If I were to shoot you on either side of your heart, one shot . . . and then another, you’d have two punctured lungs, two sucking chest wounds. Now you’re good and fucked. But you’ll still be alive long enough to feel your lungs fill up with blood.
If I shoot you there with the shots coming fast, it’s no problem. The ripples tear up your heart and lungs, and you don’t do the death rattle, you just die. There’s shock, but no pain.
I pulled the trigger, felt the recoil, and focused on the sights, not on Vicar, three times. Two bullets tore through his chest, one through his skull, and the bullets came fast, too fast to feel. That’s how it should be done, each shot coming quick after the last so you can’t even try to recover, which is when it hurts.
I stayed there staring at the sights for a while. Vicar was a blur of grey and black. The light was dimming. I couldn’t remember what I was going to do with the body.
4
THE WAVE THAT TAKES THEM UNDER
Brian Turner
THE LANDSCAPE GLOWS COLD AND BLANK in the cracked lens of the moon. An ascent. A decline. The motion repeated dune after dune. With each step, Henderson’s boots sink mid-calf deep. It’s as if the desert itself is pulling them down to an absolute low, he thinks, to be buried in sand when the wind picks up. He pauses at the crest to catch his breath and take in the sweep, the dusty sea rolling to the horizon.
The platoon stretches out in staggered wedge formations. The fire teams move like the silent wings of birds in slow motion, one “v” following another with single-minded intention. Alpha team is out front with Sgt. Reyes on point. Henderson watches how easily Reyes gives in to the dune’s steep pitch: he leans back with his weapon muzzle-up at the moon, then slides down the dune on his back in a fluid, unbroken sweep. The rest of Reyes’s team—Royce, Caldwell, and Ong—follow him, Royce yelling, “Tits up, fuckers.”
Sgt. Gould huffs up behind Henderson, the rest of Bravo team in trail. “Any word from the LT?” Gould asks. He flicks old chew to the ground and brushes his hand on his fatigues.
Henderson shakes his head while Royce helps Caldwell to his feet in the shadows below.
“I’m sure something’ll come down soon . . . Fucking shitbags up at brigade, man. They just sit on their asses punching the clown all day.” Gould spits and sucks water from his CamelBak.
“You jealous? You want to get promoted up to a desk?”
Gould wipes the last flecks of chew from his lips with the back of his hand, smiling. “Well, I’d sure have a helluva lot more time to do what I love best.”
Henderson waits for it.
“Punching that god-damned clown.”
* * *
After 0200, a slight headwind picks up, lifting the finest grains from the dune crests, catching sand in little twists and pockets of air, swirling into widening cones and dropping into hollows. It reminds Henderson of the beach near Half Moon Bay, the flats where the tide pulls back white foam. Anna, asleep in a mummy bag with her hair tangled by salt. Breathing. The breakers’ white-caps rolling in from out of the darkness while the wind lifted the spray from the peaks of the falling waves. The cool mist on his face when he closed his eyes beside her. For a moment, Henderson can almost taste it. He’s back home again. He’s with her. Anna. He says her name under his breath to make her real. “Anna. Anna.”
He looks up the slope to his right, about 150 meters away, to where Lt. Novotny and his radioman, Griggs, struggle against the dune, leaning into the wind and sand that pours down on them as they near the top. Henderson slides his goggles down from his Kevlar and pulls them tight to his face. A voice crackles over the radio on his chest, but the transmission’s too faint to make out.
* * *
“Everybody always says it’s like a bad dream,” Royce says. “But it ain’t like that at all. I mean, if this was a dream, there’d be all kinds a weird shit out here, you know? Like your fucking mom would be out there or something. Fucking sand just goes on forever and forever.”
Ong says, “Yeah. Like, if this was my dream, over every dune you’d see some crazy shit, you know? Like a giant fishbowl with seaweed and big orange Nemos with goofy eyes like they’re gonna blow up or something.”
“There’s definitely weed in your fishbowl, Ong, but it ain’t seaweed,” Royce says. “How the fuck you ever pass a piss test?”
* * *
Henderson and Reyes hear the wind-muffled laughter of the squad rising up from below. He wonders how long their humor will last.
“What do you think?” Reyes asks.
“I think we’re fucking lost,” Henderson says, staring off at the clusters of soldiers strung out along the dunes. “I’m thinking vehicle coms are down, and maybe they’re waiting for us in the wrong spot. Plus, I’m thinking we should sit tight and wait for this sandstorm to blow over, link up with the vehicles, then get the hell out of Dodge.”
Reyes motions to Lt. Novotny and Griggs off on a far dune. “And him?”
Henderson shakes his head, exhaling deep and slow. “I don’t know. I think our Lord Farquaad’s gonna keep pushing forward.” Henderson wipes his lips with his shirtsleeve. “Double-check the weapons and make sure your guys haven’t oiled them down too much. I don’t know how in hell to keep them from getting all gunked up, but do what you can.”
“Do what I can?” Reyes tilts his head and tries to shake the sand grains out of his earlobe. “Right. Do what I can. Sure.”
* * *
05:00 . . . 11:40 . . . 19:07 . . .
The turning of day nearly indistinguishable from night.
Oh-dark-thirty. Oh-dark-hell.
Bringer of the wave that takes them under.
* * *
The platoon moves forward in fits and starts as the wind drives hard against them, soldiers falling back or tumbling down dunes to roll into pits where the sand seems determined to bury them. Henderson can see Sgt. Gould yelling, but his voice barely registers above the wind’s cry and the crack of sand against his goggles. He thinks maybe Gould is cursing the sky itself, as close as any of them might come in their argument with God, or maybe he’s calling out to the men disappearing around him, yelling to be heard over the din of the world in its gritty erasure. Henderson would yell, too, but what difference would it make? It would fill his mouth with sand to even try. And Caldwell? Ong? Royce? Each is driven to his own silence, whole and complete. Henderson imagines Sgt. Reyes still on point somewhere in the storm, moving forward, and hears the pop pop of small arms fire from a squad in the distance. Now Sgt. Gould, the last man Henderson can see—though he’s only a form in the wind and sand blowing over now, more shadow and movement than man or a soldier named Gould with a family, someone from Rhode Island, no, nothing more, a blur—is running off sideways along the shear of the wind into the sound of gunfire. Something breaks inside. In some essential place of order far deeper than the architecture of the brain, the body discovers its rope-held panic and cuts it loose. Henderson’s legs stumble forward until the dune gives way, and he tumbles in the swirling dust the way a man might fall to the very bottom of his life, the carbine torn from his firing hand, coughing as he falls and spins and twists before slamming against another body slumped on the low ground. Half-buried in the sand beside him, the body is curled up on itself. When Henderson pushes him over, he discovers it’s the radioman, Griggs. A red chem-light in his left hand signals a world that only recognizes a man when it breaks him down to his most elemental form, though Griggs would never have thought of it that way. Griggs would most likely have said something like “Oh, fuck” or “I goddamned thought so.” No matter. He speaks the grammar of sand now, Henderson thinks, and the wind will break him down to dust.
* * *
The sand buries the moonlight.
Henderson sits in the darkness with his back curved against the inexorable. And as the sand gathers around him, he thinks the world feeds on us all. This thought surprises him. He doesn’t know where it came from, but as he sits hunched over, th
e wind and sand shape a dune around him, a transient barchan moon. He takes off his helmet, sets it in his lap. It is a bowl of shadow, filling with the inscrutable world.
He thinks of home, of Anna, of sand pouring in their bedroom window. The slow tide of it all pours in, wave by wave, as the ceiling fan spirals a thin cloud of dust over her. The painted lines on the streets outside begin to disappear. Streetlights dim and go dark. Anna calls out to him in her sleep.
As the wind picks up around him, he opens the door and walks into his home. He snaps a chem-light, which is like holding the last cold remains of a fire, holding it out and away from his body. Anna sleeps in the wreckage, sand erasing her image in the far mirror. Henderson traces her body in the soft light. Sand sparkles red on her eyelashes and the fine soft edges of her lips. He touches her face, but he cannot wake her, and she cannot hear him when he says her name. He can only watch as her features, yielding, disappear beneath the gathering dune of their bed.
Henderson cups his hands over his face to block out the dust.
He remembers a time from twenty years back, when he was just a kid. Poolside. An apartment complex. Summer smoke and distant helicopters. Laughter. His bare feet on the curving concrete lip of the pool as old man Kelman startled him with what he must have thought was a playful gesture. And Henderson, not knowing how to swim, fell backward wheeling in slow motion. The old man had turned away, not recognizing how the cool waters of the deep end displaced Henderson’s small frame before curling back over to push him down, as deep into that blue and unlivable world as his body could go.
5
THE TRAIN
Mariette Kalinowski
ON BAD DAYS SHE RIDES THE SUBWAY. She knows the bad days from the somewhat OK days by the tightness that inches slowly across her skin. On bad days the tightness overwhelms her and forces her onto the 7 line, its simple out-and-back path through Queens soothing her a little. Riding back and forth on the train gives her time to think. Watching the western skyline of Queens backed by Manhattan gives her a swinging backdrop to the narrative of her memories. One trip between Times Square and Flushing averages forty minutes. About five months ago, on one of her worst days yet, she rode back and forth thirteen times, before the claustrophobic press of rush hour forced her off. She watches buildings and neighborhoods flow past the window first one way then the other. The blur of outlines and colors soothes her, hypnotizing in a way that numbs whatever follows the constriction and headaches. The tightness announces the flood, those images and emotions lurking beneath the surface of everyday life, the soft buzz from a mistuned radio. A normal day is when she can make it through class and work, but when the tightness comes on, she knows it’s not going to be a normal day.
Today, she’s on her way to Penn Station to meet her mom for a long trip north to Vermont. It was her mom who decided they would take this trip, a month away from the city. She decided that the two of them should spend a month together at the house, hiking and swimming and “catching up, just us girls.”
“It’ll be good for you, honey,” she’d said. “You’re so alone in the city, and I’m worried about you. You need fresh air.”
Ten hours on Amtrak to the small town where her mom has a summer home, a barn-like house built in that odd Vermont continuous manner, with one room followed by another and unexpected doors and thresholds appearing out of the shadows drawing a person through the house, floating along without wanting to. She drifted along whenever she was in that house, the rooms choosing her direction for her. She had spent most of her time drifting through the house that last summer before boot camp. Her memory of that summer, hazy in the same way the dust rolled in over the base and made her feel like a goldfish trapped in a bowl, everything looking curved and surreal. She had wanted to go to her bedroom but found herself in the short entryway instead, looking at family photos and small landscapes bought in local shops. The crumbling scent of dried flowers hung around her as the air shifted with her movements. The house was deserted most of the year, cleaned every three months by a woman for hire. Only their possessions there proved that they visited, no other lasting mark. She touched her fingertips gently to the bottom of one of the photographs, a bright fiery orange one, her and her mom shadows against a campfire. If another person ever came through the front door, if they took the time to look at the pictures in their frames, hold their nose close and take in the details, the swirled marks of her prints would distract the eye away from the captured intensity of the flames.
Outside, on the single concrete step, she leaned against the front door and tried to remember why she was there. A smudge of blue flannel caught her eye. She saw her mother standing in the old cornfield. She walked slowly across the field to join her mother, stumbling over the rough earth. With each step she expected her mother to turn around, to wave and smile like she always did, but she remained where she was, staring at something at her feet. Even when she scuffed to a stop next to her, she didn’t move.
There was a dead bird on the ground. She wanted to say something to her mom, but kept her mouth shut at the look on her face. The bird lay on its back, its wings gently spread and feet curled up to its belly, looking for all the world as if it had simply fallen out of the sky, body frozen midflight. A few wing feathers shivered in the breeze, a line of ants moved around the beak and open, staring eyes. Her younger self tried hard to understand why the death-eyes of the bird felt so familiar. She tried to remember where she’d seen them before. And then her older self remembered for her: eyes staring up into the cloudy Iraqi sky and a body so still and she wishing and wishing that the eyes would blink and the mouth say “Gotcha.” There wasn’t a single hole or mark on the bird. She couldn’t figure out what kind it was; something about the size of a cardinal but dark brown and speckled all over. She imagined it flying some great distance, maybe from the top of Canada, south along the curve of the earth and looking down at the shifting landscape below. The methodical beat of its wings leveraging against the wind, gravity, matching the beat of its heart, maybe became too much. The small, gradual movement along its path too tiring and it simply gave up, let its wings go slack and tumbled to the ground.
Her mother spun to face her. Her eyes were big, scared. “I don’t know how to—” she choked out. She didn’t finish. Instead, she turned away and crossed back to the house, staring at the ground.
She was the one who buried the bird; she carried the bird before her, the dark body on the spade of the old shovel she leveled in front of her body, feeling the rough wood and splinters digging into her hands. She couldn’t not look at the bird as she walked to the tree line. Her short steps across the fallow field and the shovel swinging slightly with the shift of her hips. Her mother should be with her (she was probably watching from a window) to hug her shoulders and finish what she had started to say. An unfinished sentence. An unfinished migration. She kicked the bird into the shallow hole with her toe and packed dirt over it. Even after so many years she could still feel the soil beneath her foot as she tamped it down. A soft giving beneath the shovel that had the hollow sound of the rusty steel. She wonders what that would sound like from below, from beneath the soil. So often she’s thought about it: death. So often the idea fills her head while she’s awake that she hardly remembers anything else. Expansion of that single thought until there is no room for others and she is fastened onto the idea of being down, beneath. To be underground. To be where Kavanagh was.
She’d been away from Vermont for so long. So much had happened since she’d left. Going back meant catching up with her mom. Catching up meant talking about the four years she had been away—away from Vermont and away from the city—and the two times she’d gone overseas. But open air is always too open. She recalled the spinning dizziness of the desert on a clear, bright day, a vertigo growing deep behind her forehead, standing on the flat-packed sand in the middle of nowhere and feeling like she was the epicenter of the earth’s rotation. On those days she felt like a figure skater: extending her a
rms would slow the spin and manage the dizziness, while pulling her arms close would spin her faster, faster until her body pulled apart.
The train lurches along a curve in Long Island City and the centrifugal force pushes her gently into her seat. She remembers how Vermont feels in the summer, the days cool, the noise of the cicadas high, and she and her mom sitting on the screened-in porch to watch the thunder clouds roll in over the mountains.
Remembering that last summer in Vermont, the dead bird, was so simple for her, just a mere flick of her thoughts and she was back there floating through the last real part of her life. The last solid part of her before the edges of her experience faded into that questionable fogginess of memory, that state in which a person could no longer be sure that what they recalled was true, or even their own. At times, when she was consumed by the tightness of Iraq and barely conscious on the train, she wondered if what she was feeling was even her own, as though she were living someone else’s memories, transforming into another person. The tightness could be a metamorphosis, a twisting and reshaping of her body from the inside out until one morning she would walk past the vanity in her bathroom and not recognize the face reflecting back. She wants so badly to remember everything about that day, some clear part of that memory that stands out in a clear way, a part that she can call true. Too much of what she recalls feels false somehow, fabricated or drawn from some other part of her mind. She remembers the cold winter wind blowing unhindered across the open desert and feels her skin erupt in goosebumps as the memory makes her shiver, even in the dead of summer. But everything else about that day seems misplaced, drawn from every other day she spent in Iraq. Every recollection spins together flashes from every part of her tour, flashes of hajjis lining up to be frisked at the ECP, the world swept away beneath a roiling red cloud of sand, the staccato of an M16 firing or the distant thoomp of artillery firing that is felt deep in the chest more than heard. Frozen, each of these images floating across her memory, photographs that confuse the true progression of events. Reality on that day couldn’t be trusted, because she was no longer sure which parts should be kept, which discarded. There was very little variation from one day to the next. Wake up, shuffle across the chilled sand in her shower shoes to the head. Grains of sand slipping under her toes and caking around the drain of the shower. In the mornings she was often the only one awake. She enjoyed the quiet and stillness, the vast purple sky with stars just before the sun rose, because it was the calmest part of her days. Nothing to worry about, yet. Every day filled with the crouching and clutching at bunches of clothing. Frowning and snapping at women to stand still, stop talking while she manipulated the fabric of hijabs and chardors, feeling through linen along the braids in their hair and beneath their breasts for weapons or bombs.
Fire and Forget Page 7
