The Road Ahead

by Adrian Bonenberger

For the first time that night we could see a darker side showing through. For the first time in a long time, we saw a commanding presence that was not in line with this passive middle-aged vet we had been following around, this shelf stocker, this loner, this sad sad man.

  Then Ginger, who had run over X not twenty minutes before—pulled up and rolled one wheel onto the lawn across the street. A girl—we presumed it was his girlfriend, although she was a bit young to be riding in cars with men—stumbled out of the car and onto the dewy grass.

  JJ turned to X. “You’re staying at this kid’s place? You kidding me?” He started across the street at an angle. As he headed straight for the Pontiac, we followed with questions. “Don’t you think you should stand up straighter?” and “Don’t you think you should pin back your shoulder blades?” and “Did you ever think of clenching your fists in a time like this?”

  JJ opened the driver’s side door, but he let Ginger pour out of the low-riding seat on his own. JJ picked up his wobbling form from the street. He got in his face, and he told him to never do that again.

  “Whatever, old man.”

  JJ grit his teeth and growled, “You better never pull some shit like that again, especially when you have a sober person ready to drive.”

  “What sober person? You?” The kid laughed. “Bitch, please. You’re as fucked up as anyone.”

  The kid’s profanity sounded like a scared affectation. JJ poked Ginger in the chest. “I was ready to drive. I told you I could drive.”

  “And who the fuck says I have to listen to you?”

  “I was sober,” JJ said. “Sober as a judge.” He poked again.

  We whispered in his ear, “Doesn’t ‘sober as a judge’ imply that you have the power to sentence and execute?” and “How does he plead?”

  “Are you sorry?” JJ asked.

  “Whatever.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  The kid stumbled back two steps after getting thumped in the chest again.

  “Isn’t he soft?” we asked. “Isn’t he just a soft, dumb kid?” and “Don’t you think you should teach him?” and “Who better to teach him than someone who knows how it feels?”

  “Don’t you know that you could have killed someone?” JJ asked Ginger, who put his hands up in protest. “Why are your hands up like that?” JJ bent his neck over so his lips tickled the soft hair on Ginger’s ears. “One bad choice, and you could kill someone.”

  We circled around behind Ginger. “Can you guarantee he gets it, even now?” and “Can you be sure he won’t leave here as soon as you do and add another ghost to our company?”

  “You are soft, aren’t you?” JJ asked. He hit the kid with a closed fist and knocked him down. “You’re going to kill someone if you keep that shit up.” He dropped to his knees and straddled the boy.

  “Isn’t it funny that even his face is soft?” we asked. “Isn’t this moment significant?” and “Isn’t it seminal?” We all lay on our backs on the ground next to Ginger. We leered up at the bearded man, who seemed to be foaming at the mouth. “Isn’t stopping these kids from making the worst decisions of their lives the most significant thing you could do?”

  He dropped an elbow into the center of the mush that had been Ginger’s face. X puked at the curb. JJ kept hitting the kid. We think his elbow had gone all the way through Ginger’s pasty face and was, by this point, smashing against the asphalt. He smashed his own elbow into what looked like the mangled haunch of a butchered beast.

  When X finally got around to pulling JJ off, he was still screaming, “Don’t you realize that you could have killed someone?”

  When he stood, he looked down at his hands. He looked up at X with a look of resignation. “Don’t follow me,” he said. “Trust me. You do not want to follow me.” He ran toward the woods on the far side of the street.

  Tonight we give chase.

  He runs through the trees, twigs whipping at his face and outstretched arms. He runs into a tall fence line comprised of wide cedar boards. There is nowhere for him to go but up. JJ stands at the base of a tree near the fence. He dry heaves from the exertion. He wails, “What have I done?”

  The backs of his hands are covered in blood, and he has a hard time climbing. His right arm feels particularly odd and weak. His elbow, too, seems bloody, and there is a clinging mass of tissue there that won’t drop away, though he shakes it repeatedly, trying for just that thing.

  We throw rocks at him. We pepper him with questions and granite. Salt him with queries and quartz. Then we discuss how to bring him down. “Should we throw you a ladder?” we call.

  He shakes his head.

  “Do you want to come down here so we can talk?” and “Didn’t that feel awesome back there?”

  He shakes his head again.

  “Do you want us to take care of this?”

  “I need to take care of this,” he whispers to himself. “I have to figure this out.”

  “What if we throw you a rope?” and “Would you come down then?”

  He doesn’t shake his head no, but he doesn’t say yes either.

  “Don’t you want to come down?” we call as we pick up more rocks to cause more damage, to make everything harder, to make him appreciate us and what we have to offer. We throw him a rope. Its fibers catch in the crotch of two narrow branches.

  He takes his time, not moving for it immediately. We once again debate our tactics. We whisper among ourselves. “Do you want us to try again?” we shout. “Or do you want us to just leave it there?”

  He stares off into the distance.

  “Do we need to hit you right in the face with it?” and “Won’t you come down from that tree?” and “Isn’t it lonely up there?”

  “One more day,” he says. “All I have to do is keep waiting it out.”

  He seems as if he is about to drift to sleep. He has learned how to grow comfortable almost anywhere, and we fear he may rest.

  As his head begins to nod, little Nadir gets an impish look on her face, filled with the kind of cruelty only little children can muster. Just when it seems he will get a moment to contemplate his dreams, she throws one last rock. It hits him in the ear.

  “Don’t you know you can’t hold on forever?”

  At this, we stop. That is the question with which we wish to leave him.

  We watch him apprise us, contemplate us. He looks into my open eye. He pulls the rope. We hold our breath as he works a clove hitch around the branch above his head. He pulls down, as if to test its ability to hold him. Again, we panic as he begins to take his first wobbly step off the branch, as he wraps his foot in the slack to hold himself as he climbs down.

  This is not what we had in mind.

  We pick up more stones. Jagged, heavy rocks of all shapes and sizes and capacities for inflicting suffering. We throw them with all our might. He weathers only the first few. When he can feel the coppery taste of his old familiar wounds seeping into his mouth, when we make ourselves larger and louder than we’ve ever been before, when the blood covers his eyes; that is, when he has lost his sight completely, he scampers back onto the branch. He wipes his eyes with a futility we recognize.

  He still cannot see. He reaches out like a drunk, sightless and waving for the rope. He whimpers in agony. We all hold our breath, giddy, as a crumpled shadow of hopelessness flickers so fast you wouldn’t have seen it if you didn’t know to look for it. We marvel as this fleeting glimpse of despair soon melts into placidity, contentedness, and then finally something that looks like a gruesome facsimile of joy.

  This moment is where we live. This moment is where we follow, eat, and destroy. This is the moment where we feed ourselves, we ghosts. And these acts of the will—

  He draws all the hanging line to his chest. With a burst of industriousness, he tosses the end over the clove hitch on the branch above his head. He catches it, repeats, until it is snaked around the branch.

  Apparitions, these acts of the will. Apparitions.

  He is no lo
nger in a hurry as he forms it into the shape of a snake slithering through the empty desert that is his life. He sighs as he squeezes a bite into the snake with his broken fist. The snake has soon coiled itself around its own body, and all that’s left is a loop of a tail and a small frayed end. There is not much left for him to hold onto. The frayed end goes into the loop, and it is here that he seems to give pause.

  For if that final rock was the stimulus, if any one of the thousands of rocks in any one life is the stimulus, we always have that moment after to work, to prod, to ask.

  The only questions left, however, are the ones no one else is around to ask. We salivate, anticipating the moment when he lets himself down from the tree to be devoured in the light of his last moment.

  But we ask no more questions. We watch him work his raw fingers as one loop pulls the other tight. The moment is so close we can taste it, but we are tense, not wanting to break the spell. We have been there before and we have learned our lessons. This slipknot could slip either way.

  In that moment in which he gives pause, he has a whole repository of memories and human connections to help him determine his next move. And who knows what that bank may hold? He has a frozen moment of inaction in which all the possibilities in all of time and space present themselves for inspection, a whole lifetime of questions to contemplate.

  Why don’t you choose another way down? Why don’t you choose to smile? Why don’t you choose to go down to the bus stop and catch a ride home? Why don’t you choose to talk to someone on that bus? Why don’t you extend an invitation? Or better yet, why don’t you ask her story? Why don’t you learn? Why don’t you choose to value the lives you touch, the people you know, and the people you’re sure to meet? Why don’t you choose to give of yourself? Why don’t you think of the good you could do rather than the bad you’ve already done? Why don’t you choose to be goofy, sing as you walk down the street, or say hi to everyone you see? Why don’t you call your daughters? Why don’t you go for a midnight stroll at the park? Why don’t you choose to skip rocks on the river, swing fast and swing high, and think about how someday your arms won’t be empty anymore? Why don’t you choose to think of your grandkids, who one day will cling to your giant hands on the same swing and say, “Bigger,” just as your daughters once did. Bigger? Bigger? Bigger? Again? Why don’t you choose to climb the monkey bars and yell “Wheeeee!” as you ride down the slide? Why don’t you choose to read what you want to read, work where you want to work, and be who you want to be? Why don’t you think of grace? Why don’t you realize that to be is to choose the present, and why don’t you choose to be? Why don’t you choose to release your guilt, that is, your past? Why don’t you choose to change your escape route—that is, your future? Why don’t you choose to fix your eyes on what’s happening now? To just be? Why don’t you choose to just exist? If not for you, then for us?

  Why don’t you choose to make love the verb of the year?

  But, of course, we would never ask those questions. It is not in our nature.

  INTO THE LAND OF DOGS

  by Benjamin Busch

  He escaped the day they brought him to the recovery ward. He sidled down a hall and out a door. No one thought to ask where he was going. The floor was crowded with men cocooned in bandages or studying the space where their legs should have been, waiting for them to reappear. He saw faces change under “Welcome Home” signs, a kind of metamorphosis. Parents, lovers, and children passed by trying not to look at what they saw, trying to wash their way through all the damage to a time before it happened. They wanted everything back and he could see them furrowed with wishes, eyes wet. He didn’t want to be introduced to anyone. Didn’t ever want to hear his name called or meet one more person who wasn’t from a helicopter.

  Outside, the warm night surrounded him with ingratitude, quiet families calling in their cats. He slid through them in the dark, forgetting what neighborhoods were like when you lived in them, everyone inside, lights glowing through curtains. Torch lit F-16s and prop grinding C-130s lifted and landed on runways a few miles away at Lackland, practicing for war or returning with wounded. Texas was like the flat provinces of Afghanistan, its routes laid through dust like Highway 1 between Kandahar and Kabul. Similar enough that he may have never left. How would he know? San Antonio before he deployed or after or in between. They said he was home, but no one had proved it. They said his pilot’s head was missing. They said the other pilot was executed. They said he was there. Then they stopped asking him questions and put him on a plane where he slept until they told him to get out.

  He stayed clear of sprawl, but some passages were webbed by suburbs, and he had to move the way the deer and coyotes did, using drainage ditches, parks, and patches of vacancies to cut through mankind. He kept moving. He could hear traffic sometimes, music playing and people talking, a city or town bedding down to sleep as he walked the shore of a river. Engines and water made the sound of static, like radio transmissions. He hadn’t been that close to a city in years. He crept further into the wastelands. He sometimes had visions of people in the heat, circling like he was, entire families or patrols. He wasn’t sure, when he saw them, if they were real, their liquid bodies boiling out of the ground. That must be how he would appear to anyone else, an imaginary man flickering like a thin black flame. It might be all he was. Others had tried to get away. He found piles of bones left where they had burned off.

  He still carried his evasion chart, but it was inaccurate, an ancient draft. He was sorry he hadn’t been navigating. Sorry he hadn’t paid attention in the brief. They had just become routine sorties, these routes, nine years of random flights arcing over a filthy land of snakes, dirt, and dogs. Standing in an angry edge of Afghanistan, he had no point of reference. Even looking up at the sun seemed useless. They’d been flying for hours, the day late, banking to cross back. No sightings and half their fuel left. It burned on the ground, tanks ripped open, rotors gouging a ditch, throwing off pieces that spun away like ax blades.

  He’d been lucky. The survivor. His mother had begun calling him that before he deployed. “They’ll say you survived me,” she would say from her bed. The war was his way to flee from her terminal care. That was long ago. It might have been long ago. His piled days were unnumbered, places blending, sinking or adrift on a vast mirage between earth and atmosphere. He felt small and slow, moving in limped steps. He thought he was on the border of their battlespace, near its invisible line, walking west toward the center of nothing owned by Marines or Special Forces and by neither. He would have to find an outpost, maybe in a day or two if he could make it that long. He wanted to wait for dark and run under cover of night, but he had to get away from the wreck immediately. It seemed counterintuitive. A rescue would be sent after they failed to report in. His last known location was the crash site, but every Afghan with a rifle in the valley would be heading toward it now, trying to get there before the Sparrow Hawk mission, descending quickly from the ridges to make videos, rip out the radios, and strip the dead. Whoever fired the rocket would be watching him with Soviet or American binoculars. He had to move predictably until night, then change course. His wounds could be dressed later, the blood already drying. He wasn’t even sure how much of it was his. All blood looks the same. This was the easy side of tragedy and he walked, stunned, away from the falling sun as if the day was like any other.

  The dark came first as mountain shadow, then as night. Dogs barked, the terrain porous with dens and he wondered if they had any fear of men here in the unmarked wild. They followed him as an expanding multitude, the sound of their panting amplified in his mind. A pickup loaded with militia arrived at sunset and swept the valley in bobs and jerks with its single working headlight. The boulders and scree kept it handicapped and he stayed low, turning north away from the echo of engine into the wide dry plain.

  He couldn’t recall his medevac from Kandahar to the hospital. It reminded him of where his mother had been, the same, how he’d left her there
and never returned. He was drawing a map on his evasion chart, the only thing he’d kept from the crash, overlaying his present on his past, then confusing one for the other. He marked his route, corrected topography, added missing cities, covered provinces with the roads of states, his homeland the same as enemy territory. There was only Afghanistan now, everywhere else drawn into it. The scale was 1:200,000, far too small to depict a single standing man. He was invisible on maps of land, like birds. On cloudy nights he could see the orange glow of villages lit up with business or burning, people shopping and soldiers kicking open doors, new tribes forming in suburban neighborhoods, armies hungry and having less and less to defend, fewer homes to go home to. More world abandoned. He stayed outdoors, the open safer than rooms, his civilization destroyed the moment he fell to earth.

  He found skeletons and empty houses in the roadless wilds. Mining, logging, and railroad towns emptied as if by evacuation. Some were like lost temples with chambers of votive objects and myth, all the priests gone. These religions were small, the labor of a single family or an elder. Pioneers and fugitives. It was their hope to never be missing from anywhere, to avoid capture or rescue, to never be found. He began to believe as they had.

  Inside a house built into the ground, the sacred was revealed to him. Its interior was lit by squinting windows cut into the walls near the ceiling. The floor was a grid of curling linoleum squares the color of moss and he stepped in their centers to keep them from shattering. It was labyrinthian, more hallway than living space, finally opening into a large room in back. No furniture, utensils, clothing, or trash. He stood astonished. The walls were covered with puzzles that had been completed and glued together, farms and wilderness, glaciers, deserts, forests, and prairies, hundreds of them, floor to ceiling, small as napkins or large as tabletops, fit together like blocks of cut stone. It gave him vertigo, a sense of spinning, rising and falling with the staggered horizon lines. He ran his hand along the glossy images, the smooth pieces like snakeskin or fish scales. Water had found its way through the roof in a corner and the puzzles had peeled away in its path, the fields and alps unzipped, a dark fissure ripped in the world. He picked a piece that dangled, a corner of it mountain, the rest sky. If he kept it, this portrait of the earth would be forever incomplete, the hundred thousand shards assembled in vain, missing the one. It was an effort of such concentration, one landscape at a time, someone sitting for all these hours searching piles to restore order, recreate views cut apart, the windows too high on the walls to see anything but night or day outside. It was an evasion chart from ground level, the open land free of cities, bombs, and soldiers, barns and cottages closed, pastures empty, no contrails or fires, the leaves on trees perfectly still. He wanted, for a moment, to burn it, to sit in the center and watch it all go blank, the jigsaw seams charred and cracking apart. But he turned, slipped the piece of puzzle into his backpack, and crept out, his toes carefully finding the middle of each tile again.