corpse, left hand, pinkie finger. BR5—bravo corpse, right hand, thumb. And so on. After I’d labeled the back of each digit I fetched a plastic baggie from my pocket and a pair of tin snips from my pack. It would have been easier if we’d repaired the portable biometric kit, but the workaround was simple enough. I was just happy to have a complete set of limited-edition terrorist hands, complete with my own Sharpie’d certificates of authenticity.
Focusing on the fingers, I caught a cutting rhythm. I was almost done when my eyes wandered into an empty chest cavity and found a dazzling range of hues. The expected crimson, dull salmon, and shades of gray familiar to any butcher were all there, but from ruptured organs an assortment of colorful secrets tumbled out like piñata sweets. Pearly rivulets of Meyer lemon fat dripped down from a rib, sprinkled with bits of kale-smoothie-green bile. Blue raspberry arteries, long since drained, dangled from muscles the color of candy hearts. Rearranged and sugar-glazed, it’d probably pass for a f
ruit tart in a baker’s window.
Skittles. Taste the rainbow.
Bile stirred. I turned back to the task at hand. A few fingers more and I was done, almost filling the bag. As I got up to go, I double-wrapped the evidence and gave a smile to the morgue techs. The older one held out a finger to pause my leaving, and shared a conspiratorial nod with his partner.
They then grabbed a double-armed torso and held it between them, swaying the rib-cage-on-up back and forth like a grotesque revue. The older one hummed out da-dum-da on repeat as he kicked-out one of his pointed legs, then the other. I laughed, the morgue techs laughed, and the soldier in the corner puked afresh.
I uploaded the prints back at base. It took me an hour in the plywood shack with a USB scanner and more detached digits to learn we had nothing, no matches. I laughed. It had been a complete waste of time. I’d refrigerated a hand and snipped off twenty fingers and five thumbs and spent hours steaming in miasmic rot for nothing. The laughing came on stronger, manic peals that left me bent over in pain.
Gasping for air, I stumbled outside and fell into the wall, sliding down until I sat on the ground with my back against the building. I dialed it back to an anxious giggle and scrounged for a cigarette. Every movement my hands made was clumsy and arthritic: a spasm here, a jerking clench there. Getting the cigarette to my lips wasn’t bad, but lighting it took a dozen tries.
I dropped the lighter as soon as I saw flame, worried I might burn my face. One hand would tremble, then the other, then both, then stillness before another spasm. I gave up trying and let my hands fall to the side as I burned to the cherry. The nicotine helped; I felt some control return. The shakes seemed to go away. I crushed the butt in the gravel and walked back inside.
I put the fingers and thumbs back in their bag, put that bag inside another, and added a third before it went in the trash. Dinner was good that night.
The Road Ahead Page 21
