by Dara Horn
Nothing happened. The gun was an M16, the new rifle that had only been released a few months earlier. Instead of firing, it just made a loud clicking noise. Jammed. Tim began rattling the trigger, whispering, “Shit!”
Daniel moved the man into his own crosshairs, remembering his vow. The target was so close that Daniel didn’t even need to use the sights. He watched the enemy through the leaves and slipped his finger toward the trigger. But then, with another loud click from Tim’s weapon, the man with the grenade suddenly looked up. His eye caught Daniel’s, and Daniel saw that it was Cuong.
Tim elbowed Daniel again and whispered, “Fire, bastard! Fire!”
Daniel stood motionless, staring, trying to imagine what Cuong could possibly be doing holding a grenade. But his imagination failed him. Regaining movement, Daniel began to shake his head at Tim, to signal to him that they shouldn’t shoot, that it was a mistake. But then a strange expression spread across Cuong’s face, an almost-smile, and that almost-smile confused Daniel so much that he forgot who he was or where he was or why he was, because when Cuong looked at Daniel, it was as if he had suddenly removed a shell that had been covering his face for all those empty timeless days, as if the person Daniel had seen before had evaporated into that hot, thick air and what was left behind was some kind of animal, like a tiger suddenly baring its teeth into a smiling rumbling throaty roar, and Daniel watched, paralyzed, as Cuong pulled the pin and flung his arm back.
Tim screamed, “Move, bastard! Move!”
As the grenade arced through the air, Tim threw himself at Daniel, knocked him to the ground, and jumped on top of him. But in fact he only partly jumped on top of him, because when he started jumping he was Tim, but by the time he landed he was only partly Tim, from the chest down, and the part of Tim from the chest up was lying on the ground beside Daniel, screaming in a high, high voice, like a little boy’s, until the screaming stopped.
An instant later the jungle exploded with bursts of machine gun fire, but soon it fell silent again. Daniel lay for a long time on his stomach in the mud, listening to the insects and the occasional explosion in the distance, with the bottom of Tim on top of him and his gun in front of him and the top of Tim next to him, which had stopped screaming but which still had its eyes open, as if it were watching Daniel. Daniel tried not to think, and he succeeded. He looked at the trees, looked at his hands, looked at the mud. Then he rolled over, wriggling his arms out of the blasted-open pack on his back that was drenched with Tim’s blood, so that the bottom half of Tim fell off of him and onto the ground next to the top half. Then Daniel stood up, leaving his pack on the ground as he put half of Tim over one shoulder and the other half over the other shoulder. After endless timeless days, time suddenly began passing on Daniel’s back, long moments emerging with each step he took, created like light from the void. Bright sunlight gleamed through the silent canopy overhead as Daniel carried Tim’s body through the Pass of the Ocean Clouds, toward the mountain road leading to the city where men worshipped their ancestors and buried their ancient kings.
WHEN DANIEL ARRIVED at the road, he discovered that all the guardrails and lines they had installed the day before had been torn out, and the segment that they had paved the day before had been blown to bits. The tents and supplies were gone. The equipment had been destroyed, with all the rollers and drills blown up and the blackened frame of a jeep lying burning in the road like the bones of an ancient animal. No one was there, at least no one alive. In the distance, Daniel saw thick black smoke and knew that some Americans from another unit must have survived, because they were burning down the village.
He couldn’t keep carrying Tim. His arms had started to tremble, and then to shake so hard that the body was nearly slipping to the ground. He laid Tim down, one piece at a time, underneath one of the shrines by the roadside. He bent down on his knees over the body, took one of Tim’s dog tags, and closed Tim’s eyes. Then he looked over his shoulders, up and down the road, for someone to tell. Afraid to leave the body, he tried to shout for help. But his voice came out of him not as a shout, but as a long, high, wrenching scream. He flung himself across Tim’s body and screamed again, his scream rumbling and shaking the valley below him. A moment later, as he paused for breath, he heard someone nearby shouting back, in Vietnamese.
The wild thought crossed his mind of crawling over the cliff, of somehow concealing himself along the side of the precipice. But as he peered over the edge he saw a blond-haired body lying still in the ravine, bleeding from the head. It was Rob. And next to him, Wayne, shot in the back. Everyone was dead, he slowly understood. He had wandered into a necropolis—and then, as he looked at the shrine above Tim’s closed eyes, he realized that it had happened because of him. Suddenly he replayed his conversation with Cuong in his head: Cuong’s suggestions on where to build the camp, his own choice to pass the suggestions along, the ease with which he had granted his trust, how carelessly he had assumed that anything any of them planned to do—himself, his own unit, Cuong, anyone—was of course for the common good, as if they had all been building the same road into the sky. He looked again at the bodies in the ravine and almost screamed again, but then he heard a shot fired somewhere nearby. He jumped to his feet and began running down the road as fast as he could.
But where could he run? Toward the village in flames? Going in that direction meant going back into the jungle, or farther up the dirt track of Highway One. Either way there was no chance of avoiding Cuong’s unit. As for going down the road, there was nothing between the burning village at the pass and Da Nang—nothing but dozens of empty miles, and dozens of shrines for the dead. But it was the only choice. Daniel started running down the road he had built, running and running, choking on air and sweat as he fled from the dead town. He would run all the way to Da Nang if he had to, back to the land of the living. The jungle flew by at his sides, green and brown and gray and hideous, and Daniel began to feel like a bird, released from the earth as he soared downhill. But as he raced down the switchbacks, he heard Vietnamese voices shouting again, closer in behind him.
Suddenly as he ran, gasping for air in the heat, he noticed a jagged hole in the mountain face near the road. A cave. Daniel ground to a halt on the muddy slope, leaning over on his strong thighs and panting like an animal. He heard the shouting again, and entered inside the rock.
Later it would amaze him how vividly he would remember every detail from the next few moments, as if all of his senses had been sharpened into knives of hearing, seeing, smelling, taste, and touch, carving every detail of those moments onto his skin and into his brain. The cave wasn’t like any place he had ever been. The only other time he had been inside a cave was on a road trip with his parents when he was a little boy, and there the cave was all lit up inside, with railings and walkways. This cave was like the inside of a womb. The floor of the cave was thick, soft mud, and just a few feet past the mouth, the darkness was total. Inside, it was silent, a sealed silence unlike any he had ever heard. The only sound was the occasional echo of a drop of water from the ceiling of the cave landing in a puddle on the floor—a strange noise, like the plucking of a string. The air was so cool and still that Daniel felt as if he had slipped underwater. He raised his arms in front of him, still panting, and began to move toward the back of the cave, where he hoped there might be another way out after a curve or two in the rock.
He took a few steps forward and slammed his head against the ceiling. He must have taken off his helmet at some point, though he could no longer remember when or where. He reeled a bit, almost tripping in the mud, and he could hear his boots crunching on leaves that must have floated inside the last time it rained, or so he thought. His hand slipped from his momentary grip on the ceiling and landed on his forehead, and he felt something warm and wet on his face in the dark. He was dripping. He assumed it was sweat or water or mud, but then he realized that his whole body was painted with Tim’s blood. He could taste it in his mouth. He spat three times, ducked hi
s head, tried to see the ground, couldn’t see anything, pushed his hands back against the ceiling of the cave, and took one step forward. And then the ground disappeared beneath his feet, and he plummeted down into hell.
It was a “tiger trap,” of the kind the unit had often been warned about: a pit about six feet deep, completely covered by leaves and underbrush that hid a trapdoor of bamboo. At the bottom of the pit were about eight four-foot-long bamboo spikes, each implanted in the ground and sharpened to a knifepoint, and smeared with excrement. Daniel couldn’t imagine why they would have put one in a cave—the cave must have been a training center for them, he would reason much later, conveniently located to where the ambush had taken place, and surely there were more traps like it set up in the jungle. But Daniel didn’t think of any of that as he fell into the pit, where three of those spikes went straight through his right leg.
He didn’t feel anything at first. It was as if he were suspended in space, hanging by a hair, and he couldn’t understand how he had stopped falling without landing, as if the earth didn’t want him and had decided to spew him out. He reached down to feel what had happened, and it was only when the palm of his hand felt a spike erupting through his calf that he opened his mouth to scream. But then he heard a shot fired outside the cave, somewhere very close, and someone yelling in Vietnamese, and he understood that Cuong and his fellow soldiers must be nearby, that they might come and take him prisoner or execute him on the spot, and that his last remaining hope was to swallow his screams.
Daniel clamped his jaw tight, nearly biting off his tongue. His body shook so violently that he felt as if the spikes were alive, squirming and tearing through more of his flesh. He knew he had to do something before he passed out, but he had already lost so much blood that he thought it might be too late. For a moment he thought that he would just let himself die, end it, end himself. But then he thought of Rosalie, and of Tim and the others, and he braced his shaking body against the sides of the pit and hauled himself out—ripping his leg off the spikes, which tore through it deeper until the bottom half of his mauled boot ripped off, and part of his foot went with it. He was lying on his stomach and vomiting, half his body draped over the edge of the pit, and his leg, or what was left of his leg, just barely pulled out and propped up on the side. He pressed his mouth into the mud and started eating dirt to keep himself from screaming. He vomited, swallowed more mud, vomited again, and then managed to pull himself up, pour out the water in his canteen onto the dirt and blood from the wounds, and tear off part of his shirt and tie it tight around what was left of his calf before collapsing again, shaking hard, to fill his mouth with mud. He could just barely see the mouth of the cave out of the corner of his eye. And then he noticed the spider.
It was just a little spider, hanging by a thread at the entrance to the cave, dangling in the sunlight like a pendulum on a clock, swinging from side to side, slowly, as if time had slowed to a stop. Daniel stared at it as he tried to control his screams for another eternity, until he was suddenly, vaguely aware of the sound of voices at the mouth of the cave. With his mouth stuffed with mud, Daniel saw two men standing just beyond the cave’s opening, ducking down and peering inside, both armed with what looked like his unit’s M16s. And he recognized one of the voices and knew it was Cuong.
Daniel was certain that they had seen him, but they didn’t move any closer. Then he realized that they weren’t able to see inside the cave from where they stood. He wanted to pray, but his thigh began convulsing again and it was all he could do not to scream. Cuong began shouting at the other man, pointing at the mouth of the cave. The other man answered with a nod of his head, and then—and Daniel could not be sure, at first, if it really happened or if it was delirium—they walked away. For a long time after that Daniel still did not move or scream. He was certain that they had just left to bring more people with them to capture him, or to photograph his execution. It wasn’t until the light began to change in the cave door that he understood that they weren’t coming back. They had seen the spiderweb and thought that no one could have gone inside.
It started raining again. Daniel watched, in moments between bouts of passing out—was it seconds? hours? years?—as a waterfall of dirt began running across the mouth of the cave, followed by a thick sludge of mud, heavy wet clods of it, and then loose rocks from above, until the thin brown curtain of mud became an avalanche of heavy stones, piling one on another and fusing with a river of filth, the stones and mud piling higher and higher. The pale window of faint light was starting to close, and Daniel realized what was happening but there was nothing he could do—his body was still shaking so hard that he couldn’t crawl toward the door. He stopped thinking, stopped feeling, stopped caring. Instead he watched as the entrance to the cave sealed off the last bit of daylight air, until time no longer existed. He was buried alive.
IT IS EASIER than it seems to sleep through the end of the world. Daniel struggled hard to stay awake, trying to scream, but after suppressing so many of his screams he found that they would no longer come out. The pain came in waves, hot irons searing his body as if he were being thrown into a blacksmith’s fire, his body convulsing until his head rattled against the mud and he swallowed his own vomit, alternating with dull, quaking dread and fear of the next wave. The only difference between closing his eyes and opening them was that when his eyes were closed, he saw the top half of Tim, still screaming.
He fought hard to stay awake. He seemed to remember that it was once hot outside, but now he shivered constantly. Between his bouts of vomiting and wrenching convulsions, the hands of the cold cave air rocked him gently, stroking his cheeks. In college once, Daniel remembered in a half dream when his body stopped shaking for a moment, he had long ago read a story by some Greek philosopher about a cave. In the story, people were trapped in a cave, chained to a rock. One of them managed to leave the cave, going outside and seeing the sun and the trees and the whole rest of the world, and then he went back inside the cave to tell the people there about everything they were missing. But the ones inside couldn’t understand what he meant. Instead, they became enraged and killed him. The point of the story, as Daniel remembered it, was supposed to be that everyone is living in the fake world inside the cave, and the man who left the cave is “enlightened,” the only one who realizes how wonderful the real world is. What a joke, Daniel thought. He knew, now, that the fake world was the one outside. The real world was the cave, a dark place of little light. And the chill of the cave air was like a cold compress on a wound.
It was becoming more and more difficult to resist the tug of sleep, the deep seductive undertow that pulled at his eyelids each time he paused between gasps of breath and bludgeoning pain. Beneath his closed eyelids, the top half of Tim loomed over him in the cave, screaming, but articulately this time. Now he was screaming for his wife and baby. Tim’s baby! Daniel remembered, anguished. Had it been born today? Daniel started sobbing, pleading, begging Tim to stop his screams. But then he heard a thundering roar, louder than the blast of the grenade, as something large appeared behind Tim at the mouth of the cave. A tiger. Daniel struggled to wake up, to scream, but he couldn’t. And of course he couldn’t run. He watched helplessly as the tiger began to devour the still-screaming Tim, sinking its teeth into Tim’s neck like a deep sick kiss until Tim fell silent. Then the tiger looked at Daniel, licking his black lips. And Daniel, choking, unable to run away or even to scream anymore, turned around and began digging furiously in the mud, throwing clump after clump of mud behind him until he had blinded the tiger and dug himself a tunnel, burrowing like an animal into a passageway underground. In the depths of dream and delirium, in the darkest recesses of his crippled mind, Daniel crawled through his imaginary tunnel until he reached a door, pushed it open, and entered a little room.
IT WAS A room of babies. Two babies, Daniel saw—tiny, scrawny babies, naked, without navels, a boy and a girl. Daniel wondered if one of them was Tim’s. But these babies looked at him war
mly, expectantly, laughing baby laughs, smiling toothless smiles. If either of them thought he had killed their father, they didn’t let on.
The room was an underground chamber, small, unfurnished, and dimly lit. But its walls were lined high with books. Whose books were they? Daniel wondered. Could the babies read them? The floor was made of smooth, rounded tiles, and was nearly covered with books and loose scrolls that were scattered across the room. The two babies sat on the tile floor, squirming and smiling in the treasury of books. The books were dusty, ancient. But the babies were fresh and new, their pink skin glowing and their tiny hands and feet waving in the room’s dim light. One of them, the girl, looked up at Daniel and beckoned him to come in.
Daniel began pulling himself on his stomach across the floor, dragging his torn leg behind him. But then the floor started moving beneath him, the ground trembling and the tiles separating from each other. When he first felt the floor move he started shaking from fear, certain it was another trap. But then he looked down and saw that the rounded tiles on the floor were not tiles at all, but turtles, hundreds of turtles, their backs like an army of soldiers’ helmets in a solemn military march. The books and scrolls on the floor weren’t scattered at random, but were being carried, each by a different turtle. As Daniel dragged himself into the room, the two babies watched him, crawling over to look at his leg, then back around to look at his face, staring. Daniel looked back at their tiny faces and noticed something familiar about them, but he couldn’t tell what. It frustrated him. Their blank faces stared at him with deep comprehension, as if they knew who he was. Now they sat before him, leaning with their little hands against the turtles’ backs, waiting. What did they want from him?