by Ronald Malfi
It was a slow, tedious campaign. Typically, the high road found Nick and one or two other men moving up, flank-side, searching for dens of insurgents. High roads were particularly dangerous. This part of the city had not evacuated, even after all the damage caused by the battle between insurgents and the Marines. There were still families here—still dirty children in filthy, faded clothing in the streets. Many houses had been reduced to rubble; dead animals, mostly dogs and goats, were landmarks throughout the hike toward the center of the village. On occasion, a few brave boys from the village would, with surprising little trepidation, approach the men, large, dark eyes with thick, full lashes powdered with debris, their hair filthy with the accumulation of so much dust and dirt and garbage and ruin. Many of the soldiers would ignore them; a few others would occasionally flick a hand at them, warding them off before they got too close. Karuptka would shoo them away like cats around a heap of garbage, baring his teeth behind lifted lips and dark, purple gums.
Nick saw her first. He saw her ahead of them—saw her emerge directly from a rundown hovel and hasten to articulate through the solid mass of crumbled debris that littered the gutters and side-streets. He watched her approach, a frantic look on her face (what he could see of her face, anyway, masked behind a partially shorn-away burka), and right away he knew this would not be good—that any one of these natives moving so quickly with any such look on their face could not be a good thing. He could see no weapons on her, but that did not discount the very real possibility that she could have explosives strapped to her body beneath her burka.
“You seeing this?” Nick said quickly to Hidenfelter, who stood directly to his right. “Lady! Lady!” Of course, it was useless to try and communicate with any of them. Even Myles Granger, who could speak the language, was useless here for the most part. They saw your uniforms and saw your Western eyes, Western face, Western nose and mouth and skin, and it did not matter what language you spoke, because to them, all Americans were the same breed of foreigner, bringing guns and ammunition and tanks and fighters into their cities and streets.
The woman did not even seem to hear or see either him or Hidenfelter; she continued moving past them along the side of the street. A few other women from the village, equally agitated but slightly more composed, attempted to wrangle her back out of the street and away from the marching soldiers, but this lone woman would not listen. She was bent on something—bent on moving forward, bent on completing her task, whatever that task might be. She continued down the length of the guttered street, her fast moving feet kicking up and stirring the smells of the dead and swollen and bloated things in the rubble. Then, at one point, as they continued to march on, she paused and began crying in hysterics. The men all kept a cautious, distrustful eye on her, though many tried not to make it so obvious. They just all continued to move along. The woman’s moans could be heard over anything else, even their footfalls, crunching the ancient powder in the streets of this holy land ravaged by war. Brazen, uninhibited, the woman actually reached out for one of the men. Nick and Oris Hidenfelter turned, their guns leveled on her. The man—an Italian kid named Angelino—pulled his arm away from her, his face white and emotionless beneath his pitted helmet. But the woman would not relent: she cried out to Angelino, who refused to acknowledge her beyond that single rejection of his arm (though it was clear, very clear, that her moans hurt him and maybe even confused him a little, too). Myles Granger moved past her next; again, she reached out, pleadingly, sobbing while two other masked women appeared behind her and at her shoulders, holding her back. Another woman, too afraid to step into the street so close to them, cried out angrily, rattling off a series of nonsensical gibberish. They were angry; they were frightened.
“Get her out of here!” Nick yelled back to them. He had paused in his stride and stood, waving a single arm at the men. “Angelino! Bowerman! Get her the hell out of the street!”
The woman grabbed Myles Granger’s arm, and the boy froze. The strap of his rifle slid slightly down the length of his shoulder. He stared at the woman, who cried inches from his face. She was not speaking words—not really, not at first—and Granger looked like he could not move. He looked frightened.
“Get her away!” Nick shouted, now moving back through the men. His gun was still on the woman.
“Out!” Angelino yelled at the woman. “Leave!”
Still holding onto Myles Granger’s arm, the woman cried something—moaned something—sobbed something at him. She spoke to him. There was a sense of urgent begging in her voice, emphasized by the sincerity of a hand placed first above her heart, then gradually sliding down to the center of her belly, her gut, her soul.
“Out!” Angelino yelled, pointing his rifle at the woman.
“Ma’am,” pleaded Bowerman. “Ma’am, please, you need to get back up there and out of the street.” He sounded like a crossing guard his first day on the job. “Ma’am, please…”
Nick approached and wrapped fingers around the woman’s wrist. With a tug he managed to pull her off Myles Granger. The amputation seemed to jerk Granger back into reality: he stumbled backward, and would have lost his balance had Bowerman not been right behind him to catch him around the shoulder.
“Back,” Nick told the woman, illustrating with his hands that he wanted them all out of the street. “Back.”
“You okay, Granger?” Bowerman asked the kid.
Granger nodded, though he still looked green. He was still staring at the woman. She, in return, was still staring at him.
“Shoot the bitch!” Karuptka shrilled from across the street.
“Granger,” Bowerman was saying. “Granger, man—you okay?”
“Yeah,” Myles Granger finally managed.
“Look at me, bro.”
“Yeah…”
“Look at me,” Bowerman repeated.
Myles Granger looked at Bowerman. Nick looked, too. For a moment, it looked as though nineteen-year-old Myles Granger was going to collapse into tears. Then, equally surprising, the kid started to laugh. Uncontrollably, he started to laugh—a deep belly-laugh.
“All right, come on,” Nick said. The woman had receded out of the street; she stood now surrounded by a corral of other robed women, watching the men in the street like deities about to pass judgment. “Come on, guys.”
“Shoot the bitch,” Karuptka snarled again, his voice lower and tinged with a bitter twist of humor now.
“Cool it, Vic.” Nick nodded at Myles Granger. “You okay?”
“Yeah, Lieutenant. Yeah.”
But Myles Granger was not all right. Something inside him had been knocked funny by that woman, and nothing was all right. He spent the rest of the afternoon in an unnerving, reflective haze, his eyes always just slightly out of focus. By dusk of that same day, they had established camp within the protective embrace of what structures remained standing just outside the city’s marketplace. Sporadic radio transmissions warned of gunfire less than a half-mile from where they now camped, on the other side of the market square. Their packs off, he watched Granger for a few moments as the kid stood aloof and apart from the others, staring off into the distance. He went to Granger, smoking a hand-rolled cigarillo, and paused beside him.
“Looking at anything in particular?”
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” Myles Granger said. It was an utterance—hardly a voice. He seemed embarrassed, caught off-guard.
“Why don’t you stick around here with the others,” he told Granger, and ambled back toward camp where he bedded down beside Bowerman and tried not to smell the grease and fuel burning.
Come morning, they were ready to cross the marketplace. The men were ready. Karuptka was bulletproof, his face a patchwork of pale and pasty leukoderma and deep brown sun-poisoned turrets. Angelino’s eyes were squinty but watchful, creased at their corners like folded newspapers.
“Granger,” he said. He had to say his name twice. “You awake?”
Granger had been staring off into space. At the
second call of his voice, the kid snapped his head up and looked temporarily startled.
“Get up, kid,” Nick said.
Myles Granger didn’t say much of anything. He simply stood, strapped on his gear, shouldered his M-16, and looked as though he were in the process of being swallowed alive by his helmet.
“Walk with me for two seconds,” Nick said, hanging back until Granger looked sturdy enough to take a step.
“What’s up, Lieutenant?”
“What’s with you?”
“Sir…?”
“What the hell happened to you, man?”
“Nothing, sir…”
“You feeling okay?”
“Sure.”
“Because I really need you to feel okay. You got me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All these guys, they need you to feel okay.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You got something on your mind? Something bothering you?”
In the split second before the kid answered, he could tell that yes, something was bothering young Myles Granger very much. “No, sir,” Myles Granger lied. “I’m fine, sir.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Turning away from the kid, Nick shook a cigarette out of his pack and held it out toward him. “Smoke this,” he told Granger, “and try to get a grip.”
Smirking, once again embarrassed, his head tilted down, Myles Granger pulled a cigarette from the pack and poked it between his thin, white lips. “Yeah,” the kid said. “Thanks.”
In less than an hour, all but two of them would be dead.
—Chapter XIX—
The shimmer of light…
A voice in his ear: “Usted se despierta de la muerte.”
Slowly, his eyelids unstuck and slid open. The world was vibrating beneath him. His flesh was clammy; he felt both sweaty and frozen simultaneously, and overall sick to his stomach. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he made out the shape of a figure directly opposite him, standing against the wall. The figure radiated light. It was a ghost, an angel.
He waited for his mind to thaw, to catch up.
Across the room and against the wall: it was himself.
“My Nicholas,” a female voice spoke up. It was not Emma. He couldn’t remember anything. And he did not trust his memory enough to believe anything he could remember, anyway. He stopped trying.
“Where am—” he began. Winced. There was construction work, heavy drilling, rattling off in his head.
“Limbo,” she said. Though invisible to him for the moment, he could tell her full lips were turned up in a smile. He could almost smell her body, too, the scent coming in invisible, undulating waves. It was impossible to tell where she was in the room.
Naked, he was on a bed. There was a dull, aching throb running the length of his right arm. He tried hard not to think about it.
Isabella floated toward him straight out of the darkness. As she had been on the night he’d come to her room to paint her portrait, she was wearing only the white terrycloth robe from the hotel bathroom, wrapped loosely around her brown-black body. An embroidered script P covered the right breast. In the lightlessness, her face possessed the nontextured, non-blemished contours of a Greek bust. Reality began to slide back into place…
“We’re in your room,” he managed, and just talking inaugurated a fault-line crack that split down the center of his brain and continued up and over and down the back of his head. The tremor settled at the base of his skull, where his head met his neck, and seemed to expand in a soundless burst of white fire. Rockets went off behind his eyes. Still, despite the agony, he spoke again: “We’re back at the hotel.” In his stupor, he found it impossible to inflect his voice to make his sentences sound appropriately like questions.
“There is some water beside the bed,” she said. “Drink it. You are dehydrated.” She did not approach him, as he had anticipated; rather, she went into the adjacent bathroom, the naked soles of her feet padding whisperingly on the linoleum tiles. No light was turned on but he soon heard the soft run of water at the sink.
He reached for the glass of water on the nightstand with his right hand. The slight movement and extension of his arm quickly made clear to him the tremendous amount of pain that had been waiting in dormancy. He could not grasp the glass. He could do nothing, it seemed, but gently rest his arm back down on the bed.
“My arm,” he heard himself say. Even speaking, he did not know if he was doing it for Isabella’s sake or for his own. “Shit.”
Gathering sheets about his waist with his one good hand, sitting up carefully (and sending the world on a tilt once more), he stared ahead at the glowing figure that was his identical twin on the opposite wall. It was a photograph, he saw, projected from a small unit on the desk at the other end of the room: a slide projector. It took him a few seconds to place the photograph—but then he remembered: it was the picture Isabella had taken of him that night at the Club Potemkin as he gathered for her Goat-Man Claxton’s used joints from the bandstand, his left hand lifted to block the flash from his eyes. It was not possible to make out his face.
A moment later, smelling like sea salt and the deeper, headier aroma of female, Isabella returned and sat very close to him on the side of the bed. Without a word, she kissed the side of his face. Something stirred within him.
“Here,” she told him. “Lay out your hand.”
He did.
“No,” she corrected, “your other hand. Your injured hand.”
“It’s stiff.”
“It hurts, yes,” she said.
“Stiff.” It was his turn to correct.
“Lay it out, whatever it is.” She placed a pillow across her lap and patted it with some affection. Held in one of her hands was a tight wrap of bandage.
Carefully, slowly, he extended his ruined right arm and held it out straight on the bed until the feeling rushed back to his fingertips. Then he lifted it and brought it down squarely on the pillow in Isabella’s lap. The bandage unraveled itself in the darkness and Isabella began to dress his arm. The act was done with care and precision, an attribute Nick would have previously thought alien to her. As his eyes grew accustomed to the lightlessness, he watched her dress his arm. The bandage came up and around, up and around. The tightness of the wrap caused the tips of his fingers to tingle. Certain places hurt worse than others. He forced himself to talk while she worked; otherwise, at integral moments, he would have bitten through his tongue and ground his teeth into powder.
“Did we have sex?” he asked.
“No.”
“We didn’t?”
“No.”
“My clothes…”
“Are in the bathtub. You were filthy from sliding down the hill.”
“Sliding—?”
“You fell and slid down a hill in the mud, just outside the hotel.”
“Well, then your clothes…”
“Isn’t this my own room? I would think I could dress as I choose.”
He nodded. Felt weak. “All right.”
“Stop moving the arm.”
There was no appropriate discussion for such a scenario. He did not bother. Instead, he turned away and faced his illuminated photograph that covered half the far wall. For now, for the moment, he did not want to think about anything—anything at all—and that worked out just perfectly, because he found it impossible to summon even a single coherent, linear thought. For what time remained in the dressing of his arm, he found some solace in the focusing of his name, his first name, just the four letters of its abbreviated form, wavering and ephemeral in his mind. The more he stared at his name the less it was a name and the more it became just four letters. And the more he stared at those four letters, the more they became symbols, odd symbols, hieroglyphics in the soup of his mind. He willed them to sink—and they did, individually and in their own time, deep and slow beneath the murk of his subconscious. Never did he realize how truly easy it was to drown one’s own self.
>
“There,” she said. “Done.”
Hoisting his arm from the pillow, he could feel the tightness of the bandage. It was keeping his arm together. The last time he had worn a bandage had been after the surgeries, and its purpose had been the same back then: to keep him together.
“Thank you,” he said.
“De nada, my Nicholas.”
“I’m sorry about tonight,” he said.
She ran a hand down his bare, sweaty back. “For what, mi novio?”
“I have to get up,” he said, pulling the sheets deeper into the fold of his lap. Isabella was sitting on some and he couldn’t pull them out from under her.
“You are like a ghost,” she said to him, “sitting here.”
“How do you mean?”
She said, “White, pale, unsure where you’ll be from one moment to the next.”
“Lost, you mean.”
“Yes,” she said. “That is good. That is what I mean exactly.” She said, “Lost.”
“You really hurt that guy tonight, I think.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“Isabella, I think I need to leave.”
“This world?”
“This room.”
“You think too much, is what I think,” she told him. “Not everything is so cerebral. You should be more of an artist in your heart, Nicholas, like you are with your hands. An artist, my Nicholas, would be a good thing for you to be. Otherwise, you are a fool. Could you try not to be that much of a fool?”
“I have no intention of falling in love with you, if that’s where this is going.” Yet he did not know where such words had come from.
Smiling, she shook her head. She, it was suddenly very clear, was the one who had no intention of falling in love. Of falling in anything.
“I know that, Nicholas. You are here, now, with me, because you found you can be. Very simple, no? It seems very sad and very hard on the surface, but after it is done, it is very simple.”
And this was true, he knew. The hardest thing to do was kill one man. But after that one man, how easy was it to kill fifty?