by Stephen Dau
But maybe they just get the better of you that day. Maybe there are women and children all over the place and despite that, all of a sudden maybe your point man is lying on the ground bleeding from the neck. And maybe you hear those little snaps, like a million tiny flags cracking in the wind, only you know they’re not flags. They’re bullets breaking the sound barrier as they pass by your head. And then maybe Jacobs goes down, like he’s decided to take a nap. And then all of a sudden you are certain of only two things: that you are not invincible, and that you would rather be anywhere in the world except here.
23
The phone rings, and reluctantly Jonas picks it up.
“Hello?” he says.
“Hello, Jonas?” Her voice is eager, nervous, but tries to cover itself with a tranquil veneer.
“Yes,” says Jonas.
“It’s Rose. Rose Henderson. I just wanted to call and say hi, you know, and to, you know, find out if you might have had a chance to think a little bit more. If you can remember.”
“Hi, Mrs. Henderson, hello. Well, I am not really sure what to tell you, ma’am, that I have not already said.”
“Oh, well, anything really. Anything. I would be interested in hearing anything.”
“Yes, ma’am, I know. You have said that before. And I absolutely promise you, again, that I would call you. If there’s anything, I mean.”
“I know you will. And I’m really sorry to keep, you know. I don’t mean to pester you. It’s just, if there’s anything.”
“I know, ma’am. And believe me, I will. I absolutely will. I promise.”
“I know, I know. And really, I want you to know that it could be just anything, you see. It might be something that you don’t think means a thing, that maybe doesn’t seem very important. And to you maybe it isn’t; maybe to you it’s just some silly little detail that you wouldn’t normally even acknowledge. But to me. Well, it would just mean the whole world to me.”
24
He remembers the ruins of a stone fortress on the road outside the village, a caravanserai. They play there, he and his younger sister, Miriam. Miriam the delicate, he remembers, the graceful, transformed in his memories into a glowing presence that trailed him around through childhood. Sometimes, he remembers, his elder brother, Sirhan, came along as well, but not very often.
Later, he will read about them in The New Book of Knowledge encyclopedia, the string of inns or rest stations that were built beside roads branching out along the vast network of the Silk Road, stretching from Shanghai to Colombo to Cairo to Vienna.
But as yet he is ignorant of the stone fort’s original purpose, and so they are free to turn it into whatever they want it to be: a manor house on a plantation or the royal court in Xianyang, or the Palace of Versailles, or an Aztec pyramid. The pile of rocks is anything they want it to be.
And so it is that one day they find themselves touring the Taj Mahal, or scaling Mount Everest, or climbing the turrets of King Arthur’s castle, and they round a corner and there they are, crouched against a low wall, a group of young men, bearded, with long guns slung casually over their shoulders. Sirhan is among them. They smoke something from scraps of rolled-up newsprint, and they stand suddenly when they notice that they have been seen.
Sirhan strides over to them. He stands nearly two heads taller than Younis, and his eyes are deeply bloodshot, the pupils contracted to pinpoints.
“You should not be here,” he says, his voice gravelly and low.
Younis is about to say something in response, tease him, or challenge his right to tell them what to do. But then he sees that this person before him, looking like his brother and sounding like his brother, has been replaced by someone else, someone with eager eyes and a hard voice.
Younis reaches down and grabs Miriam’s wrist. “Let’s go,” he says, backing away, unwilling to turn his face from the group of men, unwilling to allow them out of his sight. But Miriam pays no attention, and crouches down to pick up another colored stone she has spotted in the dust.
“I said let’s go,” says Younis, and yanks her arm, pulling her up to her feet. She cries out, but Younis refuses to let go, moves her so that she stands behind him, and backs them both away from the group of men, some of whom now smile in a way that makes him wish he could move much more quickly.
25
And then it’s early November, the first truly cold night of the season, the smell of snow on the air, their breath turning to pale smoke under the street lamps, the welcome warmth of Shakri’s apartment, and Jonas punches the wall in her living room.
Her first reaction is to laugh.
He had been out drinking with Hakma at Wilson’s, and Shakri met him there and walked with him to her apartment. He had been eager to see her.
During the walk, under bare, shadowed trees half-lit by street lamps, maples and oaks stripped of all but their most tenacious leaves, both of them cold despite walking briskly, because until then the day had been warm and they wore only light jackets, she starts in on him again.
“How much time do you think you spend drinking with Hakma?” she says. Her face wears the blank and open expression she uses when she is trying to make a point. It is an expression with which he has become familiar.
“Oh, please, just do not start.”
“No, really, I want to know.”
“Not so much.”
“Really? Because I make it to be every night this week.”
“I had literature class on Monday night.”
“So what are we, Thursday? That’s four out of five nights, Jonas. How much money do you think you spend?”
“But Wilson’s is cheap.”
“You have this tremendous opportunity. Look at what you have been given. You’ve got—”
“What I’ve been given?”
“You’ve got the chance to do something amazing, to be an amazing person, and you piss it away in a bar with that angry Kurd.”
By this time they have arrived at her apartment. Shakri fumbles through her purse for her keys and finally gets the door open. But the whole time she keeps at him, reminding him of all he is throwing away.
“Look,” she says as they walk into her living room. “I know you’ve had a rough time.”
“A rough time?”
She starts to say something else, but Jonas cuts her off.
“What would you know of a rough time? You’ve had everything handed to you.”
“That’s not true and you know it! And you also know you can’t wallow like this.”
He doesn’t really know how it happens. He feels the anger creep up his back, rising in him, an almost physical force, or something tangible he can touch. He feels it consume him, blocking out everything else. He feels it. He is momentarily convinced that Shakri is deliberately bringing it out, seeking it, wanting it. He convinces himself that it fulfills some need in her.
The act itself doesn’t exist, only its aftermath. Jonas doesn’t even realize what he is doing until he draws back his fist and punches the wall next to the front door.
To his astonishment, Shakri laughs, albeit a little nervously.
“Oh, no,” she says, her accent fluttering. “No, you don’t, you melodramatic git. There is no way I’m going to start living in a country-and-western song.”
He regrets it almost instantly. He has punched a spot on the wall next to the front door, and realizes only afterward that he has hit not the dramatically breakable drywall, but the solid wood of the doorframe. His hand throbs, and he thinks he may have felt something snap in his wrist. The spot on the wall shows no sign of having been touched. His anger dissipated, his hand rapidly beginning to swell, he sits down on the couch.
“I, um…” he says, holding his wrist, “I think I really may have hurt myself.”
“You idiot,” says Shakri gently. “Let me see.”
She sits next to him on the couch and runs her hand down his arm and over the long, pale scar on his forearm.
“So now I
finally know,” she says. “I finally know how you got that.”
“You finally know,” he says.
“I mean the truth,” she says, meeting his eyes. “Right? And not that rubbish about being swept over a waterfall, or falling out of an apple tree, or fighting a lion, or defusing a bomb, or … what was that other one, the one you told Trevor?”
“Training accident with a peregrine falcon.”
“Yeah, that. How did you ever come up with that?”
She touches his swollen wrist, and he winces at the contact.
“That’s really swollen,” she says.
“I think I might have broken something,” he says.
Shakri stands, goes to the closet, and puts on a heavy coat, then hands Jonas his jacket. “Come on,” she says. “My friend Mira is on call in the medical center.”
“Mira?” says Jonas. “She hates me.”
“Yeah,” says Shakri. “If it is broken, she will be happy to set it.”
Reluctantly, Jonas pulls on his jacket, easing it over his throbbing hand, and in a gust of chill air they are out the door and back into the cold night.
26
Things went downhill fast. After the ambush we didn’t care. We got sloppy. We lost something. Inhibitions, I guess. It gets easier; that’s for sure. Maybe we lost a little discipline. And then we started losing more guys.
First it was Marin, on point in some village, and he just lay down like he’d decided to take a nap. Then, right after that, Landon tripped an IED and literally disintegrated.
Then a truck ran over Margold. No joke. It’s almost funny to think about it, if it weren’t so awful. He was on his back underneath the APC, because we thought a tie-rod was broken, and he was checking it, and damn if that rig didn’t just roll backward, right overtop of him. Squashed his chest flat, broke his back. We scrambled to lift it off, but there was no way.
Then, back in the zone, we had this big discussion about it. I mean, come on. You go off to war and get killed because a truck you’re fixing rolls over you? You could do that in your own backyard. I had already started thinking it was fate. You showed up and you lived or you died and there was just nothing you could do to alter it. But some of the guys said that they thought it was just chance, all totally random. And we got into it a little. We were pretty upset, which, let’s face it, is weird for such a high-brained discussion, fate versus chance, but somebody shoved somebody against a wall, I remember that, and there we were arguing and jabbering about our stretch of bad luck. And someone said it, said, “Well, you know, fuck it. We’re cursed.”
And everyone went quiet, like a secret that everybody knew but didn’t dare say had been spoken out loud. And a couple of guys laughed, but someone else got really angry, said, “Shut up; don’t ever say that again.”
And it’s true. You’ve got to nip that kind of thing in the bud. But it was too late. It was already out there. A unit gets that kind of thing into its head, that it’s cursed, and it’s useless. One of two things happens. Either they get mutinous, refuse to go out, or maybe go out and dig in somewhere, refuse to do anything, or else they snap.
We snapped.
27
In the morning, Rose writes letters, often waking before dawn in the cold house and putting a kettle on to boil water for tea before settling into the rocking chair in the large-windowed addition Roy built before the divorce. Dear Timothy, she writes, in a graceful, flowing script on a sheet of cream stationery, writing by hand because she is still not entirely comfortable writing on the laptop that sits next to the printer upstairs. You don’t know me, but you served with my son.
Roy bought her both the laptop and the printer, and checks in on her occasionally, as she does on him. Separated after Christopher disappeared, now divorced, they are friends, of a sort. While Rose had founded the support group, Roy had seemed capable of carrying on as though nothing had happened, and Rose resented him. So she funneled into her work with the group all of the energy and attention that had been squeezed out of the marriage.
Even now, though friendly, they are vaguely wary of each other, each blaming the other in part for the loss of their son, even as they each know how irrational it is to do so.
I am writing because I have organized a group of veterans and their families, anyone who has lost friends or loved ones in the line of duty.
Many of the soldiers and family members she contacts never get back to her, and she is not offended or put off by this. Quite the opposite: She finds it completely understandable, assuming that they want as much distance as possible from the past. But this is the opposite of her own reaction, and that of those who do get in touch with her, those who share a need to be close to others who have had similar experiences.
We are a group of over one hundred family members, friends, and comrades who have lost loved ones.
She never pesters or cajoles, and she is careful not to go on too much about her own loss. Her mission, she feels, is simply to be there, to be in touch, offering to those affected the opportunity for fellowship.
28
Jonas wakes up in pitch darkness to the sound of Shakri’s screams.
They are being hunted. He lies on his back, hiding with Shakri next to him. She screams into his ear, his good left ear, so that he can hear nothing aside from her screams. He can’t move, can’t sit up. They are surrounded. He tries to sit up again and smacks his head against something hard. He tries to keep them alive.
“I don’t understand you, Jonas!” Shakri sounds frantic, desperate. “What are you saying?”
It is her voice, but it feels unfamiliar. It is as though she is speaking to someone else, calling him a different name, in a different language, and he registers it merely as a kind of nuisance that threatens to prevent him from doing what needs to be done, and which, more important, threatens to give them away. He is trying to save her, and he needs her to shut up and let him do it.
“Wake up, Jonas, oh, please wake up!”
She is crying now, trying to keep her voice calm, sounding as though she is reasoning with a mugger or a rapist. He wraps his arm around her neck and clasps his hand tightly over her mouth.
He finds that he cannot move his legs, that they feel bound, and he reaches down the length of his thigh with the hand that is not holding shut Shakri’s mouth and gropes around to try to figure out what is restraining him.
It feels like bedsheets.
Then he takes a breath. Slowly, he releases his grip on her mouth.
In the darkness, he reaches up, grabs hold of the wooden slats, and pulls himself out from under the bed. He slides out of the sheet and blanket, which have wrapped themselves around his legs. Then he reaches down and tries to help Shakri crawl shakily out, as well, but she pushes away his hands.
He stands beside the bed, his bare chest bathed dimly by the light from the street lamp outside the window, which barely penetrates the darkness of Shakri’s bedroom. He is soaked with sweat, and the cool air brings out goose bumps on his arms and legs. He hears nothing but a ringing sound in his good ear. He opens his mouth to say something, then closes it again. When sounds finally emerge from his mouth, they are raspy and forced, his voice catching in his throat.
“I don’t…” he says. “What happened?” he says. He says, “I didn’t mean…” and, “Are you okay?”
Shakri is curled fetally on the other side of the bed, practically as far away from Jonas as she can get while remaining in the same room. She holds the side of her head as though in pain, and Jonas suddenly realizes that he injured her as he dragged her underneath the bed. Her body shakes, but she is quiet except for an occasional sob or rapid intake of breath. He crosses the room and sits next to her.
“I thought we were going to be killed,” he whispers, and reaches out gently to put his hand on her leg.
“Don’t,” she says. “Just don’t,” she says. “Just please don’t touch me.”
29
What if, a few days later, you find them? Wha
t if you find them a week after they kill your point man while you’re patrolling some stretch of highway outside some godforsaken village? What if you find them a few days after you lose someone else, vaporized by an IED right outside that same godforsaken village? What if you are absolutely certain that some of the locals know them, know who did it, who it was that killed your friends? What if you then get some intel? What if you get confirmation? What if you suddenly know where they are?
30
The next day it rains, and Rose can do no work in the backyard, so she reads some e-mail she has managed to print out from the computer, or she makes some phone calls, or she stares through the window at the giant drops flooding the small porch outside the front door.
She can still picture them standing there, framed by the doorway, soaking wet, the three of them, clustered around a red wooden wagon, and the thought makes her smile. They wear their dripping, oversize ponchos, their rubber boots as, behind them, the rain turns the front yard to mud.
Christopher had organized them into a team. He and Matthew were supposed to push the wagon and tuck the newspapers behind the subscribers’ screen doors, while the baby, Sam, sat in the wagon, pulling papers out from under a folded tarp and stuffing them into plastic bags. But Sam couldn’t keep up as the houses rolled by, and then it really started to rain. Though he is still years away from being old enough to drive, Christopher wants to borrow the car. “Just in the neighborhood,” he says.
