by Ronald Malfi
Nick knew it, as well. You died a long time ago, before you ever pulled on your cargo pants or strapped your rifle over your shoulder; you checked out, bought the farm, long before you ever started out overseas. Knowing this made it easier to move along and to function and to follow things through, because when you physically died, it no longer mattered as much, as you were already dead, and your spirit was already dead…or at least you had come to terms with death as a possibility, a reality. This made survival less of a chore. You made your peace with it that way, too, Nick had come to understand. You made your peace with it long before you were ever truly confronted by it.
He tested the water in the shower. It would not get warm. Touching it brought gooseflesh to his arms.
He recalled the face of the man he’d mistaken for Myles Granger at the Club Potemkin earlier that evening. And in recalling that face, his mind summoned the real face of Myles Granger, and of all the men from the platoon. A reconnaissance mission, they’d hit the village close to dawn and spent most of the day in a confusion of cold steel and white flame. He could not remember any order to it—his memory of Iraq was provided to him now in only brief, snapshot images and disjointed conversations despite the frightening clarity of all he did remember. Everything in his mind floated disembodied and unanchored to anything else; it was like thumbing through a history textbook and stopping to read every twentieth page. He recalled Karuptka lighting a cigarillo with a silver Zippo, his fingers brown with mercurochrome. He remembered, also, Bowerman stretching his calves on a pile of debris, his boots initiating little avalanches of stone while he moaned about the heat. At his feet, the pages of a thick paperback novel rifled in the wind. He remembered Myles Granger looking too young and wet and nervous and sickly—what they all called a “cherry”—and Oris Hidenfelter standing beside him, mumbling, “I’m counting four…five…six,” his lower lip starting to quiver, “you can tell by the shots, and the way the smoke rises,” and no one was really listening to him because they’d all had enough for the moment, “five…definitely five, six…”—and even Hidenfelter had had enough but he could not help himself and he could not stop. “I was always shitty at math, but out here, I mean, you start counting an’ hell if you can stop,” he rambled, “and wouldn’t you goddamn know it, but I’ve gotten to be pretty damn good at math, counting and math, just, you know, keeping track of numbers and all.” Someone else got tired of him counting and said it was bullshit, that you couldn’t tell by the shots, no one could tell by counting the goddamn shots, and then Hidenfelter had become suddenly somber and said no more.
When they slept, they all dreamed of creeping silhouettes with machine gun profiles slipping silently along stone walls. Often before bed there was aggression amongst them, but not directed at each other. Karuptka said they were fooling around, that the whole goddamn United States was fooling around, and what was so complicated? “We move into Afghanistan and take over Afghanistan,” he would say, “run the goddamn place like a Jiffy Lube, turn it into goddamn Disney World, build a frigging monument to the Trade Center right in Kabul, right in the goddamn middle of the city, and then you tell our new neighbors if you give us any shit, any lip, we’re comin’ in and sucking your goddamn oil fields dry. That’s it.”
The world wasn’t as simple as some of the men made it sound, Nick knew, but sometimes the glory of their intentions was enough to keep up morale. Yet, now, he found he could not remember full conversations…just nonsensical blips, bits and pieces, floating eternal in his mind…
What’s up, old dog? Come for a visit?
How’s your foot?
Still there. Toe’s intact, too. Good thing. I like my toes.
I think I’ve dreamt of this place.
Oh, yeah?
At least…I think so. You know that feeling?
Like you’ve been somewhere before?
No, no—like you’re destined to go back again.
He remembered things, some things. Vaguely, he remembered someone talking about a whorehouse called the Leaky Dozen, and how they had all laughed at that. Or had that been the punchline to some joke he could no longer remember? Shit. Anyway, what did it matter now?
They were all dead.
—Chapter IX—
It was the first nice day since the storm, so they ate lunch outside by the pools.
“I won last night,” Emma said.
“Won what?”
“The contest. The limbo.”
“Is that right?”
“You should have seen how I bent,” she said. “I managed to get real close to the floor and pulled myself all the way back. I never once had to use my hands. It was me and one other woman left at the end and I thought she was going to win. I think I would have liked her to win. She was very pretty. And she could bend. She didn’t even come close to using her hands, and I had come close twice, but I never used my hands, either. But she went right after me and she couldn’t bend as far back, and she fell. She fell right on her back and she started to cry a little, I think, and then she started to laugh. Then everyone else laughed with her. I think some of them thought it was funny the way she fell, but I think most of them laughed to help keep her happy about it all. I think she might have been very drunk.”
“What did you win?”
“Limbo,” she said. “Just like I said.”
He shook his head. “No—I mean, what prize did you win? Didn’t you win a prize?”
“Oh,” she said, “yes.” And she suddenly seemed very upset.
“What’s wrong?”
“I thought you were asking what—” She turned away from him then, quickly, making the hair tucked behind her ears come loose. She looked out over the pools. Her lips took turns overlapping each other, running over each other. Small mouth. Nick thought he saw her eyes fill up with tears.
“What?” he said again.
“Nothing. Never mind.”
He looked away from her. He did not need to continue looking at her. Also, he did not need to ask her what was wrong. He knew what she was thinking. They had always known what each other was thinking; until the island, until the honeymoon, they had never misunderstood each other.
Until the misalliance, Nick thought.
Emma laughed sharply. She swiped the heel of one hand alternately across both her eyes and turned back to him, startlingly refreshed.
“A parrot,” she said. She was suddenly a completely different person, determined not to be bested by her own emotions. Forced a smile; forced a look. “I won a parrot.”
“Seriously? A real parrot?”
“A bright red one. It was very big. It was in a big brass cage, too, the shape of a bell.”
“They gave you a parrot?”
“A red one.”
“Yes?”
“The reddest red you’ve ever seen.”
“Well where is it now?”
“I gave it to your friend the bell captain. I didn’t want to bring it into the room. It smelled very strongly and I didn’t want to bother you with the smell.”
“A parrot,” he said. “That’s something.”
“It certainly is.”
They were drinking demitasse and splitting a crumbly pie with fruity innards. The weather was warming up but the pools were still empty. Occasionally, a few hotel patrons would stumble out onto the patio, wander around aimlessly for several moments before realizing they did not want to remain outside in the warming, odd, humid air, then disappear back inside the hotel. Nick had counted four couples and one man, all alone in Bermuda shorts and knee socks with sandals, in the time he and Emma had been out here eating.
“Your painting went all right this morning?”
He lifted one shoulder, rolled it, and did not look her in the eye and did not verbally respond. He’d painted this morning—very early this morning—and the colors had all seemed foreign to him. Nothing made sense. And for the first time, he caught himself painting beyond the sketch—painting things that he had not planned,
had not mapped out, had not drawn beforehand. Such was not the way. He found himself painting an enormous stone wall around the courtyard, and even before he completed it he knew it was very much out of place. It did not fit. Still, he painted it, and its painting consumed him. He painted the wall and allowed the wall, after some time, to dip down into a steep valley, not of green grass and cobblestone walkways, but of dehydrated desert dunes, camel-hued and corrugated with windswept ribs of sand. Almost in a state of catatonia, he had painted an oasis of desert right in the middle of the lush, green inland. He only stopped once his hand cramped up and he could paint no more.
“You’ve been quiet about it,” she said.
“About what?”
“The painting. The painting of the painting.”
“It’s just become a little hard.”
“I’m sorry.”
He pressed his lips together, said, “It’s nothing you did.”
Emma slid her eyes away, not knowing where to let them settle. Finally, she brought them down to her plate. “The dessert is very good,” Emma said, tapping her fork against the plate.
“Sure.”
She said, “Did you hear about those Chinese divers that drowned over in England?”
“No,” he said.
“There were about seventeen of them, I think. They were diving for cockles, working for a pound a day. Not a pound of cockles, I mean,” she clarified, “but, like, a British pound. You know—money.”
She was trying very hard, Nick could tell.
“I understand,” he said.
“Is that cheap?”
“What? A pound? It’s not a lot of money, no.”
“How much is it in dollars?”
“Not sure,” he said. “Maybe like two.”
“Two dollars?”
“I think so.”
“That’s it? That’s not very much at all.”
“It’s not,” he agreed.
“But you’ve never been to England.”
“That’s right.”
“So then how do you know about the pounds and the dollars?”
“I must have read about it somewhere, I guess.”
“I don’t even know what cockles are,” Emma said.
“Shellfish,” he told her.
“Really? Is that all? I thought it was…I don’t know…something better. To die for, I mean. To risk your life like that, to die for it like that, I would think that it would be for something worthwhile.”
“Just shellfish.”
He could tell she did not want to continue talking about the seventeen dead Chinese divers, and he did not want to hear anything more about them, either, but there seemed some ounce of safety in continuing to talk about them.
Emma said, “Well, they were out collecting cockles, and then it got too late in the day and the tide came in and they all drowned. I think they were on a sandbar off the coast. I think they had walked to the sandbar earlier in the day, when the water between the sandbar and the coast was shallow enough for them to walk it. But when the tide came in—and maybe they had lost track of time—but when the tide came in, the sandbar was submerged and they could not walk back and it was too far to swim, and so they all drowned.” Her eyes were suddenly heavy on him. “You didn’t hear about that, Nick? Those Chinese divers?”
Again, he told her no.
“It’s been on the news all morning, and it was even in the newspapers. I put the newspaper on the nightstand for you this morning. Did you see it?”
“Yes. But I didn’t read it.”
“Oh,” she said. “Cockles. Cockle-shells.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Imagine,” she said, “dying over shellfish.”
“Yes.”
“The damn waiter,” she said abruptly, looking around the patio. They were still the only two souls in existence. “Do you want more demitasse?”
“Do you?”
“I think so. I’ll get some.”
She stood and Nick watched her walk across the patio. He saw her reflection move swiftly across the surface of the pools before she vanished inside the hotel. The way she walked summoned the image of her from when they had first started seeing each other—back before his deployment when they had been in the early stages of falling in love. He had taught her to drive the Impala through a wooded Pennsylvania back-road. He had anticipated hesitance and fearfulness on her part, but she had taken to the vehicle quickly and adeptly, surprising them both. She took them down the wooded back-road and into an open dirt field. She’d asked if it mattered that the dirt got on the chrome and the dust got into the car, and that had made him laugh. No, he had told her, it didn’t matter. And he’d meant it. Then, at that moment, at that time, she was the only thing that mattered. Her hair had been longer then, and with the windows down it streamed about her face. Dust had made her skin bronze. He remembered watching her while she drove, and knowing so soon that he loved her, and how goddamn lucky was he that he loved her? And how goddamn lucky was he that she might some day love him back? Already in his mid-twenties, he had been in love twice before, or so he had duped himself into believing at the time. Fleeting, universal things. But in the face of this new love, this power, stupid in the face of its complexity and weakened by the tidal wave of it, he had become uncertain as to what it all had been in the past. Suddenly and from nowhere he did not understand anything that came before her. Ever. What was true? What was wrong? Could anyone be certain about anything? Abrupt as a kick to the shin, this young woman had, from nothing, made him suddenly and unceremoniously doubt his own certainty concerning all he had been previously so sure about. What was certainty? Nothing—it was nothing. And maybe that was the way it was intended to be. He didn’t know. He was a fool, really—a child. What did he know? Life was a country with many hills.
A cool breeze brought him back to reality.
Carrying a fresh carafe of demitasse, Emma returned. Isabella Rosales walked beside her, wrapped in a floral sarong and a flesh-toned bikini top, her skin coffee-colored under the bright sunlight of midday. Her stomach was tight, muscled, and freckled—the color of new copper. Faint blond hairs traced down her abdomen, straight down into the folded dip of her floral sarong. Her belly button was a winking eye. She carried with her a small camera with a detachable lens. Emma set the carafe on the table but did not sit. Nick watched steam curl from the spout of the carafe. There were only the two chairs, his currently occupied, and it looked as though Emma might offer her chair to Isabella. It seemed to remain unoccupied for an eternity.
“Nicholas,” Isabella said, smiling. “How’ve you been?”
“Fine. Good to see you.”
“You two are always so handsome together,” she said, and motioned for Emma to sit. “It is so refreshing to always run into you both,” she went on, and Nick felt that she was being deliberately vague in her speech. Even her eyes refused to light on him and remain for any significant length of time. Had she mentioned to Emma that he had been out with her last night? He didn’t think so…
“We can get another chair, if you’d like to sit,” Emma said. “We’ve got fresh coffee, too.”
“Thank you, but no. I’ve planned to be out and about the island this afternoon. I’m going to take pictures of the storm’s aftermath. I’ve been told that just south of here, many of the small houses were destroyed by the storm.”
“That’s horrible,” Emma said.
“The camera finds it beautiful,” Isabella said. “The camera also finds you both beautiful.” Without hesitation, she brought the camera to her face, the detachable lens now pointing at him, at Emma. “May I? For a souvenir.” And she laughed. “A souvenir for me, I mean.”
“Oh, yes, please,” Emma said, already sliding her chair closer to Nick. “I just wish my hair was in better shape—”
“I have never seen a more beautiful woman sitting out in the sun,” Isabella retorted, watching them through the lens of the camera. “So beautiful and young. And without
sin. Like a woman, but like a child, too.”