by Dara Horn
In the dream, it was always the same. He was in the grave with her, licking the cool raindrops like that last night. But then she began sinking into the pit, the earth dissolving underneath her and dirt pouring over her until she had vanished underground. Then he was alone, half buried and swallowing dirt. He would wake up with his bones blasted, scratching his ant bites until he bled. The night after the incident on the cliff, though, a variation was introduced into the dream. This time, shortly after Rosalie was buried alive, a tiger roared its way into the grave, sinking its teeth into his damp flesh just before he woke up.
AT DAWN THE next day the air was already thick with heat. The commanding officer gathered them outside of their tents for a pep talk, yelling at them about how essential it was to speed up the project, the vital importance of their task, the necessity of keeping up morale. Daniel listened seriously. When they went out to the road, he found himself paired with Tim, using pickaxes to break up some of the mountain rock on a difficult point on the road. Electric drills or jackhammers would have risked a rockslide, and they had to do it by hand. It was grueling. Daniel concentrated on hacking at the rock and ignoring the welts on his hands, trying his best to pretend that Tim wasn’t sweating right beside him. But after only half an hour of pounding, Tim put down his pickax and leaned against the mountain, taking out a cigarette. The rest of the unit was around the next bend on the winding road. Tim puffed for a few minutes, watching Daniel work. Daniel was drenched with sweat, but somehow the effort exhilarated him. He stood tall on his strong legs and let Tim watch him swing the pickax in the air, smashing it on the rock.
“So how do you like this assignment, Lance Corporal Ziskind?” Tim suddenly asked. “Glad you avoided combat?”
Daniel was startled. It was the first time Tim had asked him something since his question about Rosalie’s ass. For a brief instant he thought it might be an overture, an opening to friendship. But then he heard the acid streak in how Tim had recited his rank, and the shameful implication of the second question, and kept working. Life was easier when he pretended Tim didn’t exist.
But Tim existed. He took a long drag on his cigarette and then stepped dangerously close to Daniel, blowing smoke in his face. Daniel inhaled the smoke, wishing he could have a cigarette himself. But taking an unauthorized break with Tim was the last thing he wanted to do. Instead he breathed in Tim’s air. “Well, don’t let any of your Jewish faggot friends back home in medical school think you aren’t doing your part,” Tim said, sarcasm moistening the smoke between his lips. “You heard the CO this morning: ‘The future of freedom is in our hands.’ Remember, it’s really, really important that we build this piece-of-shit road in the middle of nowhere, because if we don’t, the Commies will take over the world.” Tim took another long drag, then stepped back toward the mountain face. Daniel was determined not to look up. “Like who gives a shit about Commies?” Tim concluded, his voice taking on an oddly reflective tone. Daniel wondered again if Tim really wanted to have a conversation. “Either they nuke us or they don’t, but in the meantime I don’t see why we should give a shit what they do.”
The rock wasn’t breaking, but Daniel’s will was. He raised the pickax into the air again, no longer caring whether the rock broke or not. He wielded it with sheer animal fury, and decided to risk a word. “They killed my fiancée’s father in Russia,” he suddenly said, and slammed the pickax into the rock.
The burned stub of Tim’s cigarette fell onto a heap of rock dust as his mouth drooped open. He heard Tim swallowing smoke. “You have a fiancée?”
The question was more stunned than civil. Daniel took several more swings at the rock, enjoying making Tim wait, before allowing himself to answer. “Yes, I do,” he sneered, then paused. “She even has an ass.”
Daniel continued pounding away at the rock, relishing Tim’s silence. It took Tim several minutes to speak again.
“What, her dad was a spy or something?” Tim asked.
This time Tim seemed genuinely curious, but Daniel wouldn’t take the bait. Just because he had mentioned Rosalie didn’t mean he was about to become Tim’s friend. “Nope,” he said, tasting sweat. “Just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Tim waited for him to say more, but Daniel refused. Instead he pressed his lips together, measuring the size of the crack in the rock with his eye before raising the pickax again.
Tim blew a mouthful of smoke-flavored air near Daniel’s ear, then gave up on waiting. “So you’re here to kill Commies,” he said.
The acid streak in Tim’s voice had returned. Daniel said nothing, and continued hammering. He swung the pickax up in the air, willing it to land on the crack he had finally made in the rock. It missed. He breathed hard and wedged the pickax between his knees, shaking out his hands. His palms burned. He picked up the pickax again and kept pounding.
“Well, good for you,” Tim said. “A motivated killer. Fucking impressive. Blow ’em all away.” He kicked at the mud. “Me, I couldn’t give a shit. My wife’s having a baby next week.”
Tim had a wife? Daniel’s pickax wobbled in his hand. He resisted the temptation to look up. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Tim leaning back against the side of the mountain, glancing at the sky. For Tim, Daniel realized, time existed; “next week” was not merely a set of empty days, the way it was for Daniel, but a sequence in the creation of the world. Before Daniel could wonder more—a baby? Tim, a father? were there other children? how old was his wife? what was her name?—Tim, still looking at the sky, opened his mouth and said, “By the time I get home, the kid’s gonna be a year old. He won’t even know who I am.”
Daniel put down the pickax and looked up at Tim, who was still staring at the sky between the thick jungle trees. He saw the unfamiliar softness between Tim’s eyebrows and decided to speak, to try. “But at least you’re doing something for—for your baby’s future,” he said. “For the future of the world.”
Tim looked at Daniel for a moment in silence. Then he laughed, a cold, caustic laugh. “Fuck that,” he said. “That kid’s gotta make his own damn world. This one isn’t good enough.”
Daniel stood still, speechless. But Tim just glanced down the road over Daniel’s shoulder, and then suddenly reached into his pocket. He pulled out a cigarette and held it below Daniel’s chin. “Want one?” he asked.
Daniel breathed in, desperate. The smoke was sweet on Tim’s breath, the offer lingering perilously close to friendship. He threw his pride over the cliff. “Thanks,” he sputtered. He grabbed it out of Tim’s hand, stuck it in his mouth, and lit it. Tim shrugged, taking up his own pickax and suddenly hammering away in a fury. Daniel was just breathing in his first sweet breath of filth when he heard the commanding officer’s voice boom behind his back. He spat the cigarette onto the ground and fumbled for his pickax, which he had left lying on the rocks. Sparks flew from Tim’s pickax beside him.
“Progress, Corporals?”
Tim stood at attention, pickax in hand. “Lance Corporal Ziskind here has been slacking off, sir,” he said, and pointed to the cigarette smoldering in the mud at Daniel’s feet. “May I suggest you assign him to a task more suited to his poor work ethic, sir?”
Daniel tried not to cringe in the reeking air. He watched as the CO bent down to examine the fresh cigarette burning on the ground, then rose to spit words in his face. “We don’t have time for your crap, Wizkind,” he barked, blithe in his mistake with Daniel’s name. “This is a goddamn war here. You can’t just take a break whenever the hell you feel like it.”
“Yes, sir,” Daniel muttered. He could feel Tim grinning above his head a moment later as he did the requisite push-ups, his blistered palms bitten by rock dust until they bled.
“Any more shit like this and you’ll be breaking rocks for the next twelve months.”
As the officer abandoned them, it began raining again: thick heavy raindrops that poured down into wide rivers and washed the shards of debris down into the abyss.
&nbs
p; DANIEL STOPPED TRYING after that. The days had become grueling, pointless; the nights full of redundant dreams were worse. He began to live for the few moments each night just before he fell asleep in the mud. Then he would replay memories of Rosalie in his mind over and over until they grew grainy and pale, like paintings exposed to too much light.
“I think that’s my favorite thing we’ve read together,” he remembered telling her one day. In his mind he was eighteen, and they were sitting again in her backyard. They had just finished reading a story called “The Dead Town,” and the book lay open on the grass beside him. He was leaning back against the porch steps with his legs stretched out on the ground, while she was lying with her head in his lap, watching the sky.
“Why?” she asked.
He looked down at her black hair draped over his legs. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess because—because it’s about missed opportunities.”
“My favorite was ‘Beheaded,’” she said.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Daniel snorted. “That one made no sense at all.” “Beheaded” was a long, convoluted story, ending with a bridge between heaven and hell that was seduced by the devil. Before that, though, there was a part about an innocent man who was sentenced to decapitation. At the plaza where the beheading was to take place, there was a long ladder leading from the plaza up to the heavens, constructed out of previously decapitated heads. The executioners explained to the sentenced man that beheading him was, of course, a virtuous deed for the common good, helping them and everyone else reach heaven.
“I thought it made a lot of sense,” Rosalie said. “But I’m glad you didn’t.”
He was about to ask her to explain when she suddenly sat up, her hair swishing across his knees. God, so beautiful, he thought. And sexy. He stared at the delicate shelf of her collarbone, at the hollow dent below her nose, the way her soft skin absorbed the light and glowed, incandescent. But she was only fifteen. She twisted around him and grabbed the book out of the grass.
“You have another copy of this, right?” she asked, flipping through the thin lightweight pages that had closed in the breeze.
The book was hers, and he had seen another edition of it on his father’s shelf. “Yeah, I think I—”
“Good,” she said, and tore the story they had just read out of the book.
He grabbed the torn book out of her hand. “What’d you do that for?”
“If it’s your favorite, we should keep it in my library,” she said. Then she stood up and took his hand, dragging him into the house.
If she were anyone else, he would have assumed she was crazy. But you could never tell exactly what Rosalie was thinking; she was far too smart for that. She pulled him into the dingy living room until they were standing in the corner, where she pointed at a tiny painting hanging on the wall without a frame. “See, this is the Dead Town,” she said.
He had never noticed the painting before. Like everything in Rosalie’s house, it was dirty, dark, and small. A man hovered over a gloomy street, his leaden body blocking out the sun. Two little markers—tombstones?—stood in the foreground. The man floated above them in a white sky, risen indifferently from the dead.
“Did you paint this?” he asked.
But she wasn’t listening. “Let’s keep ‘The Dead Town’ with the dead town,” she said. She took the painting down off the wall and turned it around, leaning it against the bookcase as she folded the torn-out story lengthwise, smoothing the folds with her fingernails until the pages were flat and thin. Then she took the pages and slid them between the wood and the canvas. On the opposite side of the backing, Daniel noticed a piece of yellowed paper peeking out from behind the wooden canvas frame. It seemed she had done this before.
“What’s that, another story?” he asked her.
She didn’t answer. Instead she turned the painting around and placed it back on the wall. But then she leaned toward him, standing on her toes until her lips rested on his ear. “When you marry me,” she whispered, “I’ll tell you everything.”
As he succumbed to sleep on the edge of the cliff with Tim snoring by his side, he realized how much she still hadn’t told him.
A FEW DAYS later, Daniel’s unit heard disturbing news. A nineteen-year-old private was killed by a booby trap at the base at Phu Bai, not far beyond the pass—a sophisticated trap involving a bicycle rigged with explosives. Everyone was on alert. Even the construction unit was being sent out on patrol; the enemy was thought to be hiding somewhere near the pass, and they were the closest. After weeks of building the road, they were out for blood.
“Ziskind, it’s your dream come true,” Tim hissed at Daniel as they cleaned their weapons late that night. His baby hadn’t been born yet, Daniel figured. Or maybe it had, and even Tim hadn’t heard. “Make sure you write to your little girlfriend and your Jewish faggot friends about all the Commies you’re going to kill. Your mommy and daddy will be very proud of you.”
Daniel said nothing. He thought of his father and held his breath. What time was it at home now? It was a few hours after midnight in the jungle, so it must be the afternoon. Was his father at the hospital with his mother? Was his mother even still alive? And Rosalie in her illustration class—was she thinking of him? Would she be glad if he killed someone?
“Course, as we’ve discussed, I personally don’t give a shit,” Tim added, satisfied to have a one-way conversation. “Someone would have to be pointing a gun at my head for me to fucking bother. So you better cover for both of us, bastard. Got that?”
Was it a threat? Daniel wondered if Tim really meant it. If he did, so be it, Daniel decided as he picked up his pack. “I’m putting you in the line of fire, bastard,” Tim repeated. He slung his gun over his shoulder and stepped forward. “Now move your ass.”
But when Tim moved to push him out of the tent, Daniel had already stepped out ahead of him into the darkness, in line with the soldiers before him. They walked in silence along the banked curves of their newly built road up toward the Pass of the Ocean Clouds, and then turned off the road and into the jungle, breathing the sweet wet night air that reminded Daniel of his last night in the little grave.
THEY STALKED THE darkness in the jungle all night long, wearing seventy-pound packs with all their supplies, walking for hours without traveling very far at all, moving in circles. Daniel was surprised to find himself more frightened of tigers than of the enemy, scanning the buzzing forest for glowing animal eyes. When the rain lifted and the sun began to rise, light spilled in between the trees like rivers of gold, and it was decided that they were too vulnerable in their long line of men. They were told to separate into pairs to secure the immediate area, and then they would continue on through the Pass of the Ocean Clouds. The line was divided. Daniel split off with Tim, and stiffened his limbs as he realized that Tim was keeping his promise, moving a fraction of a step behind him as the two of them walked on together.
Daylight glistened on the jungle floor. In the long new shafts of light, Daniel saw spiderwebs stretched between the trees, large enough to trap a person—vast nets that vibrated with each of his footsteps, transparent but for the tiny raindrops clinging to their woven tapestries of threads. Daniel tore them down reluctantly, afraid of leaving a trail. But staying unnoticed was almost impossible. No matter how quiet he and Tim tried to be, every step they took resounded like cannon fire, a blasting crackle of leaves and branches exploding underfoot. Without speaking or thinking, Daniel and Tim began to take their steps at the same time, with Tim moving closer until he was moving right beside Daniel, matching their heartbeats. Now the only sounds they heard came from the buzzing of insects, and from their perfectly synchronized steps. That made it easy, half an hour later, to hear when something else—something too big to be any animal but a tiger or a man—began to move behind the trees.
The two men froze. They stared into the trees in the dim gray light until they both saw someone standing about thirty feet away, half obscured by trees and
plants. Daniel’s breath caught in his throat. All he could see was the top of the man’s head, covered by a helmet he didn’t recognize, and part of his leg. But then the man shifted in his place so that they could see his hands, and Daniel saw that he was fumbling with something that looked about the size and shape of a stick grenade.
Tim elbowed Daniel, a little too hard, and silently raised his rifle. Daniel crouched over his weapon, trying not to breathe. It seemed that Tim had been bluffing earlier about putting Daniel on the spot. But as Daniel watched the man’s hands through the leaves, it became clear that the man was simply waiting for the right moment to pull the pin. Had he seen them? Or was he aiming for someone else? Daniel began to raise his rifle, but then Tim elbowed him again, urging him on, and the gun slipped in his sweaty hands. He began to raise it again, slowly, but Tim already had the man in his sights. Daniel watched, defeated, as Tim pulled the trigger.