by Alan Averill
• • •
it will be four years before he sees the real New York again.
clean is better
chapter two
“You seem distracted today,” says the psychiatrist.
Samira doesn’t respond, partially because she hasn’t spoken to anyone in almost three weeks and feels out of practice, but mostly because she is distracted. A bit of black goo is stuck under her middle fingernail, and all of her attention is currently focused on removing it by whatever means necessary. It’s probably harmless—a dab of engine oil, or some loose subway grime—but she wants it gone. Ever since she came back from the big desert, Samira had been obsessed with keeping herself clean. Over there, you were never completely clean. Sand. Grease. Small chunks of your friends. Something was always landing on you.
“Samira? Are you all right?”
She glances up nervously. “Yeah! Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just…I’m not into this right now. Sorry.”
There is another long silence. The doctor—a squishy, serious man named Carrington—jots down a note on his ragged wooden clipboard. Whenever he shifts his not-inconsiderable bulk, the worn office chair on which he rests makes an off-tone squeaking sound. Samira flinches each time this happens. If Carrington notices the flinching, he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he continues to make small little notes and stare at his patient, occasionally smiling beneath a bushy grey mustache.
The squeaky chair fits with the rest of the office: a drab, windowless room with off-white tile and walls covered in eggshell sound baffling. Light is provided by a flickering fluorescent tube that gives everything a vaguely washed-out quality. When people heard that Samira was visiting a psychiatrist, they formed images of her lying on a velvet couch in a room filled with important hardback books and a fireplace. Clearly, none of them had spent any time in a VA hospital.
Dr. Carrington clears his throat. Samira jumps, then begins frantically cracking her knuckles, moving from finger to finger with a practiced, unconscious grace. A clock ticks softly from Carrington’s desk, muffled under a pile of paperwork like the beating heart of a boarder in a Poe story. Samira briefly considers getting up and walking out of the room but then rejects the thought. Leaving the session will cause more questions to be asked, more tests to be run, more suspicious glances to be thrown her way. And really, Carrington is all right as shrinks go. At least he doesn’t make her talk about the war all the time.
She adjusts her bony ass against the hard blue plastic of her chair and tries to think of something to say. “It’s…It’s been a bad week. I’m not sleeping again. One, two hours a night, maybe. The only way I can sleep now is if it’s really noisy. I tried turning on the TV, but it’s not the right kind of noise. It’s too random.”
Dr. Carrington leans forward, curious. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you get ten minutes of jangle, like a sitcom, then three minutes of loud ads, then ten more minutes of the jangle. That doesn’t work. It reminds me.”
“It reminds you of what?”
“Of listening to people die.”
That seems to interest Carrington. “I thought you were sleeping well,” he says. “The last time we talked—which, granted, was almost three weeks ago—you told me that you’d found a way to sleep.”
Samira smiles weakly and runs one hand through her curly black hair. It’s been washed twice already today; rays of light practically engage in fistfights to see who gets to shine off it. “I was sleeping on the subway.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Yeah, the subway is a good noise. It’s predicable. Especially at night. You get the clacking, and you get that screech when a train pulls into a station. You ever listen to the way a door opens on a subway? Whoosh. Whoosh. It’s so calming. I love that noise. I wish I could tape it and run it in a loop.”
Samira realizes she’s been talking for nearly a minute and stops. She moves back to the knuckles and attempts to crack them again, but she just finished a pass, and nothing will come. That only serves to increase her anxiety. Curling her feet underneath her, she slips off her sneakers and begins popping the knuckles on her toes. Carrington makes a face as she does—something she can’t quite read—and scribbles another note on his rapidly filling paper.
“So, yeah,” she continues as the knuckles pop pop pop. “I’d get on the D line at Kingsbridge and just conk out. Sometimes I’d sleep all the way to Coney Island, then wake up long enough to hop a car back so I could sleep some more.” She pauses for a moment, letting her mind drift back to the days where she’d begun to feel something approaching normal. “It was nice.”
“But clearly you stopped going,” says Carrington. “Can you tell me why?”
He shifts his weight again—SQUEEEEEK—and pushes his brown plastic glasses up on his nose. He isn’t a bad guy, all things considered, but he has a strange air about him that she can’t quite place. Sometimes it feels like he has genuine sympathy for her situation, but other times it seems like he’s running out the clock. Right now, Samira is getting the first vibe in waves, which makes her more chatty than usual.
“I had an incident,” she says.
“Go on.”
“Um, there was…There was a guy. He woke me up. Homeless guy, drunk. I was asleep on the A train, and all of a sudden this guy was shaking me and screaming about bugs or aliens or something. I dunno. It’s kind of fuzzy. Anyway, I…I broke his wrist.”
Carrington looks up, a dozen expressions washing over his face at once. He rejects a few—anger, bewilderment, professional calm—and finally settles on concern. “Samira, when did this happen?”
She squirms. “A week ago? Maybe two?”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No!” she says, loudly enough to make her jump. “God, no. No, I just…I got off at the next stop and ran. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore, and then curled up in the doorway of a brownstone and cried until I passed out. Some guy with a broom chased me off a few hours later.”
The doctor makes a much longer note this time, underlining something a couple of times with a thick, heavy stroke. Samira instantly regrets telling him about the homeless guy. He won’t understand, she thinks. He can’t. He’s never been in the thick. He’s just a nice guy who tries to help broken girls like me. People like that can’t possibly understand.
“Samira?” begins Carrington after nearly three minutes of heavy silence. “Samira, I can see you don’t want to talk about this, but it may be very important. Can I ask you a few questions?”
“Yeah, okay,” she whispers.
“Did you mean to hurt him?”
“No.”
“Do you remember hurting him? I mean, do you remember the actual act?”
“No.”
“Is that why you stopped riding the subway?”
“Yeah.”
“Because you’re afraid of hurting someone else?”
Instead of responding, she turns her attention back to the black under her nail. The spot reminds her of a time she pulled on a combat boot with a scorpion in the toe. The ensuing sting had left the digit looking like a rotting piece of fruit straining to burst from the confines of its skin. A week of antibiotics had reduced the swelling and restored her toe to its usual healthy self, but now Samira wonders if the infection has returned in the form of a small black dot. Is that happening? Am I rotting from the inside? Am I going to split open and pour black ooze all over the floor of this office?
The thought makes her shudder, so she quickly pulls her hand away and sits on it. To distract her eyes, she stares at her small, thin body, which is clad in a pair of black cargo pants and a grey sweatshirt with the word army stamped across the front. It’s almost the only thing she wears anymore, this outfit. She’d been slowly throwing away clothes since she returned to the States six months ago, discarding them as too old, or too big, or—in most cases—too happy. The purging makes her sad in an almost indescribable kind of way, but the more she throws out, the cleaner her apartm
ent becomes, so she keeps at it. Clean is better. Clean is much better. Her clothes are from an old life. From an old Samira. She doesn’t really understand that person anymore.
“Samira?” asks the doctor.
The one thing she hasn’t been able to throw away is a yellow sundress that’s hung in one closet or another since high school. The garment had seen quite a bit of use back then, but in ensuing years it simply became a subtle reminder of better days. Samira never worried about her weight, or her complexion, or the other body issues that plagued modern women, but she also never felt truly beautiful unless she was wearing that dress. She’d put it on a few times in the months since her return, staring at herself in the full-length mirror and wondering what it was about war that made the participants look so sad. Sometimes, she’d stand in the middle of her room, a thin, scared smile on her face, and turn her hips from side to side just to see the dress swish around her legs. The night after the incident on the subway, she’d donned the dress and sobbed herself to sleep. When she woke up thirty minutes later, she was screaming and clawing at the cheerful yellow fabric as if she couldn’t wait to get it off. It hadn’t left the closet since.
Carrington clears his throat. Samira jumps again. “Um, sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry. I was…I forgot what you asked.”
He nods as if this is the most understandable thing in the world. “I asked if you stopped riding the subway because you were afraid of hurting someone else.”
Samira glances at the clock, which is bolted to the wall, sees she has nearly ten minutes left, and licks her lips. The black spot is calling out to her. It takes all of her strength not to put the nail between her front teeth and pull until it comes tearing off.
“I don’t remember hurting him,” she says. “I just remember staring at him as he rolled around on the floor. He smelled like old egg rolls. I don’t know why I remember that, but I do. He smelled like egg rolls, and he had a bushy grey beard, and there was a chunk of white bone sticking out from his wrist…. I can still hear the screaming. It was a really familiar noise. Lots of range. I know that sound.”
Samira suddenly realizes that she sounds like a psychopath, so she brings the black fingernail to her mouth and begins biting furiously. Her mind races for something else to talk about and finally lands on a memory of her father drinking tea with a cigarette in his hand.
“When my family fled to this country,” she says, her voice muffled by the sound of her chewing, “my father opened an ice-cream parlor. He’d been a highly respected professor in Iran, but then we came here, and he ended up dishing out cones and sundaes to bratty little kids. He hated that job. He hated it so much, but he did it, and he never complained. He was always strong like that, and I don’t know why I can’t be the same way. I’m weak. I’m afraid of everything, I cry all the time for no reason. I just…I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this.”
Carrington holds his pencil over the paper for a long time, then slowly leans over and sets them both on his desk. He moves forward in his chair and presses his fingertips together, thinking. Samira curls her feet even tighter underneath herself and continues to chew. The room, with its cheap plastic chairs and bookcases full of file folders, seems to shrink in on them. In another room nearby, a man beings to wail. Samira stares at the doctor and gives him a weak smile, which he returns. The action causes his mustache to curl up at the edges.
“Samira, do you have suicidal thoughts?” Carrington asks the question in a normal tone of voice, but she can hear the urgency beneath the surface. “Do you think about harming yourself?”
“No,” she says, pulling the finger from her mouth and staring at it. It’s bitten down past the quick, but the dot is still out of reach. “Not really. I mean, I think about dying a lot. All the time, actually. I think about it all the time, and there are moments where it might be nice. You know?”
She decides against working on the finger anymore and returns the hand to its hiding place under her thigh. “I don’t like my life very much. I feel okay telling you that because it can’t be much of a secret. I’m twenty-five years old, and I’ve spent three tours of duty in strange cities where everyone is trying to kill me. I’ve made friends and watched them die, made new friends and watched them die, then I come back here, and it’s like I just don’t know how to function anymore.”
“You’re going to Afghanistan in three weeks,” says Carrington. “Is that right?”
Samira nods, a motion so subtle it probably wouldn’t dislodge a fly. “Yeah.”
“Will that be easier or harder for you than being here?”
“I don’t know.”
“A fourth tour of duty is unusual. Especially for a reservist.”
“Yeah, well, we’re low on translators. They keep getting blown up.”
She squeezes her eyes tight, trying to hold back the tears that always seem to be there, but it’s a losing effort. She’s so tired of crying. Every day, something or other causes her to sob uncontrollably for what seems to be forever. Sometimes it’s a memory, sometimes a conversation—but more often than not, the tears come from a dark place in her mind that she’d rather not consider. Samira knows how this will play out. Dr. Carrington will reach over to his desk and produce a box of tissues from the stacks of paperwork, her body will take that as a sign to really turn on the waterworks, and then all hell will break loose. Determined to avoid such a predictable fate, Samira bites down on her lower lip until she hears a crunch and feels blood pour into her mouth. This stops the tears, at least for a moment.
“Are you all right?” asks Carrington. “Hold on, I think I have—”
“No!” she screams, causing the doctor’s eyes to pop open. “No. Don’t. I’m fine. I’m not going to hurt myself. I’m not going to shoot myself in the head or anything. I’m just miserable. That’s all. I just…I used to be happy. I wish I could be happy again.”
Samira is relieved to see Carrington leave the pencil alone, allowing her words to settle and vanish like new-fallen snow. Her hour is up—more than up, actually—but for the first time since the military forced her to start attending counseling, she doesn’t feel the need to scurry out of there. She notes absentmindedly that her lip is bleeding badly and hopes it won’t require stitches.
“We’re almost out of time,” says Carrington, “but I want to ask you one more thing. Is that all right?” She nods, and he continues, “Samira, when was the last time you were happy?”
“Graduation,” she says without hesitation.
“College?”
“No, high school.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I went to high school in Seattle. I never really liked it. I spent most of my time trying to be as small as possible so people would just leave me alone. But I had a friend, a really good friend, and after our last day of class, we took off and just…hung out. You know, stared at the stars, talked about the future. It was nice.”
“Are you still in contact with this friend?”
“He killed himself four years ago.” She runs a suddenly shaky hand through her hair and takes a deep breath before continuing. “He used to host this TV show where he’d go into the desert and eat bugs, turn his piss into drinking water…. You know? One of those survival shows? He did that for two or three years, then things kinda went bad, and he just couldn’t handle it, I guess.”
Carrington’s eyebrows raise. This is clearly an unexpected bit of news. “Was the show popular? Would I know him?”
Samira shakes her head. “Probably not. It was in Japanese.” She sees the doctor’s confused look and continues before he can ask the obvious question. “He was Japanese. Well, he was half-Japanese. His mom was from Japan and his dad was Irish. And yeah, I know, it’s kinda weird. Anyway, he went to Japan, did that show, took tourists up Mt. Fuji, explored jungles, stuff like that. He was crazy, but…God, I miss him. I miss him all the time.”
“What was his name?”
“Tak,” she whispers. “His name
was Tak.”
chapter three
Tak is almost twelve hours into the flight before he notices that something has gone seriously wrong. With only three hours to go on the Sydney to Los Angeles nonstop, the plane is dark, travelers are sleeping, and the attendants should be strapped into their seats with a book or chatting quietly in the galley area. This time, however, things are different. Instead of engaging in mindless chatter, the attendants are buzzing through the aisles with nervous looks on their faces. Occasionally, two or three will duck off behind the bulkhead for a brief, whispered meeting, then emerge from either side and whisk their way up and down the aisles some more.
At first, Tak thinks that there’s some kind of low-key mechanical problem—the flaps are a bit sticky, or the hydraulic pressure is off. But after watching the attendants scuttle back and forth for the better part of an hour, he dismisses this option. He’s been on planes with problems before, seen that flavor of panic on attendants’ faces. This is different. It’s almost like they’re moving up and down the aisles to avoid attracting attention to something.
Or someone, he thinks suddenly. Could be a problem with a passenger. Medical emergency up in first class, maybe? Some drunk asshat making jokes about lighting his shoes on fire?
He’s on the end of a four-seat aisle in the very last row. This is where Tak prefers to sit. He likes being able to see the entire plane in motion, likes being able to predict and adapt to anything that might come his way. The only things he has to worry about behind him are a pair of lavatories and a small galley, where they store the beverage cart. Some would consider this level of caution to be excessive, but Tak doesn’t care. After the last four years of his life, he readily allows himself a healthy dose of paranoia.
As he watches the attendants try not to look as worried as they clearly are, he absentmindedly runs one hand back and forth over the slim silver briefcase in his lap. He thinks about mechanical problems and terrorists and unexplained airline disasters that spontaneously occur at forty thousand feet and gives a small chuckle. Oh man, if you guys only knew what this was. That would really give you something to worry about.
