by Ronald Malfi
“I don’t care about the car.”
“Thank you for showering. I deserve it all, I know it, every last little bit, but thank you anyway for showering.”
“Let’s not talk about it now, Emma.”
“We’re in a dream here, for the time we’re here, Nick. Don’t you remember? And I love you so I want you to do whatever you need to do to make us right again. It’s my fault so you need to do what you need to do. But I can’t hear about it and I certainly can’t smell it. Do you understand?”
“Go to sleep,” he told her. Something in him was angered because she wasn’t crying.
“Please,” she said again. Again with that word. “Please.” She said, “Just say it, Nick. Promise it and say it. I need to hear you say it.”
“You’re talking nonsense.”
“I just need to hear you say it.”
“Fine,” he said. “Fine.”
“Promise it.”
“I promise,” he said. “No hearing and no smelling.”
“And you’ll shower?”
“I’ll shower.”
“All the time you’ll shower?”
“There is nothing happening here,” he insisted. “There isn’t an ‘all the time,’ Emma.”
“Just say it, please, Nick. I need to hear it.”
“All the time I’ll shower,” he said.
“All right, Nick.”
“Now go to sleep.”
“All right.”
“And stop all this,” he said.
“What?” she said. “Stop all what?”
“Christ,” he said, but he didn’t know how else to say it. He did not know how to say any of it. He suddenly wished himself far from here, somewhere black and bleak and empty and void of feeling. That place would be his Eden, blessed Eden. He could rest there, not thinking, stupid in his remoteness, for the remainder of his days. He thought, I could shut this off, all of it. I could never think about any of it again, and such not thinking would be welcome, would be terrific. I could fade away into myself, as if drug-induced, and keep fading and falling away so I would never have to think about anything ever again. And wouldn’t that be perfect? He could find it—it was possible: a small, shielded sanctuary inside his own head, where he could regroup and shelter himself and create his own world, and where, in that world, he could make himself come to believe and understand and accept or decline anything the outside world—the real world—provided. Anyone had that power. In your head, he knew, you had complete control over what was real and what was not. You had complete control over what you wanted to believe and what you wanted to designate as a dream and nothing more. In your head, you had the power to alter the reality of the world. If you wanted to fly, you simply told yourself that you could, and although the physical act of flying would never actually take place, it was enough to simply convince yourself—and no one else—that you could.
And that is hiding, he admitted to himself. That is the coward’s way out.
And what are you? intoned some obscure but vaguely familiar head-voice. What are you, Lieutenant? Do you think you are the bravest man in the world? Did you so easily forget what happened over in Iraq? Did you forget about all the dead? Or are you already living inside your own head, already living there right now, hidden like a goddamn coward, altering reality to whichever way best suits your desires? I’m glad you think it is so easy, Lieutenant. But you cannot do that with Emma and you cannot do that with yourself, either.
It was Myles Granger’s voice, he realized.
No, he thought. Stop it.
But there was no stopping his mind—no stopping his thoughts…
He thought about the war and he thought about Myles Granger—dead Myles Granger—and thought that if he could just erase it all, he would be about the happiest man alive.
“Go to sleep,” he heard himself say to Emma. But she had already fallen asleep some time ago, leaving him awake and alone.
—Chapter XII—
With newfound drive, he worked for a long while on the hotel mural the following morning. He’d gotten up early, even before Emma, and upon vacating his room noticed Isabella had left his nylon supplies case just outside his hotel room door. There was a note attached to it, too, but it was written in Spanish and he couldn’t understand any of it. Stuffing the note in his pocket, he carried the supplies downstairs to the lobby and made exquisite love to the mural for the remainder of the morning.
Before meeting Emma for lunch, in a somewhat good mood, he went to the restaurant bar for a beer.
“Do I look different today?” he asked Roger.
“Do you?”
“I think I might feel differently today.”
“A good different or a bad different?”
“I’m hoping a good different. But whatever it is, I’ll take it for now. It just feels so good to get away from myself for a while. Know what I’m talking about?”
“Sure,” Roger said with little emotion.
Conspiratorially, partially grinning, Nick leaned over the bar. “Is something wrong, Roger?”
“No, sir.”
“Are you feeling all right?”
“I feel fine, sir.”
“Then what’s with this ‘sir’ business?”
“Please,” said Roger, nearly bowing away, “I’m busy this afternoon. I don’t mean to be rude…”
“Of course not.”
“Have a good lunch today, sir.” Then quickly: “Nick.”
“All right, Roger. Thanks.”
What the hell? Nick thought.
For lunch, he met Emma outside by the pools. A waiter came only twice—once to take their order and once more to distribute the plates about the table—and they were mostly left to each other’s company.
“It’s such a beautiful day,” Emma said. “What do you think it will be like when the bugs come?”
“The cicadas?”
“Yes, cicadas.” Glancing upward, she said, “I picture swarms of them covering the sky, blotting out the sun, and dropping by the thousands into the sea.”
“Sounds like the Apocalypse.”
“That’s how I am picturing it, yes,” she said.
“I don’t think it will be nearly like that.”
“Don’t you?”
“You’re thinking of locusts, I believe.”
“Oh?”
“And even with locusts, I don’t think it is all truly that bad. Not like, say, how it is in the Bible. And even if it is that bad with locusts, I don’t think that happens in this country. Not like that, anyway.”
“And locusts are different than cicadas?”
“Yes,” he said. “I think they’re very different.”
“Well,” she said, “I’m sort of glad to see them come because I’m interested to see them. But then I’m sort of scared, too, because I think I might be a little afraid of them.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he told her.
They enjoyed a nice lunch of beef carpaccio with arugula and mancheco cheese, two light garden salads with peeled shrimp adorned with a sprinkled sneeze of sunflower seeds, and sipped mimosas from slender flutes. A pot of demitasse had been brought over as well which, between the two of them, was emptied prematurely.
Over on the other side of the pools, something caught Nick’s eye. He looked and saw a young female child in a blue-and-white checkered sundress giggling with her hands up to her face. She appeared to be looking at someone hidden behind the corner of the hotel and out of Nick’s line of sight. The girl dropped her hands and began speaking with whoever stood just beyond. She was too far away for Nick to hear any of her words such as he had heard just the vague titter of her giggling only moments before.
“Are you all right?” Emma said.
Looking at her, he said, “Sure. Why?”
“You seem distracted.” She turned briefly in the direction of the little girl but found no interest there.
“I’m fine,” he said, picking up his coffee
mug and staring at the empty bottom for lack of any other gesture.
“You want more?” she asked him, hefting the carafe. “Well,” she said, “it’s empty. Where is that little waiter, anyway? Did he vanish into smoke?”
“It’s not a big deal,” he told her. “The mimosa is fine.”
“No,” she said. “Every time we eat out here they forget to refill the coffee.”
“They’re busy inside.”
“I’ll get some more coffee.”
“It isn’t necessary.”
“It is,” she said, rising with the carafe and walking back into the hotel.
He watched her walk. When she had gone, he turned his gaze back on the little girl in the blue-and-white checkered sundress. She was young—perhaps five or six—with cream-colored skin and dark, raven-colored hair long and straight down her back. A very pretty little girl, he thought.
Still giggling, she turned and looked at him from across the pools. Uncertain as to his response, he raised a hand and offered a clumsy wave. This made the girl giggle some more. She pointed at him, which caused him to wave further, feeling playful but a bit foolish, too…and then she turned and said something to whoever was hidden on the other side of the hotel. Looking at her invisible friend, the girl began pointing in Nick’s direction. Still talking to the hidden person behind the corner of the hotel, Nick could see she was doing so with some urgency now. As kids will, he supposed. But no—there seemed a bleak desperation in her eyes, and he was suddenly discomforted by her previously innocuous stare when she again turned to look at him. This time, there was a flicker of fear in her eyes, a presentiment of distrust and confusion.
He thought, What the hell?
From behind the hotel ambled a stooped, burka-clad figure, undeniably female despite the amass of robes, with only a narrow panel of brown face and piercing black eyes staring directly at him from within her robes. Nick shuddered and knew immediately that he had seen this woman before—had seen her in the hellish ruins of the outskirts of Fallujah, where she had cried and pleaded and said something—something directly at Myles Granger—in a language Nick himself had not understood. That woman. That little American girl…
He was not in control of himself. That was so clear to him now. How long had he been functioning this way? How long had he been driven to the brink of the ruinous and the fantastic by some unseen and preternatural force? He was powerless to choose his actions, and powerless to choose his feelings, too; like in war, he could not choose his battlefield, could not choose his stance. And now the goddamn war was in his head. He was merely led and thusly functioned, broken, automatic, at a whim, aimless and pitiable. Aimless? Perhaps his aim was predestined after all. Perhaps (it occurred to him) his path had been chosen long before he’d ever appeared as a reddened, blind, squealing infant, wet and sticky from the womb. There was no aimlessness here; no whimsy. Here, in this island purgatory, he was simply going through the motions, and his actions were not his own. He felt dazed, lost, suspended in a colorful animation of wakeful dreamlessness, executing the precarious act of balancing—vertiginously—on the cusp of some undefined void, his entire body frozen at the zenith of his most important hour, hesitant, the physical and mental caesura before the final physical and mental exhalation. It was watching speed freeze. Speed, he thought, as a noun, as time, moving time. Like the biblical wandering through the desert, he could no longer find himself, walking lost and destitute in a Heliopolis mind, scorched by sun and ruined and parched by the unforgiving dry heat.
Looking out across the pools, he saw that both the Islamic woman and the little American girl were gone. And for a split second, he was confused as to what brought him to this point. Where am I? Who am I? What the hell happened to me? But then he remembered it all over again, all of it, and it was abruptly, fiercely too much. All of it was too much…
Women with their memories of their first lovemaking experience, and how many things in their lives inevitably and uncontrollably spiraled further and further away from where they’d always truly wanted to be, with only a few times finding their way back; and men, stupid men, consumed by war, both inward and out, and how there was an underlying sense of hopelessness in the doing and undoing of those very women whom they would both come to love and hate simultaneously. Everyone had their cross to bear. On Christ-less shoulders, Nick had borne his through tumultuous desert landscapes while riding on a confession of faith, and now, here and now, with the undoing of his and Emma’s marital compromise—that traitorous misalliance—he continued to carry that horrid thing through this island paradise façade.
And it is not wholly mine this time. It was not only about the war. It was about Emma, too. She has forced me to carry hers, as well.
He could recall Emma’s small voice, wanting to weep but somehow unable to do so: I can’t live with myself if you don’t know, Nicky. I can’t live with myself if I keep this from you…
And young Myles Granger’s croak: Lieuten—
He felt himself jerk back from the table. His fork clattered to the pavement at his feet. Looking down, he saw his right hand begin to spasm in his lap. He tried to lift it but found that he couldn’t: it no longer belonged to him. Wincing, he forced himself to make a fist. It hurt like hell. Yet he made the fist, and it was with much difficulty, and held it. In his mind, he willed his muscles to relax, willed his arm to cease moving. Stop it, you lousy goddamn bastard. Stop it, or so help me God I will cut you off with a saw. And he could see that as his surprise ending, as the grand finale to this romantic but terminally plagued getaway scenario: back in the room, hearing the slow creak of the bathroom door as Emma catches a glimpse of red splashed along the basin of the sink, reflected in the mirror just above it, while he stands huddled and now abbreviated but free of the torment, the metal glint of flesh-flecked saw teeth on the basin, the saturated cling of bloody hotel towels balled into wet afterbirth—
The arm continued to spasm. Yet he willed it and, after a moment, it was still. His fist remained. He did not even know if he could unclench his fingers. And when he finally did, he saw that his fingernails had cut crescents into the flesh of his hand. His goddamn ruined hand…
By the time Emma returned with a fresh carafe of demitasse, Nick was not feeling well. She set the carafe on the table and felt his brow.
“You’re burning up,” she told him.
“It’s just the heat.”
“It feels like fever.”
“The heat,” he repeated.
The afternoon was mild and cool; the remnants of the storm still hung wet and bleak over the island.
“Maybe you should go up to the room and lay down,” Emma said.
He pushed himself away from the table and balanced, standing, on legs that felt like wet cornstalks.
How did I get here? Who am I and how did I get here?
And another voice, this time not Myles Granger’s—this time completely unrecognizable to him: How the hell should I know?
What should I do?
—Go shit in your hat.
What should I do?
—Go take a flying leap, you piss-scared coward.
What should I do?
—Play possum, why don’t you?
Back up in the room, Emma pulled his shoes off and unrolled his socks from his feet. He climbed into bed and tried not to move after falling back into the pillows. There was no moving now. Emma went directly to the double doors and pushed them wide open. A good, strong breeze filtered into the room. Nick felt his sweaty body break out in gooseflesh.
“How’s that?” Emma said, still standing by the double doors. “I don’t want it to be too much on you.”
“It’s fine,” he said.
She crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at him. He could not meet her gaze. Again, he could hear her voice echoing in his head: I can’t live with myself if you don’t know, Nicky. I can’t live with myself if I keep this from you. Those goddamn words. Why had she felt the n
eed to absolve herself? Why do that to him? Goddamn it, why?
“This is my fault,” she said. She was crying.
“Some of it,” he said.
“I hate this.”
“So do I.”
“Then what do we do?”
He could give her no answer. What answer was there? Then what do we do? He thought, We take it back, that’s what we do. We summon some supernatural powers and go back in time and take it the hell back. Can you do it? Can you do it?
He said, “Let me sleep for a bit.”
She did not say anything. She did not stop crying and did not remove herself from the bed, either.
“Emma,” he began.
She bent and kissed him hard on the mouth. But before he could react at all, she had finished, and was rising from the bed and moving across the room. She picked up one of her poetry books from the desk and pulled half the drapes closed over the patio doors so the cold would not be too unbearable. From seemingly out of nowhere, something about her presence reminded him of their early courtship, before both their relationship and his hand became tainted by the war. It was nothing specific this time, though. Perhaps he had just glimpsed the simplicity that was her, and that he had fell in love with (in a time that now seemed very far away), and it was a powerful and lingering sensation. He tried to recapture it fully then, right then, as he remained unmoving on the bed with his head pressed into the pillows, sweating on himself, his mouth tasting old and bad and sour. He tried to recapture whatever it was that made him recall their uncorrupted time together, but he could not do it quick enough.
She left the room, leaving him alone.
Limbo, he thought, and it was as loud as a gunshot in all that silence. How low can you go?
—Chapter XIII—
He remembered everything about Fallujah. Every detail.
They had seen much fighting. It was not uncommon for the platoon—for any of the platoons—to engage in six, or seven, or eight-hour battles in the tiny villages and outside the mosques. There were four squads split into eight teams. By February, each functioned independently. Nick D’Nofrio, First Lieutenant Platoon Leader, would keep track of the passing hours by watching the drift of shadows across the sand. They were good boys, all of them, the whole sick crew. That was what Oris Hidenfelter dubbed them: the whole sick crew. He carried with him a tattered copy of a Thomas Pynchon novel and it seemed he was always associating or attributing references from the book to the squad and its members.