“I’ll show you a beautiful snake,” Morales said. He was riding behind them in the back of the Humvee. “Right here in my pants, you want to see it?”
“I thought you already had a python, Carleton,” said someone else. “You talking a real python or conceptual?”
“All pythons are real,” Carleton said. “Same as all assholes.”
That had been in Haditha, and they’d been driving up to the command center, at the dam. The sand blew in fine clouds, twisting and swirling under the endless sky.
“So, Con, do you feel you’re back—you’re home?” Jenny finally asked.
He leaned back, raised his arms, stretched. “Yeah. Sort of. Hard to say.”
“I know it’s hard to talk about a lot of stuff,” she said.
“I don’t talk about the stuff that’s hard to talk about,” Conrad said. He smiled at her, so as not to sound mean.
Jenny nodded. “Because you think we can’t handle it or because you don’t want to?”
“I guess both.”
She nodded again. “So, well, if you ever want to talk about it, I’m ready.” She spoke carefully. “I mean, you can tell me anything.”
Ollie nodded, solemn, respectful, leaning back in his chair, his eyes large. “Yeah.”
Jenny lifted her wineglass to sip from it, looking at him over the rim. He remembered watching her, drinking steadily from his concoction. She and Ollie waited.
“Thanks,” he said. “I mean it.”
As a kid, he’d once watched a polar bear at the Central Park Zoo. The bear was close, only fifty feet away. He was walking across a huge outcropping of stone. Conrad was mesmerized by him, his huge padded feet, his narrow, snaky muzzle, his creamy pelt, his massive, dangerous size. The bear stopped and turned, looking straight at Conrad. The small rounded ears were pricked, the black eyes focused. For a long, locked moment they looked at each other. The deep gaze seemed to link them. The watching boy returned the look. He felt an awed kind of kinship, a primal recognition.
But he’d misunderstood. Between them was a sheer granite drop and a deep chasm, a high metal fence, wire netting. They were in different worlds. The bear, seeing Conrad and pausing in his endless quest, had thought, simply, Prey. Conrad realized that later. There was no kinship. Now, when Jenny told him he could tell her anything, there was that same kind of drop between them. A chasm.
Conrad pushed his chair back and stood. “But I’m going up,” he said. “I’m kind of whacked. I’ve got four years of sleep to catch up on. I’ll see you in the morning.”
They smiled without reproach: they were younger siblings, they were his subjects. They were happy at his return, happy in his presence. Trusting.
He thought of taking Ollie’s throat in his fist.
You stupid fuck, he told himself. That was the kind of thought that would do him in. What was the matter with him?
When Carleton was killed, Conrad had to write to his parents. He had wondered then about the python—if it existed and what Carleton’s parents would do with it if it did. How did you get rid of a python? Carleton’s Humvee had been hit by an IED, but it wasn’t the explosion that killed him. He was alive at first, but he couldn’t get out. The doors had been soldered shut by the heat of the blast. It was one of the new Humvees, heavily armored, with a new locking system and windows that wouldn’t shatter. They couldn’t get him out. He was screaming and shaking the door handle, and at first they tried to open it from the outside, trying to unlock the handle, and then to smash the windows with the butts of their rifles, but the fire had bloomed quickly, overtaking them all, and they had to fall back and stand there watching, and hearing him. By then the fire was burning too fast and too hot for anyone to get near enough to work on the door.
Climbing the stairs, Conrad felt exhaustion drop suddenly over him like a muffling blanket. When he reached the landing and faced the next flight, he nearly stalled, and he took hold of the wooden railing, wondering for a moment if he would actually make it to the third floor. He was poleaxed. It felt good.
Four years, two deployments in Iraq—Ramadi and Haditha—and an honorary discharge. He was through, back at home. His parents were asleep in their room overlooking the darkened lawn, and his brother and sister were sitting at the kitchen table, yawning, and he was climbing the stairs to bed, and this made some kind of full circle, the completion of a mysterious equation. As though his family had a deep connection to what he’d finished, or that what he’d done was done in some way for them, and now, because of being here, because of their being here and safe in the sleeping house, he could give in to exhaustion.
He held on to the notion of exhaustion as if it were a reward. He would get into bed and turn off the light and he would lie on his back in the dark, peaceful, closing his eyes in surrender, knowing that this time, finally, as he lay in his room under the eaves, his whole family beneath him, the willows whispering outside his windows, sleep would drift easily over him. It would slide across his mind in a dark, soft tide, carrying him down into a deep silence.
But when he turned on the overhead light, everything sprang again into existence, the low ceiling, the twin beds, the high bureau. Everything was now raked in shadow, and the room looked somber and claustrophobic, something harsh and judgmental about the light. The windows were black holes.
He hadn’t actually accomplished anything all day.
He still hadn’t unpacked his clothes, they were still lying in piles on the bed. He hadn’t called Claire. He’d dialed the number twice, but each time he hung up before it rang.
He sat down on the bed and looked at his hands.
He was too heavy for the bed; he was too big for the room. He felt he might break something if he moved around in it—as if he’d become a giant while he was gone. His younger self inhabited this place. The person he’d become was an intruder. This was like a room in a museum. It was a room he could not use, one he could only disturb. The night was silent, the air motionless.
He thought of that other world: the dawn sweep through the streets of Ramadi. The big black bats flickering through the air like thoughts as the sky went from dark to pale. The gritty sound of footsteps in the empty street. The burning, cindery smell. The rows of date palms along the river in Haditha. The sound of his pulse beating in his head, of Olivera whispering. The spattered walls.
He tried to keep Haditha from his mind, but how could you keep a thought from your mind? The thoughts lived in his mind. The dark spray on the wall. So much of it, so high up. The limp bodies on the bed. The terrible limpness. The boy in the stained pajamas, the girl’s arm curled around him.
He looked at the windows and willed himself to think about something else. Just beyond the screens, in the darkness, were the willows, their narrow leaves nearly brushing the house.
In the fall, these silvery leaves dropped messily everywhere. Once, he’d seen a thin, whippy twig draped on a tall boxbush in the garden. At least he’d thought it was a twig, but it was a striped garter snake curved into a serpentine shape among the dark green leaves of the boxbush. Its neck stuck straight out into the air, the mouth wide open. The long, forked tongue waving like a flag, trolling for insects.
That was a good thought, the snake in the bush. You could focus on it safely. If you could keep Carleton from getting in. There were good thoughts, but they ran out. You got to the end of them, and then the others came back.
He sat still and let the silence move in. In a moment he would get up and undress. He looked down at his hands. They lay on his knees, palms down. They looked strange, unfamiliar.
He got undressed and into bed. He lay waiting, the room black, for sleep. Anxiety began rising, and the space around him took on a massed and hostile presence. It seemed as though the ceiling were lowering toward him. Images he had no wish to see began to flicker inside his head. He rolled over, as though he could leave them behind, but his mind had entered a state of crazed alertness, connected now to a jittering web of filaments that le
d him to places and moments he did not want to visit. Olivera whispering, the pattern on the walls, the girl on the bed, Jesus.
None of these were things he ever wanted to see again or even think of, and how could he erase them from his mind? Wasn’t there some kind of therapy that blotted stuff from your memory? Or was that a movie? Wipe it smooth, wipe it all clean of this stuff. How was he meant to get rid of it? Wait until he forgot it? How could you make your brain forget something? There must be a way to force it to forget. There must be something. He’d been trained to make things happen. What you did was carry out the mission: get it done. No excuses.
This was what he had to look forward to; this was every night for the rest of his life. He was lying rigid, eyes open, every muscle locked tight. His jaw was clenched, his calves and shoulders taut, his breath quickening, his pulse rising. Tension had taken him over as completely as exhaustion had earlier. He kept seeing the face of the girl, the little boy’s head falling back.
He turned on the light.
He’d gotten another thriller, this one by a better writer. It was about drugs in the projects, with a beaten-down black woman policeman going after a criminal. At least this was a real kind of war, and the characters seemed real. He read until after one; Jenny and Ollie were long upstairs and the house was quiet. When his eyes turned heavy again, he tried turning off the light, but the same thing happened, his brain jumped alive at once, headed for things he didn’t want to think about.
It was like an alarm system activated by darkness and silence: as soon as the lights went out, everything came crowding in on him, packed and massing, things he kept out during the daytime. Things he didn’t even think about during the daytime, things that should be gone and over and done. Christ.
He turned on the light and sat on the side of his bed. The house was silent. He held the mattress with both hands. He squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head, swinging it from side to side, bending over low, as if he could somehow get away from his mind.
He would call Claire. He raised his head. This was the moment—right now, when everything was quiet. It wasn’t that late. It wasn’t even three. Quarter of, not even. Eighteen of, nearly twenty. Practically two-thirty. She’d definitely be awake. They’d stayed up this late lots of times.
He couldn’t make the call from here; his cell phone was dying. He’d use the phone in the kitchen, no one would hear. She’d definitely be awake, she’d answer on the first ring. She’d say, Where are you? I want to see you.
Is that what she’d say?
He didn’t know what she’d say, or what he’d say.
* * *
They had been together, at Williams, when he signed up for the Corps. They were still together when he finally went in for good. They’d agreed then that they were separating, sort of. It wasn’t clear. The agreement was that they were not tied to each other, that they were both free to connect with other people, but for a while it seemed as if nothing had changed. In the beginning Claire’s letters were full of her thoughts of him, and how much she missed him. She never mentioned seeing anyone else. Gradually that had changed, and she stopped saying how much she missed him, or that she loved him. He was sure she was seeing other people, because why wouldn’t she, and if she was, he didn’t want to know too much.
When he came home after Ramadi, things had changed further. He saw her for a few days in New York, but it was awkward. They spent the night together, but it seemed as though they hardly knew each other. Their bodies were still familiar, but they didn’t seem to share a common language. He didn’t know what went on when he wasn’t there; he didn’t want to know.
After that, Claire still wrote to him, but she told him that she had to take a break, whatever that meant. He hadn’t argued because you couldn’t argue with that, because if she wanted to stop she would stop, and because he didn’t want her to say anything more. He didn’t want her to tell him anything he didn’t want to know.
And he didn’t want her to stop writing. In-country, getting mail, real mail, was not something you’d give up. Getting real mail was the way you knew you had another life, that you’d go back to it.
Standing outside the command post, the sand blowing in pale, whirling skeins across the open ground, tiny drifts of it rising around your legs as you opened the letter under the flat, hot Iraqi sky, reading the words and breathing in the black, burning stink of Iraq but being in another place because of the letter, which was from Jenny, about swimming in the reservoir in the late afternoon, the smell of the flat green water, the sun going down through the trees and the way it looked on the water, flickering, gold, stretching in a shimmering path right up to you. Mail was one of the things that kept him sane.
In the beginning, Claire had written about everything. About school, when she was still in school, and later about her job—she was working in the Porcelain Department at Findlay’s, the auction house—and about her two roommates and her boss, and things she saw on the street in New York. How much she loved him and missed him. After Ramadi she just told him the other things, nothing about love.
He had told Claire it was okay, they would write however she wanted them to. He didn’t want to break up with her, and he didn’t want her to stop writing to him.
They all got mail from the send-a-soldier-a-letter programs, letters from teenage girls at Catholic high schools who wrote generic notes full of smiley faces:
Hope you are keeping your spirits up, tho’ I know sometimes it must be hard!!! I can’t even imagine. You are doing good work and we all apprecaite what your doing. Thank you! I look forward to meeting you when you come back!!! Lots of love, Rosalie.
Most of these letters were thrown out unread, but some of the girls enclosed pictures and some of them were kind of hot, or anyway you could persuade yourself they were, and some guys took the pictures and used them for jacking off. Some of the guys even wrote back to Rosalie and Traci and Tiffany and Lori, and if you got no mail from anyone else, which was true for some guys, then teenage Catholic girls who were complete strangers and writing letters for credit in school or in heaven or both were still better than nothing.
Mail was a fine line connecting you to the life you’d once had. Paper mail was best because it had been held by the person who wrote it. Not just letters from a girlfriend, which you always sniffed, but ones from your family: you knew that when this letter was written, your mother was sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window at the garden in winter. The paper itself had been there in the room while garlic sizzled in a pan; it was there when your father came in the back door from the train, his face and hands cold. You could hold the piece of paper and read it over and over, wherever you were, and it reminded you that the other place was real and that you’d go back there.
That June, in Ramadi, insurgents started sending rockets and mortars onto the base. The perimeter fence kept them at a distance, so they couldn’t see where they were sending them. They just lobbed them over at random. Sometimes the mortars missed everyone and everything, exploding harmlessly, and sometimes they were duds and didn’t explode at all, and sometimes they took someone’s leg off, like Kuchnik, who was in their sister platoon and was on his way over to the mess hall with his buddy Colbert.
Halfway there, Kuchnik remembered a letter he wanted to mail to his girlfriend. He went back for it, and Colbert went on ahead. Kuchnik got the letter and started back to the mess hall and was nearly there when the rocket landed. It didn’t hit him, though, it landed right beside him. It hit a utility pole, and the impact detonated the rocket’s hot-metal penetrator. White-hot metal shards pierced Kuchnik’s thigh, severing the femoral artery. Kuchnik lay in the sand outside the mess hall, screaming and bleeding out, still holding the letter. Doc Whitman came running, but he was on his way to the shower and was wearing only his PT shorts, and he didn’t have a tourniquet.
They finally got Kuchnik tourniqueted and medevaced out to Landstuhl, in Germany, where the trauma hospital was. But by then he’d l
ost a lot of blood, and even though they got him stabilized on the flight over, two days after he got to Frankfurt, he died of organ failure.
He was twenty feet from the door of the mess hall, which had sandbags around it to protect it from blasts. Colbert had already gone inside and was standing in line. Afterward it was impossible to get all the blood out from the sand, and for weeks after, going in and out of the mess hall you walked over a dim stain on the ground from Kuchnik. At the beginning, when he was still alive, you thought of it as blood, but after he died, you thought of it as Kuchnik.
Email and phone calls were not as good as actual letters. In Ramadi at first, there weren’t enough computers to use for email, though later they could use one sometimes. At Sparta things were more basic, and they rarely had Internet access. They could almost never use phones, but in any case everyone knew by then that phone calls were never as good as you hoped they’d be. They had those electronic gaps, overlapping voices, the ringing sounds of distance, starting and stopping, misunderstandings. Both of you were trying to put too much into the words, more than was possible. You could never say what was really going on, so you were left talking about scraps of nothing, and you couldn’t hear very well. And the calls were always over too soon, before you’d said what you meant to say, and afterward they were gone completely, no way to remember exactly what had been said, what the tone of voice was, and no way to rehear them.
But letters you carried with you, you kept them in your pocket or under your pillow, if you had one. You put them inside your helmet, or just inside your seabag, or in your boot or your locker, someplace where they were safe and you could touch them. Sometimes you just wanted to run your fingertips across the envelope, that was enough; sometimes you wanted to take the letter out, unfold it, and read it again so you knew you’d had another life once, been part of another world.
8
Conrad had met Claire Ingersoll during the fall of his junior year at Williams. They were both in a seminar on Homer. The class was small and hard to get into; it required permission from the professor, who was a medium-well-known classical scholar and majorly finicky. He accepted only upperclassmen who were majoring in classics, and he was fussy about even them.
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