We continued sweeping and searching for another two weeks until the battalion CO came down from DC and, after one sneering look around, called it off. But before leaving, he overheard a couple of PFCs talking about how excited they were about the deployment and angrily called division to find out why Marines from one of his companies were getting deployed without his knowledge. I don’t know how that conversation went, but what matters is that division found out they had a platoon of volunteers and a week later issued orders for Afghanistan in support of 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment.
We were so happy that we threw a party in Conrad’s honor. We even dressed a mannequin in some of his old cammies and spent the night toasting and taking drunken pictures of each other with it. None of our girlfriends, fiancées, or wives seemed to understand and were generally outraged by our joy and our volunteering. There was a mass dumping, which left ninety-five percent of us single before reporting. On the plane, we all laughed until it hurt when Mack summed up our collective feelings: “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”
Five months later, we were in Helmand Province, sweeping for IEDs and weapons caches. We’d been out for at least three weeks—so long that even the young, naive, “moto-tard” officers had stopped caring if we shaved. Doug and Russell had both been blown to pieces but had somehow survived. Roger had been shot through the shoulder. Still, no one had a damn clue where Conrad was.
When he came up in conversation one night, Mack swallowed the last bite of his beef ravioli MRE and said flatly, “He’s a fucking magician. Disappeared himself, then disappeared us when we went looking.”
We got lucky a lot in the heavily mined fields of Helmand, where the Taliban planted IEDs with such low metallic content that our piss-twelves were useless. Often, when the piss-twelve didn’t register anything, there would be some visual clue marking the spot—a rock stacked strangely on a stump, a ribbon, loose dirt. We’d see it, check it out, and find a 155mm artillery round wired to a pressure plate one of us had narrowly missed stepping on or were kneeling right next to. Mack said it was Conrad keeping us safe, our point man sweeping ahead of us. I don’t think he truly believed it, and I don’t know if I did. But it doesn’t matter—that was never the point.
Even today, years later, I still check the police blotters for evidence of Conrad. Every now and then, I see something odd or unexplained I think must be him. Sometimes I even go to look for evidence, but I never find much. We had the same problem during the sweep: it always felt like he was nearby, but of course he wasn’t. You have to understand: he’s one of the best. He didn’t want to be brought back, even by us. And I can’t say I blame him.
RACHEL SWIRSKY
If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love
FROM Apex Magazine
IF YOU WERE A DINOSAUR, my love, then you would be a T-Rex. You’d be a small one, only five feet, ten inches, the same height as human-you. You’d be fragile-boned and you’d walk with as delicate and polite a gait as you could manage on massive talons. Your eyes would gaze gently from beneath your bony brow-ridge.
If you were a T-Rex, then I would become a zookeeper so that I could spend all my time with you. I’d bring you raw chickens and live goats. I’d watch the gore shining on your teeth. I’d make my bed on the floor of your cage, in the moist dirt, cushioned by leaves. When you couldn’t sleep, I’d sing you lullabies.
If I sang you lullabies, I’d soon notice how quickly you picked up music. You’d harmonize with me, your rough, vibrating voice a strange counterpoint to mine. When you thought I was asleep, you’d cry unrequited love songs into the night.
If you sang unrequited love songs, I’d take you on tour. We’d go to Broadway. You’d stand onstage, talons digging into the floorboards. Audiences would weep at the melancholic beauty of your singing.
If audiences wept at the melancholic beauty of your singing, they’d rally to fund new research into reviving extinct species. Money would flood into scientific institutions. Biologists would reverse engineer chickens until they could discover how to give them jaws with teeth. Paleontologists would mine ancient fossils for traces of collagen. Geneticists would figure out how to build a dinosaur from nothing by discovering exactly what DNA sequences code everything about a creature, from the size of its pupils to what enables a brain to contemplate a sunset. They’d work until they’d built you a mate.
If they built you a mate, I’d stand as the best woman at your wedding. I’d watch awkwardly in green chiffon that made me look sallow, as I listened to your vows. I’d be jealous, of course, and also sad, because I want to marry you. Still, I’d know that it was for the best that you marry another creature like yourself, one that shares your body and bone and genetic template. I’d stare at the two of you standing together by the altar and I’d love you even more than I do now. My soul would feel light because I’d know that you and I had made something new in the world and at the same time revived something very old. I would be borrowed, too, because I’d be borrowing your happiness. All I’d need would be something blue.
If all I needed was something blue, I’d run across the church, heels clicking on the marble, until I reached a vase by the front pew. I’d pull out a hydrangea the shade of the sky and press it against my heart and my heart would beat like a flower. I’d bloom. My happiness would become petals. Green chiffon would turn into leaves. My legs would be pale stems, my hair delicate pistils. From my throat, bees would drink exotic nectars. I would astonish everyone assembled, the biologists and the paleontologists and the geneticists, the reporters and the rubberneckers and the music aficionados, all those people who—deceived by the helix-and-fossil trappings of cloned dinosaurs—believed that they lived in a science fictional world when really they lived in a world of magic where anything was possible.
If we lived in a world of magic where anything was possible, then you would be a dinosaur, my love. You’d be a creature of courage and strength but also gentleness. Your claws and fangs would intimidate your foes effortlessly. Whereas you—fragile, lovely, human you—must rely on wits and charm.
A T-Rex, even a small one, would never have to stand against five blustering men soaked in gin and malice. A T-Rex would bare its fangs and they would cower. They’d hide beneath the tables instead of knocking them over. They’d grasp each other for comfort instead of seizing the pool cues with which they beat you, calling you a fag, a towel-head, a shemale, a sissy, a spic, every epithet they could think of, regardless of whether it had anything to do with you or not, shouting and shouting as you slid to the floor in the slick of your own blood.
If you were a dinosaur, my love, I’d teach you the scents of those men. I’d lead you to them quietly, oh so quietly. Still, they would see you. They’d run. Your nostrils would flare as you inhaled the night and then, with the suddenness of a predator, you’d strike. I’d watch as you decanted their lives—the flood of red; the spill of glistening, coiled things—and I’d laugh, laugh, laugh.
If I laughed, laughed, laughed, I’d eventually feel guilty. I’d promise never to do something like that again. I’d avert my eyes from the newspapers when they showed photographs of the men’s tearful widows and fatherless children, just as they must avert their eyes from the newspapers that show my face. How reporters adore my face, the face of the paleontologist’s fiancée with her half-planned wedding, bouquets of hydrangeas already ordered, green chiffon bridesmaid dresses already picked out. The paleontologist’s fiancée who waits by the bedside of a man who will probably never wake.
If you were a dinosaur, my love, then nothing could break you, and if nothing could break you, then nothing could break me. I would bloom into the most beautiful flower. I would stretch joyfully toward the sun. I’d trust in your teeth and talons to keep you/me/us safe now and forever from the scratch of chalk on pool cues, and the scuff of the nurses’ shoes in the hospital corridor, and the stuttering of my broken heart.
MAIA MORGAN
The Saltwater Twin
FROM Crea
tive Nonfiction
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
I PICTURED HER below the waves where the water was gentle. I imagined she floated like a bright October leaf, unhurried, lazily seesawing in the current until at last she came to rest on the ocean floor. Her hair grew into delicate ropes of seaweed; her skin turned opalescent like the inside of a shell. She wore a necklace of coral, swam seal-like through shimmering clouds of fish, and slept in an underwater cave with a nightlight of luminescent plankton. In my imagination, she became mythic: The Saltwater Twin. She belongs to the sea, I thought. She knows things no one else knows.
She didn’t start out as a mythical creature. She was an ordinary kid named Abby Mahoney, a sandy-haired, freckle-faced girl—that is, if she looked anything like her twin brother, who was my age. I never met her. Her family lived on my cousins’ street, but she was already gone by the time they moved in. Abby drowned in the Atlantic when we were three, leaving her brother, leaving all of us behind. Abby had been Tommy’s twin, but The Saltwater Twin was mine—and she gave me a way to escape.
My family spent a couple of weeks each summer at Martha’s Vineyard—my parents, sisters, and maternal grandfather, and sometimes my aunt, uncle (my mom’s brother), and cousins. I loved the ferry ride from Woods Hole—the bellow of the whistle; the smell of diesel and tar and sea air; the gulls wheeling and shrieking overhead; the boys treading water in the harbor, calling for us to throw them coins; and the men tossing ropes as thick as my arm from the boat to other men who caught them on the dock and pulled us in. I loved the hermit crabs that scrabbled in our plastic buckets, the quicksilver minnows that flicked around our shins, the prehistoric horseshoe crabs. I loved the way the priest said Body of Christ with a Boston accent; the salt that dried in ribbons on our skin; the hippies and seaweed; beaded moccasins and sailor bracelets; ladies with tan legs and pleated white tennis skirts; the clay cliffs; the dinners of tomatoes, sweet corn, fresh-caught fish, and pie. Sometimes we swam on the ocean beach and raced down the hot sand of the dunes, past sharp, sun-bleached grass and tangled thickets of wild roses with blooms the impossible pink of Barbie lipstick. Sometimes we swam at Menemsha Pond, where the beach was festooned with dried seaweed and spotted like a bird’s egg with blotches of black sand. There was an inlet we called the Dangerous River, carved into the sand by the tide; it was one of our favorite places to play. It felt like a jungle; the grass was high and laced with the cries of plovers and gulls and the buzz of insects. We couldn’t see our moms from around the bend in the Dangerous River, which came to my collarbone at high tide. We’d strip off our bathing suits under the murky water and rinse the sand out of the crotches. The sand, of course, was ubiquitous. It peppered our scalps, worked its way into sheets and sandwiches, dusted the floors of our rental houses.
In the unstructured summer days, I drifted into my own world, mostly unencumbered by adult expectations and entanglements. I had books and sky and hours to daydream. The grownups had newspapers and sweet rolls and hours to talk over beach towels and the supper table. They talked to each other about what to make for dinner, and they talked about the president and James Taylor and what color they ought to paint the bathroom back home.
My mother asked us whether we’d brushed our teeth and if we could imagine what that little schoolhouse up the road was like a hundred years ago and whether we wanted a peach or some boysenberry yogurt for a snack. She felt at home at the beach. She loved to eat the special treats you could only get at that one bakery with the screen door or that little stand by the wharf. She sang in the car, songs she knew from college and before. She liked us to sing with her, and sometimes we did. She liked to imagine the fancy houses we could live in if we were rich. She took us to the library, and we filled canvas sail bags of books. She read voraciously. She loved strangers, and strangers probably liked her because she was inquisitive and pretty. But she was also sad. And scared at night to be alone. Afraid of thunderstorms and the dark. My mother was a cigarette-sneaking, bobby-socked twelve-year-old trapped inside a suburban housewife. Her father called her the Queen of Sheba. My father didn’t make her happy. As far as I could tell, he didn’t pay much attention to her at all, and my mother required attention. He thought she was naïve and careless; she thought he was uncouth and cruel. At least, that’s what it seemed like to me.
My father talked about how the salt water was good for us and how that was a nice piece of fish, and asked who wanted to drive with him to the dump. He went running with my uncle and to the market to buy dinner. My dad was pale and then sunburned. I guess he read, too. That’s what everyone did at the beach—read or played cards. I played War and Spit with my sisters and cousins. Uno and Hearts with our moms. But I don’t remember my father playing. He made a swing for us and hung it from a tree in the front yard of one of the houses we rented. That’s all I remember.
My sisters, Molly and Sam, were fifteen months and four years younger than I, respectively. Molly didn’t talk that much. When she did, it was about whatever we were doing—riding in the car, swimming. Or maybe what we were going to do later—what we might eat for dinner, if there’d be dessert, if we’d get to sleep all together with the cousins. Sam talked about basketball, she talked about scary things she saw on TV that she wasn’t supposed to watch, she asked whether sharks might swim this far north. Molly loved dolls and babies, and hated it when people stared at her. Sam liked candy and getting her way. Neither of them liked to read like I did, but we played together sometimes on the beach. We raced through the shallow water, laughing at how it pulled us down and made it impossible to run, like when you try to run in a bad dream.
My grandfather was a sphinx with horn-rimmed glasses and fat toenails. He asked what grade I’d be in come September and if I still liked school and if I thought my dad made a blueberry pie that wasn’t half bad. He read thick, hardcover books and asked if I knew that it made God happy when little girls were obedient. He wore Bermuda shorts and the old Penguin polo shirts with skinny collars. He coughed when he laughed. He said, Good girl, that’s a good girl. He smelled like skin and smoke. During the night, sometimes in the afternoon, my grandfather would take me or Molly into his room. Sam was too little then, but he’d get to her eventually. There were lots of girl cousins. He could wait. He stopped short of intercourse, rejecting it, perhaps, as too risky—I don’t know why, really—but I remember his hands gripping my small thighs. I remember the color and feel of his skin against mine. The sound of his zipper. His fumbling, the rasp and heat of his breath. He huffed and snuffed—a goblin, a wolf. He dripped and oozed. He pried us open like oysters. He sucked out everything inside. Outside the room where he did these things, he sat on the couch with us sometimes and read us stories. He told my mother he’d take some toast with mushrooms. He crossed his brown legs and tapped ash into an oyster shell. He was mottled and knobbed like a witch, evil as Rumpelstiltskin. I saw him. I knew his secret name. But then I had to forget. I was a kid, after all. I understood pretending. Forget, pretend—almost the same thing.
It was probably my mother or my aunt who first mentioned Abby—maybe chatting on their towels at Menemsha Pond while we hunched nearby, drizzling sandy broth through our fingertips into delicate stalagmites. Although I was a fairly conscientious kid about many things, I didn’t have any serious qualms about eavesdropping. Grownups seemed to have a monopoly on all the really important information, so listening to them, especially when you were in plain view if they’d only been paying attention, didn’t seem wrong. That’s how I knew one of my uncles had gotten drunk and smashed through the sliding glass door of my grandfather’s shower, and that’s how, the summer I was eight, I found out how Abby had died.
It could have been any of us. Every summer, my sisters, cousins, and I exhausted ourselves fighting the wave
s, staying in until our mothers protested that our lips were blue. I knew how it felt to be dragged under, shaken like a ragdoll, lungs like party balloons about to burst until you managed to surface, sputtering and choking, through the foam. It made me feel strong to look the ocean in its fearsome blue eye and come out breathing. You knew the ocean might drown you, but not because it was malevolent. That’s just the way it was. Not that there was no fear; fear tumbled with you in the salt-clouded blue-green. It held you, one part at a time, laced around a wrist or thigh, bubbled across your sealed lips. But there was something else—a steady let go, let go—a calm, a beyond-ness where nothing could reach. For a split second, I felt eternal, omnipotent. Then I’d swallow water and gasp back into time above the surface.
I turned Abby into The Saltwater Twin on the ferry. I liked to lean over the railing and watch the hull carve the bottle-green plane below us into frothy white furrows that connected the dot-to-dot of where we’d been to where we were going. I’d press myself into the space of that moment—sun and spray on my skin, the snap of my windbreaker, the deep rumble of the ferry in my legs—and think that no one else could hear what I heard or see what I saw. I am apart from these others; I am my own. I thought about Abby on her own in the ocean; her drowning set her apart from all the rest of us alive on this boat and on the island and all over the world. Maybe she was watching our ferry like the mermaid sisters in the Hans Christian Andersen story, who’d poke their heads up through the waves and spy on ships. The mermaids sang through storms to sailors whose ships were going down. They told them not to be afraid; they sang of the beauty of their kingdom under the sea. But every sailor who reached their undersea gardens arrived there lifeless. The sisters grieved for the unlucky sailors but couldn’t cry; the story says that because mermaids don’t have tears, they suffer that much more. I liked that. Unlike my mother, for whom an offhand remark or a touching Pepsi commercial could set off profuse weeping, I held back tears even when I split my chin open falling off my bike. I guarded my tears fiercely; they were mine to keep.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 Page 33
