Now and Again

by Charlotte Rogan

  —Is it an American flag if it doesn’t have fifty stars?

  —Why do you want to know?

  —If it’s just a paper decoration, is it an American flag then?

  —Why the fuck do you want to know?

  —Because it makes a difference, doesn’t it?

  The memory coalesced and then disintegrated: Dolly when she graduated from the nursing program. Dolly back when she was happy and he hadn’t yet gone to war. Dolly kissing him and waving. And then the coming-home party, which had taken place two nights before: a bonfire, some bottle rockets and sparklers, plenty of beer and old friends and the baseball game, which started off friendly and then got a little heated. He remembered hot dogs and grilled corn and some little white paper dumplings that exploded on contact when they hit the ground. One of the guys had brought a gun. Danny hadn’t touched the gun. He knew he hadn’t touched it.

  —I didn’t touch the gun.

  —Did I say anything about a gun?

  The napkins had been printed with a holiday motif, but whether there had been thirteen stripes, starting with red, he couldn’t say. He couldn’t say if there had been fifty stars or some other number. The tablecloths had been red, white, and blue—he was sure of that. And they had stars. He hadn’t counted them, but he definitely remembered stars.

  He remembered long-ago bonfires and also more recent ones, including one where he had gotten drunk and kissed a girl who wasn’t Dolly, something he regretted now. The girl had laughed and said she had to help clean up, so he said he would help her, which is when he had pulled the spangled cloth off of the table and thrown it into the fire, which had flared gloriously toward the heavens. He had thrown the bunting into the fire too, and the paper plates, and the little dumplings and the corncobs and the sparklers—anything that would burn. Anything that would explode. He threw in the napkins, and when the older people had all gone off, the younger ones turned up the music and started to dance.

  —Now let’s talk about those two boys.

  —I wasn’t there.

  —But you knew about it. You could have told.

  —You don’t tell on your buddies. No matter what, you keep your buddies safe.

  —Then how do you explain Pig Eye?

  He couldn’t explain Pig Eye. Pig Eye hadn’t even been there, and then, suddenly, he was.

  6.6 Penn Sinclair

  Summer was almost over, and Penn was still living with Louise. Every time she smiled at him or called him Huggy Bear, he wondered if he had imagined the conversation in the SoHo restaurant. Or maybe Louise had just forgotten it, for whenever the subject of the future came up, she talked as if they were in agreement on what it would look like. He should have gotten a job by now, but interviews made him sweat and stumble over his words, and if he got a call back, he didn’t return the call.

  “You just hang in there, Huggy Bear,” said Louise. “Something is sure to pop.” She liked to use words that sounded like their meaning. “Buck up,” she would say. “Worse comes to worst, you can always work for my dad. That would be a total hoot.”

  Louise threw out the offer like a rope to a drowning man, but Penn knew what was on the other end of it. Louise’s father, for one thing, and for another thing, Louise herself. But he also knew that none of it was Louise’s fault—the rope alone would drag him under. “Okay,” he would say whenever she mentioned it. “I’ve got something on the line, but if it doesn’t come through, I’ll seriously consider it.”

  “How seriously?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  Ever since arriving home, Penn had been glued to the Internet, trying to figure out the depth of his mistake—its meaning and historical context, and if it had been avoidable or fated. If it hadn’t happened to him and his men, would it have happened to someone else? This led to questions about the role of an individual tasked with acting decisively and even brutally in service of the state, which fashioned itself guardian of ethics and morality—inwardly for the benefit of its own citizens (and along the way squeezing out outliers and misfits)—but also outwardly, forcing its superior vision onto others who were less enlightened. And what did the use of force say about the possibility of peace and also about the common good?

  After studying every aspect of the current wars, he started on the wars of history. He was researching the Gulf of Tonkin, a false flag incident that was used to precipitate the last unwinnable war, when Louise came home with a bottle of wine and two noisy friends.

  “I’ll introduce you,” he heard her say, but when she called out to him, he didn’t respond. “He must be sleeping,” said Louise. And then she added, “I swear, it’s like he’s living in a different world.”

  The women chattered about china patterns and how to deal with overbearing mothers-in-law before the talk turned to J-Lo’s skin-care secret. Penn waited until the group stepped out onto the patio to admire the view before slipping Louise’s library card out of her purse and leaving the apartment. He walked to the big downtown branch where he had been working his way through the history section instead of looking for a job. It was cool in the library. The shelves of books muffled the sounds.

  By the time he had finished with the strafing of London and the Nazi death chambers, he had started to ask silent questions about the meaning of life. He didn’t necessarily need to know what that meaning was; he only wanted to know if it had meaning or if it didn’t. If it did, how did he explain the Srebrenica massacre or the shooting of Russian soldiers by German generals for sport, and if it didn’t, why did he feel so sure it did?

  “The answer’s here somewhere,” he said to himself. He didn’t realize he was speaking aloud until a homeless man who had been dozing in a corner by the restrooms said, “Man is warlike.” The man raised a grizzled hand, using a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to shield his eyes from the bright egg-crate lights. “You can read any damn book you want, but that’s what it comes down to.”

  “What?” asked Penn, startled to find he wasn’t alone.

  “Peace is an illusion. War is inevitable. That’s fairly significant, don’t you think?”

  The two men stared at each other, the older man seemingly stunned that it was taking Penn so long to absorb what he was saying, and Penn stunned by the realization that the answer he was seeking could be packed into three words. “Man is warlike,” he repeated as the homeless man beamed at him and nodded his head.

  Penn pulled out a foil-wrapped bagel Louise had put in his pocket that morning and offered the man one of the halves.

  “I started out the same as you,” said the man between bites. “I was home from Vietnam and looking for answers, so I came here. Of course, we didn’t have the Internet back then, but I still found what I was looking for even if it took me a very long time to find it.”

  “How long?”

  “Fifteen years, which is better than never, I guess. Which is how long it takes some people. Maybe even most people, but then again, most people never look. Believe me, I wasted a lot of time searching in the wrong places—bars, mostly—ha! But I finally found what I was looking for.”

  “In here?” asked Penn, picking up the volume with the warrior on the cover and weighing it in his hand.

  “Yes, but also in here.” He tapped his head. “Man is capable of nobility and high achievement, but the very same man has primitive impulses that can never be eradicated and will emerge full-force under the right conditions. It’s useless to ask yourself if human beings are fundamentally good or not. They are fundamentally a lot of things. But death is the thing that gives life meaning. By extrapolation, then, war intensifies life and gives it meaning too.”

  A librarian rolled a reshelving cart past and peered at them over the tops of her glasses. “Excuse me, Professor,” she said, “but you and your friend are in the way.”

  “Professor of what?” asked Penn.

  “Ha!” said the professor. “Life, I guess.”

  Penn rolled the foil into a ball and lobbed it at a
nearby trash can. “Three points,” he said when he made the shot.

  “You owe me more than half a bagel, seeing how I’ve saved you years of trouble,” said the professor when he had finished eating.

  Penn dug around in his pocket for his wallet. He took out all of the money he had and held it out to the professor, whose hand reached for it and then disappeared into his pocket with astonishing speed.

  “Thank you,” said the professor, saluting with fingers that wouldn’t straighten. “Now, do you want to know what I learned in the next fifteen years?”

  “Sure,” said Penn. “Lay it on me.”

  “I learned that the system is designed to preserve itself, even if it has to grind you and me up into little pieces.”

  “That sounds bleak,” said Penn.

  The professor picked up a walking stick that was lying on the floor and started to get to his feet. “They don’t really like me in here,” he said. “The mayor is cracking down on homeless people. We give the city a bad name.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “There’s a shelter a few blocks from here, but they don’t open ’til five. A better question is, why am I homeless?”

  “I’ll visit you again,” said Penn, but he knew he probably wouldn’t. Man was warlike. How could he have been so naïve as to think he had been fighting for peace? It was only the terms of the next war that were being decided. Everything had happened before. Everything would happen again.

  Unless, he realized, someone did something to stop it.

  6.7 Danny Joiner

  The doctor at the clinic abruptly changed Danny’s diagnosis from post-traumatic stress disorder to personality disorder. “What’s the difference?” asked Danny. “Why the change?”

  “I’ll give you this brochure to take home with you,” said the doctor. “It should answer all of your questions, but if it doesn’t, please don’t hesitate to call.”

  When Danny called, he was informed that if he wanted to talk to the doctor, he would have to make another appointment, and if he made an appointment, he’d have to make it quickly, before he was discharged from the outpatient program and his benefits were stopped.

  “Why would I be discharged? And why would my benefits stop?”

  “Don’t you have a brochure?” asked the pleasant female voice. “I can send you one if you want.”

  “But the doctor was already treating me. I’d like to speak with him.”

  “Hmm,” said the voice. “They were already treating you? That would be unusual, given that personality disorder is a pre-existing condition, but give me your name and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Danny told her his name and she relegated him to hold, where a British voice was announcing the news. Just when he was about to find out whether or not the trailers that had been donated to house refugees from Hurricane Katrina were toxic, another voice came on the line to tell him that in cases of personality disorder discharge, benefits were always discontinued.

  “Discontinued!”

  A broom handle was sticking out of one of the garbage cans that had been set out for morning pickup, and now he used it to whack at the lid of the can. “We’re just like one of these garbage cans,” he said into the phone.

  “What?” said the voice on the other end of the line.

  “We’re not as useful,” said Danny. “We’re like the garbage in the cans.”

  —Don’t take no for an answer, said the voice of the old drill sergeant.

  “I’m not taking no for an answer,” said Danny.

  “I’m sorry, sir. It’s Regulation Six-thirty-five dash two hundred, chapters five to thirteen. There’s really nothing I can do.”

  —So you’re quitting? I think you should march yourself back to that doctor’s office and demand your rights. A soldier never accepts defeat.

  The doctor had a bristly mustache and a black Mustang. “Do I know you?” he asked when Danny, who was holding the broom handle as if it were a rifle, stepped from behind a line of parked cars and said, “Hey, Doc.

  “Apparently you know me well enough to tell me I have personality disorder.”

  “Oh, yes, yes.” The doctor seemed defenseless without his white coat and hospital badge.

  Danny’s arms were nearly as big around as the doctor’s thighs. If he and the doctor had met in a parking lot in downtown Baghdad, Danny could have ordered the doctor to drop his weapon and put his hands in the air. He considered doing it now, and then he did it. What the fuck? he thought. “Drop your weapon and put your hands in the air,” he said.

  “What? What are you talking about?” The doctor looked like a beaver. Behind the mustache his teeth were an unprofessional yellow. “I don’t have a weapon,” he said.

  “Hands up,” said Danny, moving in closer and tensing his biceps and causing the doctor to take a step backward until he was leaning against the faded fabric top of the Mustang.

  Slowly, the doctor put his thin white hands in the air, dropping his keys to the pavement as he did so. “What do you want? Money? I don’t have much, but you can have it.” He was wearing a light blue shirt and a striped tie. His sleeves were rolled to show pale forearms and a gold wristwatch. It all made a nice picture against the black car, pleasing somehow.

  —What do you mean “nice”?

  —It’s easy to distinguish the details, that’s all. The black sets everything off.

  —Then say that. Don’t use some mealy word like “nice.”

  —Vivid, then. The black-as-petrified-shit background enhances the vomit-and-blood colors of the tie.

  When Danny’s eyes lingered on the watch, the doctor seemed relieved. “Do you want the watch?” he asked. “Do you want the car?”

  “I want to know the difference between personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder,” said Danny. “I want to know why you changed my diagnosis.”

  The doctor let his hands drop to his sides. “The medical review board is pressuring us to give lesser diagnoses,” he said.

  —Tell him to put his hands back in the air.

  “Put your hands back in the air,” said Danny. And then he said, “Shut up!”

  “I didn’t say anything,” said the doctor.

  “What’s a lesser diagnosis?”

  —Tell him to look you in the eye when he talks to you.

  “What’s a pre-existing condition?”

  —Tell him to lie on his belly. Tell him to eat dirt.

  “Lie down and eat the dirt!” shouted Danny.

  The doctor dropped to his knees, hands shaking. “It means that you were already damaged when the army got you, so you’re not their problem anymore. It means that every dollar they spend on you means less money for bullets and able-bodied soldiers.” The doctor squeezed his eyes shut after he said it, as if Danny was going to hit him with the broom handle, but Danny figured that’s what they wanted him to do. He might be damaged, but he wasn’t a fool. He knew the rules that allowed sending someone off to war and then failing to help him didn’t allow hitting a doctor. He knew that because one of the voices was shouting at him.

  —If you hit him, they’ll arrest you, asshole! Now tell him to stand the fuck up.

  “Stand up!” shouted Danny, and the doctor stood up, holding the keys he had dropped and pressing a button on his key ring that started a horn blaring.

  The commotion scared Danny so much that he raised the broom handle and brought it down on the Mustang’s fabric top as close to the doctor’s shoulder as he could without touching him. The breeze from the stick riffled the doctor’s hair. The sound made him jump and his eyes popped open, bugging out almost comically as the car’s emergency horn ripped through the sultry air until someone shouted at the doctor to shut it off and Pig Eye exploded in the distance for the thousandth time.

  “I don’t make the rules,” said the doctor in self-defense, but the words sounded as puny and untrue as the doctor himself.

  —Yes he does!

  “Yeah, you do,” said D
anny.

  “I don’t. I swear to you I don’t. There are rules and regulations.” The doctor looked hopeful now that they were talking and the physical threat had receded somewhat.

  Danny thought about using the broom handle to wipe the look off his face after all.

  “There’s a rule book,” said the doctor, “but there are also monthly updates. My folder of updates is this thick.” He stretched his thumb and fingers to illustrate.

  —Tell him he’s a fucking liar.

  Danny was tired. The notebook was in his pocket, along with a mechanical pencil that had a reloadable cartridge for pencil leads and a retractable eraser. They all thought words could acquit them, when Danny knew that words could also be used to trick people and to control their thoughts. For instance, Danny had always considered America a place of equal opportunity because of words that had been drilled into him, not because of anything he observed. There was probably an evolutionary reason for this, but he didn’t know what it was.

  —Repeat after me, asshole. Say “equal opportunity.” Fucking say “American dream.”

  Danny raised the broom handle in the air and brought it down again. “American dream,” he said, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was tired. He wasn’t a violent person. “Here,” he said to the doctor. “Take this stick, and next time you want to destroy someone, be honest about it and use this.”

  Then Danny sat on the curb and took out the notebook and wrote down what he could remember of the encounter. He didn’t look back at the doctor, but he could imagine him taking up the broom handle and holding it over Danny’s head.

  —Never take your eyes off the enemy.

  “Who’s the enemy?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s not me,” said the doctor. “I hope you can find what you’re looking for somewhere else.”

  The somewhere else was the army recruiting station where Danny had enlisted almost three years before. The soldiers there joined the chorus of voices shouting, “Who the fuck do you think you are?” at Danny. They must have called the police because a squad car roared up, followed by what seemed like a whole squadron of cars with sirens and loudspeakers.