by Weston Ochse
“Give me the phone,” he said, holding a shaking hand out.
“Sorry, Sarge. It’s not up to you anymore,” Watkins said, getting off the floor. “We’ve decided—“
“You’ve decided?”
“Yes. We’ve decided that no one can own such a thing. If it’s really helping us, then it belongs to all of us.”
“But it’s my dead brother whose texting me,” Nathan screamed. But as he saw the looks on the others’ faces, he knew there was nothing he could do. “Fuck it and fuck you. We’ll see how long this goes on.” He turned to leave but found his way blocked by Skinny.
“Better move out of the way, boy, or I’m going to shove my boot so far up your ass you can spit shine it with your tongue.”
“Easy, Sarge,” Watkins said. “We’re not mad at you.”
Nathan whirled. “Mad at me? What the fuck did I do?”
“You tried to take away our early warning system.”
“Are you serious?” Seeing their expressions, it was clear that they were. “This is not going to stand,” he growled.
As he turned to leave, Watkins had one final word. “What are you going to tell them? That your squad won’t let you destroy the cell phone your dead brother is using to warn you of an attack?”
Nathan slammed the door, but could hear his sergeant’s final words, “Good luck with that!”
– 8 –
HE’D FUMED FOR an hour, but had never gone to the first sergeant or the commander. The men were right. What was he going to say? What was he going to do? The worst part about it was their disloyalty. He’d trusted them and taught each of them to trust one another. All for one and one for all and all that shit. How could a sliver of hope so change what he’d spent months forging?
He found himself near the back of the compound, where food and ammo stores were kept and closely guarded. The nearest hooch belonged to Chief Jackson, notorious for his ability to find anything for anyone anytime. Nathan found himself knocking on the door. After a moment, it opened. A dark black face appeared, then the door opened wide. Chief Jackson stood in his boxer shorts, flip flops on his feet, a tattoo of the Four Horseman across his chest.
“Johnson. I heard about your brother, man. Come on in.”
Nathan hesitated a moment, wondering how Jackson had heard about his situation. But then he realized of course Jackson would know. He has ears everywhere.
“Thanks,” he said. “But I can’t stay long. I need a bottle.”
Jackson’s eyes narrowed as he shut the door behind them. The Chief had a room to himself the size of the room assigned to his squad. One side of it was covered with stacks of boxes, television sets, laptops, and wooden crates that looked suspiciously like RPGs.
“Are we celebrating something?”
“No. I just need something for my men.”
“You know I supplied the booze for your stay at Sammarah.”
“I didn’t know that. Thanks, Chief.”
“I don’t usually front folks, unless there’s a good reason. Is there a good reason, Johnson?”
Nathan wondered what he could say. Coming here had been spur of the moment… or had it. Somehow his feet had brought him here. But how was he going to answer the question? My squad has decided to ignore my orders and I want to get them drunk enough to bribe them back into following me? As he ran the truth of it through his mind, he realized how stupid the idea had been. He found himself looking at the Chief, but unable to speak.
Jackson sat in a recliner and gestured for Nathan to sit in a similar chair beside it. After Nathan was seated, Jackson said, “Sometimes we have problems that we don’t know how to solve.”
“Then what do we do with them?”
“There are two schools of thought on that,” Jackson began. “The first is to force your will and force the problem to a solution. The problem with that is by forcing it, the problem might repeat itself.”
“And the second?” Nathan asked.
“Is to sit back, act as if there isn’t a problem, and let the problem solve itself.”
Nathan found himself grinning as he realized he’d heard those exact same words before.
“What’s so funny?” Jackson asked.
“My brother used to say that when he talked about surfing. You couldn’t force yourself into a wave. You had to let the wave take you, then make it your own. It’s all a matter of perspective really, he’d say. When you’re outside the wave looking in, you can’t know the nature of the wave. But when you’re inside looking out, you realize everything it can possibly do. Only then can you exert influence.”
“Surfing, huh?” Jackson rolled out a cigarette. “Not much of that in York County, Pennsylvania. Looks to me like a lot of hassle for a moment’s glory.”
“But that moment is so glorious,” Nathan said, imagining himself back twisting through waves, walking to the front of his board so he could have more control.
Jackson lit his cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. “If you say so.” He got up. “I’m going to the wash room. You can stay here as long as you want.”
“Thanks Chief.”
Jackson nodded, grabbed his dop kit, and headed out, leaving Nathan alone with his thoughts. He sat there for a time, then fell asleep, dreaming of him and his brother, surfing along trails of swirling moondust connecting all the seas of the moon.
– 9 –
THEY WENT ON mission just after noon. The atmosphere was fat with tension. No one would look the other in the eye. Everyone was on a hair trigger. Twice Smittie almost shot a woman stepping from her home. The patrol ended without a telephone ringing, someone being shot, or Nathan ripping the head off one of his men. But the same couldn’t be said for what happened after the mission. Once they’d recovered their gear, Nathan entered into the hooch, fire in his eyes.
“I want each and every one of you outside.” He didn’t wait for them to respond. Instead he turned and marched out to wait for them.
Skinny came first, then Smittie, then the rest of them. They fell into a ragged line. They hadn’t time to switch out of their gear, although they’d managed to remove their body armor. Frisbee stared clearly into Nathan’s eyes, but the rest of them couldn’t meet his gaze.
“We’re going to play a game,” Nathan said through gritted teeth. “The game is called I’m going to forget the bullshit you pulled yesterday and we’re going to move forward and if any of you asswipes ever does that again, I’ll have you doing police call in a minefield.” He stared hard at each of them and didn’t relent until they’d all made eye contact. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Sarge,” they replied.
“Do we understand the rules to this game?”
“Yes.”
“Do we understand the penalties of this game?”
“Yes.”
“Then get back inside the hooch and take some personal time.”
They all turned to go, except Frisbee.
“What is it?”
He frowned as he reached into his pocket and pulled out Nathan’s cell phone. “I managed to fix it,” he murmured, as he held it out.
Nathan took it and shoved it in his pocket without looking. He watched as the door closed. He stood there for a moment, then pulled out the phone and checked it. Nothing. Not even a message.
He turned to leave when Watkins came back out. He held his rank in his hands. “Here, Sarge. I don’t deserve this.”
Nathan took the rank. “No you don’t. Since when did you let fear rule you? I thought you were better than that?”
Watkins looked at the fence in the distance that separated them from the Iraqi people. “I don’t know. It’s this place, I suppose.” He punched his palm. “I feel like such a fool. How I could have fallen for it, I don’t know. Fucking coincidence is all it was.”
“Fucking coinc
idence is right.” Nathan balled his fist around the rank. “Listen,” he said. “I’m going to hang onto this for a while. When you feel like you’ve earned it back, come to me and we’ll talk about it.”
Watkins shook his head, but smiled nevertheless. “Thanks, Sarge.”
“We’re off cycle for a week. Next patrol is in eight days. Use this time to get them back on track.”
Watkins nodded. “I will. I will.”
Nathan turned and walked away. He shoved the rank into his pocket and eyed the Third Quarter moon hanging high in the sky. In seven days it would be the New Moon and invisible from the Earth, which meant his brother would be nowhere close. Then the cycle would continue, progressing through Waxing Crescent, First Quarter, Waxing Gibbeous, then Full, lasting about twelve days.
He was well aware the next time they’d return to patrol there’d be no moon to help them.
– 10 –
THOSE EIGHT DAYS went by quicker than he’d have thought they could. One moment they were pulling KP and cleaning the showers, the next they were back on the street, humping body armor in the Iraq desert heat. With the change in cycle also came the change in their area of responsibility. They’d been assigned the northwest section of Sadr City, in the news recently because of several Muslim on Muslim attacks, and the discovery of beheaded bodies. Instead of getting better since the death squads of 2005, things had gotten worse, which was why the U.S. presence had increased; good American men acting as policemen for a populace at odds with each other.
Nathan arrayed his men on both sides of a side street north of Sheriqka Road. Midmorning traffic was light. There were only a few cars and delivery vehicles. There were even fewer people. Except for the odd group of children, or woman returning from the market, the place could have been deserted.
He began to reach into his pocket for his phone, but stopped himself. Coincidence had turned to compulsion. Although he knew it didn’t mean anything, couldn’t mean anything, he couldn’t help himself. In reality, it was just a lucky charm. Soldiers had been carrying them for thousands of years. He knew a soldier who carried a ten-year-old Twinkie in his pocket. He knew another who carried a plastic bag filled with Barbie doll heads. Still others carried more mundane trinkets: a rosary, a ring, a rabbit’s foot, a St. Christopher’s medal. So what was so crazy about a cell phone?
He was suddenly hit with a wave of pressure so massive, he felt as if his body had been flattened in mid-air, his uniform ripped away, and his skin left ragged. He saw nothing but red fury as he tumbled uncontrollably, until finally hitting something so hard that it took his oxygen away. For a long time he was in a middle place, where he neither lived nor died, he merely existed in a cauldron of flashing pain. Pain, no pain, pain, no pain, as if he swung from the tip of a great metronome back and forth between universes.
Then there was silence. He didn’t know for how long. He wasn’t even really aware of it. He just knew everything was gone. His unit. Iraq. His body. The universe. All of it. Gone. Adrift in the aftermath of something he knew to be terrible, he bobbed along the waves of his unconsciousness.
Eventually he became vaguely aware of the sound of a phone ringing somewhere. He wondered if it might be his dead brother, or maybe his mother, or even perhaps his fifth grade science teacher, who’d tried to explain that the moon was believed to once have been part of the earth. He also heard the sound of popcorn. Not like an air popper at the theater, but like one his grandparents had used on the stove that expanded with the tinfoil as the popcorn pop-pop-popped. He began to salivate, thinking of popcorn, his hand between Jenny Gillespie’s knees and a giant screen with Tom Cruise acting badass with sunglasses in a jet.
Then it all returned in an impossible wave of noise and violence.
Machine gun fire ate at his screams. His legs were on fire. His vision was red. He tried to grab at his legs, but his arms wouldn’t answer his commands. He saw bits and pieces of his hands, but they moved so quickly in and out of his vision he couldn’t keep track of them. He shouted for them to stop moving, but they wouldn’t do anything. He shouted louder, thinking they weren’t paying attention.
Then for one brief moment everything was clear. He saw his men on the other side of the road. Some returned fire, while some lay still. He gained control of his hands and reached out to them. He opened his mouth to cry out. He wanted them to know he was there.
Suddenly he was jerked backwards.
The view of his men receded as he was pulled down an alley. Then he turned a corner and was thrown on a pile of rubble. Rock and grit bit his face. One scraped against his front teeth. He found his arms and tried to push himself up. But as soon as he had his arms under him, he felt himself held by the feet, and pulled across another street and down another alley. Then he was lifted and tossed into a trunk. For a brief moment he saw a man with a black and white keffiyeh wrapped around his head and face. Only the upper nose and eyes were visible, eyes that had the same hatred he’d seen in Jenny Gillespie’s dad’s, when he’d taken her home drunk and left her passed out on the front door step, her skirt on backwards.
A butt of a rifle smashed through the memory and all went black.
– 11 –
CAL LEANED AGAINST the retaining wall at La Jolla cove. Beneath him roared a hundred hungry sea lions, drowning the sound of the surf and the screaming children in the park behind them. He turned to Nathan, grinning like an idiot as he pointed at set after set of waves slamming into the beach.
“The storm is here!” Although he shouted, it was the movement of his mouth that confirmed the words.
Nathan stood back, his brother’s smile infecting his own. Cal had been tracking the almanac for months with the idea that the storm would come. He’d taken time off from work, arranged for a neighbor to watch his dog, and had packed enough food to last a week. His idea was to park at Neptune Beach the entire time so he could surf what would probably be ‘the best waves in a century.’ Better yet, no one else was on the water. It’s as if the storm took them by surprise. Even the most diehard surfers were normally frothing at the mouth, waiting to dive into storm surge, but the beach was amazingly vacant by the time they arrived.
They’d surfed that first night, laughter tinkling on the edge of every drop of rain and roll of thunder. When they’d finally fallen into the couches in the RV, exhausted and fulfilled, beers in their hands, Cal was the first to speak. “It’s like I told you. The moon tells the truth. It always tells the truth. It can’t help it.”
“But how can you tell what its saying?” Nathan asked.
“Because it repeats itself over and over. Every rotation, every cycle, it says the same thing. All you have to do is watch it and watch what it affects, then you know.”
Nathan grabbed another beer for him and his brother. “You say it like it’s a secret.”
Cal laughed aloud. “It isn’t. Not even close. It’s right out in the open. Everyone should know, but they never even take a second to pay attention.”
“What do you mean?”
“They sing songs about it. They send men in spaceships to it. They’ve even have had entire civilizations worship it. But they never figured out that the moon affects everything.”
“Come on, Cal. Everything? Really?”
“Everything has a tide, Nate. Not just the oceans. The moon affects insects. It affects flowers and the trees. It even affects people.”
“Bullshit. You talking werewolves?”
“Nothing of the sort. It doesn’t change people. Not like that. But it moves them. If they listen and they know, it will guide them.”
“Guide them to what?”
For the first time Cal looked uncertain. He shrugged. “It depends on what they want. Everyone wants something different, you know? It just depends, is all.”
Nathan thought about asking another question, but something strange began to happen to his brothe
r. The left side of his face disappeared. Just vanished. His right side smiled, then frowned, as if he realized the loss. His single remaining eye went to it, searching for what had gone missing.
The side of his face returned, but when it did, it was no longer his brother. Instead it was the face of a nameless Iraqi whose eyes reminded him of Jenny Gillespie’s father. Then the right side switched to match. The eyes examined him like he was a bug, the man’s head leaning above him.
“Who are you?” he said, his voice heavily accented but understood.
Nathan struggled to get his voice.
“Fuck you,” he tried to say, but it came out more like a cough.
The Iraqi grinned. “No American. Fuck you.”
Then a bag was thrown over Nathan’s head and he was shoved on the floor.
– 12 –
WHEN HE NEXT awoke, his leg felt as if it had been scraped against eight miles of road. His mouth was so dry that his lips were unmovable. His entire body was one big bruise, which refused to move under its own accord. He didn’t know how long he lay there, but he became aware of the other about the same time he realized he had to pee something awful.
“They got you good,” said a voice, American, from somewhere in New England.
“Wh… Where am I?”
“A closet. I think we’re still in Baghdad, but I can’t be sure.”
“Who are they? What do they want?” Nathan tried to turn his head, but it felt boulder-heavy.
“Some jihadist group. They sort of have a video blog. I saw the set-up once upstairs. They like to pretend they’re going to kill you and get all crazy with a sword. But don’t worry. It’s nothing but them blustering about some crazy Arab shit. By the way, my name is Robert Booth, chief petty officer, United States Navy.”
Nathan digested the information. He couldn’t help but wonder what the navy was doing in Bagdad and he said as much.
