In the fall of 2005, the Marines’ commanding officers moved upriver. They established a command center outside the town and closer to the dam. The Marines in Haditha itself were left with a skeleton crew in violently hostile territory. Their base was in a school administration building, though some Marines moved out of this into small huts nearby. The base was called Sparta.
Sparta was remote, isolated, and embattled. Its Marines rarely left the compound unless they were in full combat gear and mounted in Humvees. Each time they left the wire they knew they might be hit: IEDs were ubiquitous and well concealed. There was little diplomatic or constructive interaction between the Marines and the locals.
That fall, another initiative was carried out in Haditha: Operation River Gate. The Marines destroyed the two bridges leading to the eastern side of the river, and then they attacked from the west, moving slowly through the town from house to house. This time they were careful not to use bombs and artillery, not to destroy the town or kill civilians. But both sides had learned from Fallujah: this time the Marines met no armed resistance. Most of the insurgents had slipped out of town the night before. At the end of the day the Marines had arrested some six hundred insurgents, most of whom were later released. They called the operation a victory, but it was hard to define exactly what they’d won.
* * *
“So, it was a pretty interesting place,” Conrad said. “There were some ancient sites along the river, but I never got to them.”
“You never got to slip away,” Lydia said.
“To look at archaeology?” Conrad laughed. “There was no slipping away, Mom. We were in a combat zone. We never left the wire without full battle rattle, nothing smaller than a squad, twelve or fourteen guys.”
“So what did you do when you went out?” she asked.
“Went on missions. Patrols, carrying troops around, different things. There was a local elder we’d meet with. We were supposed to be making an alliance.”
“But you didn’t?” asked Marshall.
“He had no intention of making an alliance with anyone,” said Conrad. “He always had a list of things he wanted from us, and he never did anything we asked him to. It was all bullshit. He never trusted us, and we never trusted him. He’d say, ‘Give us back this man, Abdullah, he is innocent. Release him.’ We’d say, ‘No way, man. Abdullah’s in a decapitation video, we’ve seen it. He cuts people’s heads off. He’s staying where he is.’ The guy would say, ‘He is a good man. Set him free.’” Conrad shrugged and shook his head. “Most of the locals didn’t like us. We were the problem, as far as they could tell. We worked some with the policemen, but they never knew if they’d get shot just for being seen with us. Some of them were good guys, but a lot of them kept their distance. It wasn’t the climate for friendship.”
“How did you work with the policemen?” Marshall asked.
“We did some training. And we used to sit on guard duty with them at night in the police station,” Conrad said. “Sometimes they’d bring food and share it with us. Theirs was always good. We called it red shit and rice.” He didn’t tell them what they’d called kebabs: pricks on sticks.
“So what was it like to go out on a mission?” asked Marshall.
“We’d go in a convoy. Every time you left the wire you’d wonder if this would be the day,” said Conrad. “Some guys counted the days between IEDs, as if there were some mathematical pattern they could figure out. Lot of superstition. You couldn’t eat the Charms from the MREs. They were a big deal. Everyone would get mad at you for that.”
“Charms?” asked Lydia.
“That hard candy,” said Conrad. “It came in some of the MREs, Meals, Ready-to-Eat. Charms were bad luck. Bad bad.”
“Did you ever eat them?” she asked.
“Hell, no,” said Conrad, laughing. “I wasn’t going to be the one.”
They all laughed; then silence fell again.
“So, Con,” said Lydia. “Do you want to tell us about the day you were hit? Or would you rather not?”
Conrad looked down at the mat, picked up his water glass, and moved it back and forth on the quilted surface as he spoke.
“There were no Charms, as far as I know,” he said. “No mathematical patterns, nothing, though afterward someone said someone else had had a bad feeling that morning.” His glass left a faint silvery trail on the mat. “We were picking up some policemen from another outpost. I chose the route, I always did. Haditha wasn’t that big, there were only so many ways you could go. We headed south, along the river. When you were in the Humvee, it was kind of like a state of suspended tension. You were tense all the time, waiting. But there was nothing you could do about it. It wasn’t like being ambushed. You could have your weapons ready for that, keep your eyes open, figure out the territory. IEDs were different. You couldn’t prepare for them. You could only wait for them to happen.” The cobalt glass was glittering with condensation, drops pooling along its sides. “You focused on the mission, what you were doing, keeping contact, paying attention. You did all that to distract yourself. It did no good to think about whether or not it would happen. But it was there in your mind.”
His parents sat silent, watching him.
“So that day, we were heading down along the river. We always closed off the road wherever we drove, because of suicide bombers. The locals knew that. They pulled over when they saw us coming. We were driving along between houses on one side and some empty land on the other. A strip of empty land, then orchards going down to the river. The buildings were on the other side of a little ditch. I remember looking at the ditch and thinking that I’d seen a stone slab set there for pedestrians, just a slab, a couple of feet wide, for people to cross the ditch on. I thought of the stone and I wondered if I was misremembering where I’d seen it, and then just as I was thinking, It’s been removed, they’ve taken it away—that was exactly the kind of thing you paid attention to—the air kind of changed, and things went black.”
He paused again, looking down.
“Everything changes. It’s like being in a vacuum tube. All the air is sucked away, and everything slows down. I remember thinking that the Humvee was sliding sideways, we were tipping over on a flat road, and what was Olivera smoking? I was trying to stay upright and turn around to see what had happened, but I couldn’t move. You feel zapped, too, shocked, as though you’ve just run into an electric wire. You’re surrounded by noise. The sound is too big to understand. The whole world is black noise, and you’re floating in it. You can’t move or speak, and you may die. Your body knows that. And then it’s over, the light comes back, but you have no idea what happened. You still feel lost in the world. You can’t figure anything out, but you have to keep going.”
There was a silence. The candles flickered, the points of light reflected in the blackness of the windowpanes.
“Hard,” said Lydia. “That sounds so hard.”
“How did you get through it?” Marshall asked.
Conrad shook his head. “Just did.”
“Con,” Lydia said, her voice quiet, “are you all right?”
The question, asked in the dim light, there with the sleeping cat, the glowing lamp, took him by surprise.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” Conrad said. “I’m here.” He was ashamed of the sudden filling in his chest, the risk of tears.
“I’m so sorry,” said Lydia. “I’m so sorry.”
* * *
The only way he could be in this world, here, was to turn his back on the other, there. But it was unclear how he could do that when that other life kept circling back on him when he least wanted it.
At the end of the meal Marshall leaned back in his chair. Conrad knew what was coming.
“Con, any thoughts about your next step?”
“I’ve been thinking about graduate school.” He wondered if he sounded audibly false.
Marshall nodded.
“Great,” Lydia said. “In what?”
He saw they
believed him.
“Political science. International relations,” he said. “Or law.”
Discomfort appeared on their faces as they realized his uncertainty.
“Which one are you more drawn to?” Lydia asked.
“Not sure,” Conrad said. “I’ve gotten really interested in political science.”
In fact his chest tightened at the idea of studying political science or international affairs or law, or anything else. Sitting silently in a crowded classroom, taking notes and trying to concentrate. Studying in the library, people moving behind him, unseen. But also, the idea of starting out again in a whole new field implied that all this, the life he’d been living for the last four years, was finished, behind him. It didn’t feel finished. He was still part of it; it was still part of him. It wasn’t over. He knew he had to keep going, move on, but the future seemed like a locked gate. He couldn’t see into it.
None of this—the dim, enfolding clouds of anxiety, the rise of choking panic, the throttling claustrophobia, the straight-out jolts of terror—had anything to do with the bright, calm world where his parents and everyone else lived. He couldn’t tell his parents any of this. He had to move forward. Charlie Mike: continue the mission. You made a plan and carried it out. His plan was to make a plan. Speaking it made it real.
“So what schools are you thinking of?” asked Marshall.
“For international affairs, Kennedy, Columbia, Fletcher. I’ll need to take the GMAT or GRE. I’ll study for them over the summer, and take the test in the fall.”
At the moment, of course, he could not study for them. Whenever he tried to read anything serious, to concentrate, the headache descended on him, sinking its talons deep into his mind. He didn’t tell his parents this; he was pretty sure it would stop. He’d get some rest, things would calm down, he’d go back to normal.
“Sounds great,” Lydia said again, nodding.
It was strange to think that everything was going on at Sparta without him. In the early evening the cooks would be shouting in the mess hall. Marines were walking into the courtyard to mount up, the sound of their boots grinding into the gravel. At dusk the bats came out, skittering black outlines against the darkening sky, quick, erratic, like scraps of night let loose.
He could not stay here. This house was so thickened with the fragments of his own life that he could hardly breathe. Here his parents had their own adult lives, and he had none. Here there was no room for him as an adult, the closet still filled with his childhood clothes. He was a child here. But where else was there?
“Con,” Marshall said finally. “This has to be hard. Is there anything we can do?”
He shook his head.
“Is there anything you’d rather talk about?” Lydia asked. “Anything you want to tell us?”
Conrad shook his head.
“I feel as though we’re so far apart,” she said. “As though there’s something between us.”
He said nothing.
“We got a movie,” Marshall said. “Life of Brian.”
The way to get through this was moment by moment. It would get better. It was a question of getting through the moments.
The library was long and narrow, lined with books on three walls. Two small sofas faced each other across a kilim-covered chest; at one end was a fireplace, with a battered leather bench on the hearth. Family photographs stood on shelves and tabletops: Here they were in Kenya, arms around one another’s shoulders, thorn trees and savanna in the background. Here was Jenny at her high school graduation, her mouth bristling with braces, smiling, squinting up and holding the ribboned scroll. Here was Ollie in sixth grade, with huge black eyebrows and a pointed wizard’s hat, as Prospero. Here was Lydia at five, solemn in a nightgown, glancing sideways at a Christmas stocking.
They settled in to watch the movie. The room was dark except for the bright liquid images on the screen. This was one of his favorites. It was a relief to sink into it, to feel the dark fist of pressure against his chest begin to release. To laugh out loud.
As the movie went on, the fist against his heart began to clench again. Crowds of robed people milled about, pressing bodies, the confusion, growing chaos. He wanted someone to take charge. His heart was speeding up and he felt the swollen surge in his throat. He watched them stand up in the amphitheater, dangerously outlined against the sky, the crowd below shouting and mutinous. Conrad stood up and left the room. He closed the library door and went through the darkened kitchen, on out the back door.
Outside, he stood on the brick walk. The white fence gleamed in the darkness, the dim garage beyond it pallid. Above was the black sky. He counted slowly to ten. He looked around, letting his eyes adjust. It took ninety seconds to get night vision, a long time if someone nearby was trying to kill you. The darkness breathed around him; the willow trees moved slightly, the leaves hissing faintly. He stared into the blackness. There was no one there. He could walk up the hill, across the field, on into the woods without danger. There was nothing.
Something had gotten loose in his chest.
He looked up at the hillside. He could sense the chem lights drifting dimly across the field. He couldn’t see them without his night vision goggles, but he knew they were there, glimmering and green. He strained to see them. He listened for footsteps, the brush of cloth against stone.
He remembered the night on guard duty at the police station in Haditha. The day before, an IED had killed three Marines, and everyone was on edge. That night they sat without talking, drinking chai. Two local police guards and two Marines from Sparta. Around midnight they heard footsteps in the street. They looked at one another. It was after curfew, and anyone outside was there illegally. The footsteps stopped outside the building. The Iraqi policeman called out, but no one answered. The footsteps came closer, right outside the door. Nomer Caulfield stood up and aimed his rifle at the door and shouted, first in English, then in Arabic. No one answered. The Iraqi called again. No answer. They heard fumbling at the doorknob, and Nomer Caulfield shot right through the door. They heard a heavy grunt, and then a wild, broken braying. They opened the door: it was a donkey, gotten loose from somewhere. It lay on its side, screaming and trying to lift its head, until Nomer shot it again to stop the noise. The next morning it was in the street, bloody and buzzing with flies.
Here no one was creeping toward him. The night around him was safe. He knew that. He stood still, breathing slowly. He counted to ten. Nothing.
Conrad went back inside, catching the screen door with his hand so it wouldn’t slam. The kitchen was dark. The dishwasher thumped noisily. He stood still for a moment, watching the line of light around the door into the library. He started to count again, trying to slow his heart. Against his leg he felt the soft, hideous brush of a camel spider, and he kicked out violently. He caught the cat on his instep and she gave a cry. Jesus.
Conrad knelt, reaching for her in the dark. His hand found her, the light, bony body upholstered in fur. He took her, soft but struggling, into his arms and held her still, her tail switching angrily against his chest.
“Sorry, Murph,” he said, his heart racing again.
Those fucking spiders didn’t bite, they ate. He’d seen the big hole in Stocky Warnock’s leg, the flesh red and open, hollowed out like a half-eaten peach.
“I’m sorry,” Conrad said again, deep into her fur. “Shh. I wasn’t thinking of you. Good cat.”
She had stopped struggling, but would not purr. She waited in his arms, ready to leap out.
“Purr,” he said. He held her against his chest, stroking hard. “Purr. Goddammit.” He thought of slamming her against the wooden counter.
“Con?” Marshall stood silhouetted in the doorway.
Conrad put the cat down and stood up. “I was petting Murphy.”
“You okay?” Marshall asked.
There was a silence.
“Yeah,” Conrad said.
His heart had been wound up too tight. It was coiled in his chest lik
e fuck. He still had all these hours to get through and there was nowhere to go.
6
Ollie must have come up the drive soundlessly, because Conrad, who was in the kitchen, didn’t hear him arrive. He didn’t hear Ollie drive up or get out of the car or slam its door shut. He didn’t hear Ollie coming through the white gate into the yard. He didn’t hear anything until Ollie came through the back door, jumping up the one step into the mudroom. His backpack caught on the screen door on that jump, and he jerked himself free and the door slammed behind him like a gunshot. Conrad, who was standing at the open refrigerator, felt the sound go off inside his head like lightning hitting his heart, and as Ollie appeared in the doorway, Conrad threw himself as far as he could get inside the fridge, pulling the door shut against himself, ducking down, his blood thundering.
For a moment there was silence. No one moved.
Conrad emerged, closing the door behind him.
“Sorry,” Ollie said.
“It’s okay,” Conrad said. He shook his head. “Reflex.”
“Sorry, Con.” Ollie looked appalled.
“No problemo,” said Conrad. He took a breath. “Welcome home.”
They gave each other quick shoulder clasps, a thump on the back. Ollie was taller than Conrad remembered, but insubstantial. The bones were just beneath the skin, unclad by muscle.
“Glad you’re home, bro,” said Ollie.
“Yeah,” said Conrad. “Me, too. You want a beer?”
They went out through the library to the porch, a square room added onto the side of the house. On three sides the walls were tall windows: the room faced the side lawn, toward the big ash tree and the barn. The ash tree made a high, graceful canopy. The grass had just been mowed, leaving a pattern of wide silvery stripes in the lawn and a damp, fresh smell lingering in the air. It was the end of the afternoon, and the golden light slanted wide and low across the velvety green.
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