“It’s an old habit,” she finally said. “I quit before I married him.”
I lit my cigarette from the tip of hers, but said nothing. Her hair was up and I thought about the tattoo on the back of her neck, and this made me think about the stars, so I looked at the sky, but they weren’t out. A few clouds and a late sunset still hid them.
She inhaled off her cigarette and spoke, exhaling smoke: “He told me about a course in Maine he has to go to. Do all of you have to go?”
The course was in survival, evasion, resistance, escape—SERE school—where we’d learn what to do if we ever became prisoners. It was required training for those who’d committed to the next deployment. I didn’t know that included him, but I knew to tread carefully in what I said to her. “I’m not sure who else is signed up, but I have to go.”
“It’s always have to with you all, as if you have no choice, as if you’ve conveniently forgotten you volunteered for all this.” She snubbed her cigarette out on her running shoe and lit another as though it were some act of revenge. “You ever think that once or even never was enough?”
I began to smoke quickly, wanting to finish and leave. I flicked my cigarette across the parking lot, toward the dumpsters. She touched my arm. “Have one more?” she asked.
There was a weight to her eyes, like gravity holding me in place. I took another, and as I did she sat on the asphalt with her back against the wall of the gym. I sat next to her and the ground still trapped the fading day’s warmth.
“Going back a second time, are you more or less scared?” she asked.
“It’s just different,” I replied. “The first time, I wanted to go. Now I need to.”
“Needing something is scarier,” she said.
We both smoked and looked up at the darkening sky. I tried to remember the strange shape of Andromeda dotted on the back of her neck. She looked off in what I thought was the constellation’s direction. I followed her stare with my own, but could see nothing except the nonsense of rising stars.
She turned toward me as if she might say something else, or try to teach me how to find the constellation. The thought of saying or doing more with her made a coward of me. I looked at my watch and told her I needed to get back to work.
After Mary returned to the dormitory, Eden lay awake by himself. A few minutes later, the door swung open just a crack. He could feel this through the vibrations in his bedsprings and he could feel the footsteps that came toward him, heavy and even. He knew this was Gabe, the one who’d grabbed him by the throat before. He felt his heart eating a hole in his chest in the familiar way, and he could feel currents of his blood moving to the center of him.
He was afraid of Gabe.
But there was a lot Eden didn’t know about him. For instance, he didn’t know Gabe’s shift had ended hours ago and that he stayed on, wanting to be there for the end. Eden didn’t know he reminded Gabe of his friends, guys from another war, where he’d first learned to fix men. Not permanent fixes, but the small repairs that would buy a man the time he needed to get on a helicopter and fly to a place where real repairs could be made. In his war, Gabe had learned almost all there was to know about buying a broken body time. Chest compress, clotting agent, tourniquet, nasopharyngeal tube, all of it the vocabulary of saved moments. Over the years of Gabe’s war, and after, he’d watched the minutes he bought for his friends turn into sentences of too many hours, days and months. Soon he learned it wasn’t too little time that was the enemy but too much. For in the end, it was time that turned all his friends’ fractures to breaks. And for his friends, the moments from their saving to their ends became a list of torments caused by him.
Now all Gabe hoped to bring was speed.
Eden knew none of this, but he did know Gabe’s heavy footsteps and, as the old nurse hovered over him, Eden could smell the faint alkaline odor of his sweat. Eden felt vulnerable, trapped in his own body, with no voice to sound the alarm of his suffering. He’d been vulnerable like this before, during the three weeks of our training at SERE school, where we’d learned how an imprisoned man survives. As Eden lay in his bed those memories came back. First the old noises echoed in his deaf ears: sounds of the camp we’d lived in, an invention of the training. Each man was kept alone in a cage. The floors of the cages were dirt, but the course was up in Maine and it was fall, so most days the rains turned the floors to mud. Eden remembered the wetness of the mud and how it stuck to his prisoner’s pajamas, recycled scrubs donated from a state sanitarium. He also remembered the insects that occasionally crawled across that floor and how they terrified him. Without warning we were taken from our cages and questioned, but crueler than this were the hours left with our thoughts and anxieties. Through days of simulation, steel locks slammed against wood doors as each of us was hauled off for interrogation and returned. Clipped questions came from instructors who played the role of our interrogators, some of them acting the part and others indulging in it. The noise of prisoners answering questions was ceaseless. It ran into each night, punctuated only by the hollow clap of an open palm striking one of our faces when a question wasn’t answered, or was answered poorly. These strikes were designed not to break bone or skin, but to sting and remind.
Soon our greatest struggle became unrelated to our interrogations and beatings. The struggle for us became one of holding on to what was real, and of understanding what wasn’t. On the first day of the course, before the camp simulation began, the instructors gathered us in a classroom and warned how reality would slip easily from us in the camp. They drew a diagram on the board:
This grid was tap code, a tool we could use to communicate from cell to cell, one that would help us hold on to our reality. Communication, we were told, would be our only defense against the stresses of isolation and confinement. Without it we didn’t stand a chance of passing the course and, if we were ever taken prisoner, without it we’d lose our minds. To teach us how the grid worked, the instructors had us all bang out a single word: 5, 1 / 3, 3 / 4, 1—END. This was our safe word. If we banged it out a few times our training would be over. We’d fail the course, but as we were told: “You’ll get a hot meal, a cot, and a ticket home.” What was left unsaid was that we’d be taken off the next deployment, too.
We were two weeks into the course when Eden tapped out those three letters. It wasn’t the interrogations, sleep deprivation, or hunger that made him do it. Instead, it was a bit of cruelty on the part of one of the instructors and a small betrayal by me.
I’d had three interrogations the day it happened. The sessions had been long, but I couldn’t say how long. I tried to keep track of the time by looking at my interrogator’s watch, a simple stainless-steel Seiko on a brown leather band. When I could, I’d glance at his wrist. But whenever he left the room and returned, it seemed his watch had been set forward or back to confuse me. Soon, I had become loopy from cold and hunger, and my interrogator, seeing this, became dangerously kind, offering me a Styrofoam cup of chicken broth. He asked how the living conditions were and if there was anything that could be done to improve them. I thought of Eden. In the past few days, he’d taken to tapping: 2, 1 / 5, 4 / 2, 2—BUG. He’d tap it over and over when in the night he’d feel the insects crawling through the mud floor of his cell. It’d been a few taps at first, but now it’d become relentless, running straight through until morning. Soon the fifteen others in our camp lost patience with him and their tapped replies of SHUT UP could be heard mixing with his panicked taps of BUG, BUG, BUG. I told the interrogator this. I explained my friend’s phobia to him, and that we prisoners would be more cooperative if we could get his tapping to stop. Perhaps they could put a plywood board on the floor of Eden’s cell. I wanted to be helpful. I wanted to negotiate something better for my friend.
I wanted another cup of chicken broth.
The interrogator put a blanket over my shoulders. “I’m glad to know all this,” he
said as he brought me the cup of broth I’d wanted. Then he left me alone to drink it, and to warm under the blanket. As I sipped the second cup, I noticed it was saltier, as if it’d come from the bottom of the pot, and as I drank I knew I’d traded something for it.
That night, under the rows of floodlights, I slept on the mud floor of my cell. Through its bars, I saw the interrogator who I’d spoken to before. He walked across the camp with a glass pickle jar tucked beneath his arm. It slithered with every type of insect you could imagine.
Eden was sleeping when the interrogator opened the small door to his cell. He set the jar inside and shackled the lock back on the cage. Eden sat up. The interrogator smiled at him, checked his Seiko and said: “Just a few hours till morning.”
Then he left.
Our cells weren’t tall enough to stand in, and that jar was wedged right between Eden’s legs. The hundred insects swirled around the jar, pressing against the glass, millimeters from Eden’s groin. They climbed on each other as he imagined they would climb on him, all poking legs and black mouths. He tried to crawl into a far corner, but there were no far corners. He tried to press the jar through the cell bars, but it was too wide. He kicked his feet at the bars, trying to break the door off, but the steel lock was too strong.
Then he began to tap. But he didn’t tap BUG, he tapped END. Over and over. END, END, END. I panicked too, not because I’d betrayed Eden’s fear to our interrogator, but because if he quit I’d deploy without my friend. I began to tap over him, nonsensically banging like an ape in a cage, which perhaps I was at that moment. Soon others joined, organizing on instinct, and the commotion spread. But through it, I could still hear the one thread of Eden’s tapping, straining to be heard: 5, 1 / 3, 3 / 4, 1—END, END, END. All he wanted was to quit the course, but I wouldn’t let him. I thought eventually he might scream, but he didn’t.
Instead the sound of shattering glass came from his cell, and then silence.
The insects crawled over him and burrowed into the mud. A few minutes later a group of instructors took him from his cage.
The next morning he was brought back to camp. His hands were bandaged from where the glass had cut them. He could’ve quit. There would’ve been no shame in it, but he stayed, and when the course finished a week later, his hands had begun to heal. For graduation there was a small ceremony and each of us was given a manila folder with a certificate of course completion. In Eden’s folder that one interrogator had slipped inside his Seiko.
At the graduation party afterward all the instructors attended, except for that one. As Eden drank Guinness at the bar, I thought about telling him how I’d confessed his phobia, and how I’d done it for a cup of chicken broth. Then I saw his wrist. Proudly, he wore the watch on its leather band. At that moment, I decided not to tell him. I didn’t think there was much point to it. He’d shown those assholes he wouldn’t quit.
But lying in his hospital bed Eden now wondered about that watch. He wondered about the leather strap that eventually became familiar, dimpled in one place by him and in another by the instructor who’d given it to him. He imagined the watch at his bedside, or maybe it’d burned up when we hit the pressure plate in the Hamrin. He remembered how the second hand circled its face, sweeping smoothly and never ticking, the minutes passing to days. But he had no idea how time passed now. All he knew was that there was too much of it.
He could still feel Gabe in the room. And he began what I’d spoiled for him those years ago in the camp, he clacked his teeth together and tapped out the words: END, END, END.
By the time we got back from SERE school, Mary knew about Eden’s reenlistment papers. We wouldn’t deploy for another three months, and he wouldn’t take his oath until a couple after that, but the papers were there. He’d committed.
I wondered how she took the news.
I assumed this meant they were putting their family plans on hold, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to ask him and I kept away from her gym.
But then I got the chance to do something for her.
We were scheduled to deploy in the new year, and the afternoon before the long Columbus Day weekend the entire battalion was herded into the base theater. All through the weeks before, everyone had been traveling, finishing training courses here and there, but for this briefing no one could be absent. Nearly a thousand of us filled up the theater. There were reunions taking place in the rows of red felt seats. A lot of us hadn’t seen each other for weeks. Up front, a movie screen was hidden by long curtains with a heavy hem. A large pair of Comedy and Tragedy masks crowned the stage, and a lance corporal, compact and Latina, stood beneath it. She looked out over the crowd and spoke into a microphone, her nervous voice breaking into an accent and her words barely traveling.
“Speak up, picante!” screamed someone in the back.
Laughter rippled across the crowd. A first sergeant trolled the aisles searching for the voice. He had a tight-set jaw, flat head like an anvil and hair trimmed like a strip of putting green.
The lance corporal turned red and smoothed down the sides of her hair, which ran solid black into a bun on the back of her head. She fiddled with the microphone’s collar. Volume violently returned and her slight movements boomed over the crowd.
“Can you hear that better?” she asked.
Again from the back came a shout: “Picante!” Again the first sergeant moved after the voice, but now there were a couple of diversionary shouts: “Picante!” “Picante!” rising from different places in the crowd. It became quiet. The first sergeant stopped looking, but stood in the back of the theater, holding his gaze among the rows, waiting for who would try next.
The lance corporal continued: “Beneath your chairs you will find Form SGLV 8286.” She rattled off the alphanumeric designator as sig-luve eighty-two eight-six, demonstrating a bureaucrat’s flair for pronouncing any combination of letters and numbers as if it were a word. “Fill this sheet out accurately and in black ink. If you make a mistake do not try to change it, come to the stage and I’ll give you a new copy. You can turn in the form today or, if you need more time, you can mail it to the address listed in Section M.”
“What’s the form for?” came another shout. The first sergeant flinched in the back row, making a move toward the voice until some part of him registered the question as legitimate.
“This is your Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance,” said the lance corporal. “If anything happens to you, the government will pay out four hundred K to your family or whoever else you deem fit.”
“What does deem fit mean?” asked another voice in the crowd. The first sergeant moved again, but stopped himself.
“Whoever you choose,” she replied.
“How about my dog?” asked someone else. The first sergeant started out for the voice.
“Good question,” said the lance corporal. “If you want to leave it to your dog, you can.” Again, the first sergeant stopped himself.
Most everyone had begun to carefully look over their forms. Eden sat next to me and I noticed he wasn’t doing anything. His form was blank. He saw me looking and said: “You interested in being roommates when we come back?”
“Can’t be that bad,” I said.
“Bad enough.”
“She really doesn’t want you to deploy, huh?”
He shook his head.
“And the baby?” I asked.
“That’s what she needs.”
Before I could say anything else to him, another shout came from behind us: “What’s your address, picante?”
A flash of something registered with the first sergeant and he tore down one of the theater’s side aisles, grabbing a skinny private in a headlock. He dragged the kid through the red vinyl swing doors at the back of the theater and into the lobby, where on movie night they sold Jujyfruits, Raisinets and popcorn.
Eve
ryone went back to their work. What we each put down was personal, and perfectly diminishing, the secret or not so secret truth of who you love most placed on a form. But Eden didn’t write anything. He left the form blank and slipped it into his cargo pocket to be mailed in later. Then he stood to walk out the back of the theater. As he did, he turned to me and said: “If you’d let me quit that night, I’d be stuck back here.”
I looked up at him, but didn’t speak.
Neither did he, but I think this was his way of thanking me.
Once he left, I listed Mary as the recipient of my four hundred K. Even then, I knew whatever happened to me would likely happen to him. And if he wouldn’t take care of her, I would make her the secret on my form.
It was early in the morning, still night really, and Mary couldn’t sleep so she took a shower. Just as she turned the water off, the phone rang. She cursed under her breath, clutched her bathrobe across her chest and rushed into the den. On the sofa, Andy was still asleep and stirred while her mother dripped puddles onto the cheap shag carpet. On the phone’s other end was Gabe. His voice rattled like gravel in a can: “He’s having some trouble and we’re worried about another seizure.”
“What’s he doing?” she asked; her voice was flat.
“We’re not sure. His vitals are steady and there’s no irregular brain activity, but he’s thrashing in his bed and clacking his teeth together. It’s wearing him out. I want to put him on a pretty strong sedative, but I’ll need you to come sign some consent forms first.”
She looked across the room. Andy was up, rubbing little fists in her eyes. Normally, Mary would’ve left straightaway. She would’ve hung up the phone and run to the hospital’s main building. But that was a long time ago. Now she felt worn out and, though she’d never say it, hopeful that this was the end.
“Give me a minute,” she replied and hung up.
Waiting for Eden Page 6
