In fact, now that the killing was done, even the prison camp seemed to be disappearing into the nothingness. Its seven earthen structures had been sandblasted smooth by the desert winds; and as the soldier looked at the wall closest to him, it seemed as though it were disintegrating in the breeze, like a sand castle. There was a gust of wind then, and a miniature cyclone danced in the sand for a moment, before disappearing like a ghost. The gust of hot, arid air burned the soldier’s eyes and left his nasal passages desiccated. As he coughed and winced, it occurred to him that he was dehydrated. The prisoners of war he had freed into the desert heat were no doubt dazed and dehydrated as well. Maybe in an hour or so they would pass out and be covered over by the Sahara—or be eaten by the flocks of vultures that soared over the desert, looking for death.
Just as he was nodding his head absentmindedly, something came up behind him and brushed against his leg. He sensed it even before it touched him. The usual tingling sensation came over him, and he looked down in time to see the cat arch its back as it brushed its flank against his leg. It was the same spectacularly white cat that he had been seeing periodically for months now; and as usual, he felt himself being severed from time and reality. He was free for those few moments—able to see more of the repressed memory (or delusion) that had been unfolding for him over the months of his capture. As he looked down, the setting sun’s blinding rays seemed to refract off the cat’s immaculately white fur, so that the soldier had to clamp his eyes shut. In a world of dust and death, the cat was a beacon of life and possibility. Its movements were lithe and mesmerizing; as it rubbed against his leg, it purred, and he felt the sound washing over him, like a soothing waterfall. He smiled as he stood there with his eyes closed. However, when he opened his eyes, the cat was gone, and he felt suddenly melancholy and foolish. He had spent the bygone months wondering if the cat was a figment of his imagination—
But presently, as he began to tremble all over, it suddenly occurred to him that he had been shot during the battle with the prison guards. He lowered himself to the ground then, and leaned against the side of the hovel. Rather than being painful, the bullet holes that riddled his body were points of numbness. He had been shot at least once in each leg. A bullet was embedded in his left shoulder, and there were two in his abdomen. As the blood flowed, the points of numbness seemed to expand in diameter, so he knew that soon there would be no sensation at all—no life. With these thoughts in mind, he lay down flat on the ground, closed his eyes, and sighed—as if anticipating the fitful sleep that always possessed him when he dreamed of the woman.
All those months ago, before the soldier became a prisoner of war, the war had not been going well. The enemy had won no great victories over them, but the era of grand victories was over. In its stead rose a stalemate between those who were clearly mad, and those who were dedicated to being more brutal than the madmen. When the American Military originally swept into the African desert, the war fever had unified them. As politicians and television commentators were constantly reminding them, everything had changed two and a half years ago. The American Military had come to the desert to either change things back, or to exact revenge for the change.
Whatever the case, two and a half years ago, the soldier had been a typical senior in high school. He had talked the way others talked, and dressed the way those around him dressed. He had had girlfriends with whom he had experienced varying degrees of sexual success. He had had friends and enemies, and engaged in all the fads of adolescence, so that once he was within the crowd, he had been indistinguishable from his classmates. And yet, on the morning when everything changed for America, he had felt disembodied—severed from time and history. He had been late for school; nevertheless, as he drove along the streets of Long Island, New York, he had sensed that his lateness would be irrelevant tomorrow. …And then, towards the end of his history class, there had been a scream in an adjacent classroom. That other class had been watching the news for a social studies project; and when several other students from that class began to scream, the soldier’s history teacher had gone to investigate the commotion. She had warned her students to stay in their seats. However, as the seconds passed, and more students in the neighboring class cried out, everyone in the history class had streamed over to the other class. …Even before the soldier saw the thing for himself, he had known. He had actually been the last one to leave the history class. He had meandered over to the other class—not with the curiosity and budding horror of everyone else, but with the detachment of someone going to verify something he already knew. While girls cried and hugged, and boys mustered whatever emotion their machismo would allow, the soldier had only nodded his head as he watched the smoldering remains of the White House.
The subsequent announcement that the president and half the cabinet had been blown to bits by terrorists had been one of those reality-changing events. Within a week of the attack, the soldier and forty percent of his graduating class had signed up with the Military. There had been nothing else to be done: the resulting war had been inevitable—like the impulse to scream once someone had stepped on one’s foot. At the same time, there had been a kind of purity in the terrible war cry of America. The war had been a transcendental event; Americans had surrendered to the war the way converts surrendered to a new religion. In the aftermath of the White House bombing, it had not so much been a new president that Americans cried out for, as a priest that would be able to interpret the will of God. The laws enacted by the new government had been like edicts from God. The new government’s policies had been like the ones mandated by ancient high priests, where everyone was either a believer or a nonbeliever—and where the nonbeliever was a sinner to be eradicated through conversion or death.
As such, America had swept into the African desert with all the religious zeal of the original Crusaders. Unfortunately, after over two years of war, America found that while it could conquer, it could not rule. Military might had allowed it to overthrow a regime; missiles and bombs had decimated the conquered regime’s army; its infrastructure of power had been systematically dismantled and replaced by a structure sympathetic to America. However, the battles and skirmishes continued—not against an army; not against anything with a structure that could be dismantled by military might or political will. It became a matter of their believers against the believers of America—a battle not so much of ideals, as superstitions.
That was the state of the war before the soldier was captured.
During his time in the war zone, the soldier had gotten into the habit of walking around the base before his unit went out on night time raids. He would walk inside the base’s perimeter walls, willing his mind to be still. As his sergeant was always telling them, a soldier’s job was to forget everything but his orders. For a soldier, there were no yesterdays—and no tomorrows; and even the present was only a nightmare dreamed up by someone else. …That was what their sergeant would say; so, when the soldier went on his pre-mission walks, he would allow himself a few moments of indulgent fantasy before he willed his mind to be clear. Most times, he would think about his parents: how much he missed them and their home on Long Island. Sometimes, he would think about a girl from high school that he wished he had asked out, or a girl he had been able to seduce. Typically, these walks would only take five to ten minutes, and he would come back looking resolute. However, on the night when everything began to unravel, he was gone for half an hour. His sergeant came looking for him, concerned, because their mission was supposed to begin in five minutes. The sergeant exited the barracks and spied the soldier through the darkness. The sergeant called to the solder, and the young man came stumbling up, looking dazed. At first, the sergeant was going to ask him what was wrong, but he prided himself on being a strict disciplinarian, so he screamed:
“Get a move on, soldier! Quit walking as if you need to change your goddamn tampon!”
The soldier tried to move quicker, but the disillusioned expression on his face did not change.
The sergeant glared at him momentarily, still determined to ignore the soldier’s strange mien, then he re-entered the barracks, where the rest of the 10-man unit was getting ready for the mission. When the soldier entered the barracks, he went straight to his cot, and began to put on his gear. The man on the cot next to the soldier’s had welcoming eyes. He and the soldier were friends; and as the man with the welcoming eyes saw his friend’s agitated state, he frowned. In fact, several of the other soldiers had frowned at him as he entered, noting the strange expression on his face. However, the sergeant was yelling at them again, telling them to hurry up. The others got up and headed out of the room. The soldier was the last one left, and the sergeant yelled at him, saying:
“Move your ass, goddamn it!”
The soldier bundled the rest of his gear in his arms, before running out of the door. The other men were getting into an armored personnel carrier when he got outside. As soon as he got in, the door was closed. In addition to the sergeant and the other soldiers, there was an interpreter and a lieutenant. The interpreter was a scrawny old man who claimed to have been an English teacher before the war, but whose sentences were so convoluted that the soldiers did not bother to ask for translations half the time. They kept him along as a kind of mascot, and made crude jokes about him to his face, which he never understood, but which he would nonetheless smile at, in his demented, toothless way. The lieutenant was a young man straight out of West Point, who always kept a certain professional distance from the others, as if military decorum demanded it.
The personnel carrier started off, through the night. There was still a dazed, disillusioned expression on the soldier’s face. The man with the welcoming eyes was sitting across from him; they usually engaged in idle banter before a mission, but the soldier did not want to talk at the moment. He began to put on the last of his gear. He needed to clear his head and figure things out. However, when the soldier looked up, he realized that everyone was staring at him. He felt suddenly self-conscious. He tried to smile to reassure them, but all he could manage was a nervous grimace. He realized he was trembling slightly. He inhaled deeply, hoping to calm himself, but it was no use. This was usually the time when they all made wise cracks about one another, in order to put the unit at ease before the start of a mission. When men faced death on a daily basis, they became superstitious. They were always on the look out for bad omens, and strove to repeat their routines, feeling that their most mundane actions held sway over the forces of life and death. The soldier’s strange behavior was a bad omen, which brought out all the secret terrors that seized superstitious men. Suddenly exasperated, the sergeant snorted in disgust and addressed the soldier again, saying, “What the hell is your problem?”
The soldier opened his mouth, but he had no idea where to begin, so he shut it, shaking his head in the same disillusioned way. He was staring at the floor.
“Soldier!” the sergeant yelled, annoyed. The soldier looked up at him helplessly. The sergeant went on: “Whatever it is, get it off your goddamn chest now, before we start the mission.” And then, sarcastically: “What happened? Did your girlfriend tell you her new man has a bigger dick than yours?”
The rest of the unit laughed. The soldier tried to laugh, but his lips somehow refused to comply. He looked up at them apologetically, as if embarrassed by his lips’ shortcomings. This strange reaction made the laughter cease.
“What is it, son?” the sergeant asked again, his tone strangely compassionate.
The soldier took a deep breath. “I…I don’t know where to begin.”
“Start from the beginning,” the sergeant coaxed him.
The soldier nodded. He looked at the unit apologetically again, and took a deep breath. “…I went out for my walk—you know, like I always do before a mission.” Everyone else in the unit nodded, remembering his routine. The soldier went on: “…I was walking along the wall, like I always do. My thoughts were just drifting, you know…Anyway, I looked up, and there was a man there. He just seemed to pop out of nowhere. I looked up, and he was there.”
“What do you mean?” the sergeant asked. “He wasn’t one of us?” he said, meaning if he was with the Military.
“No, he was in this business suit. His shoes…I remember that his shoes were shiny: polished. That’s how I knew that he didn’t belong there. You know how the desert dust gets on everything. It was as if he had just popped…” The soldier shook his head. When he looked up again, everyone in the unit was frowning at him. He felt embarrassed and foolish. “I’m sorry—”
“Finish your goddamn story, soldier,” the sergeant chastised him. “Tell it now and get it out of your goddamn head.” The sergeant’s favorite word was goddamn. He used it as a crude exclamation point in practically every sentence—especially when he was angry or anxious.
The soldier stared at him, then nodded when he saw no choice but to continue. “…Well,” the soldier began, “he was just there when I looked up… the man with the shiny shoes. …And then he began to speak.”
“What did he say?” another soldier asked him eagerly.
“He said he knew me—that we were friends. I tried to look at his face, to see if I could place it, but the strange thing was that no matter how hard I looked, it was as if he had no face—as if his entire face was a shadow. I think I spent about half a minute trying to see his face. He began to talk. I don’t think I heard what he was saying at first—I was staring at his face…trying to see it, I mean…”
The sergeant spoke up again, losing patience: “You’re saying you met a stranger within the perimeter wall, and he didn’t have a face?”
“…I know how crazy it sounds.” When the soldier looked around the unit, he realized that even the lieutenant, who usually read mission orders during these rides and pretended to be too engrossed to hear their banter, was staring at him. The soldier felt even more unsettled. However, feeling it was too late now to keep quiet, he went on, “…I started to listen to what the man was saying. …He told me about this mission—about everything that’s going to happen.”
Everyone stared at him, but then the sergeant laughed out, saying: “A ghost appeared to tell you the future? Why the hell can’t you fantasize about women like the rest of us, soldier?”
The other soldiers laughed, but it was a mirthless kind of laughter—as if they were desperate to believe that it was all a joke. The soldier tried to laugh as well, willing to admit that it did sound silly. Unfortunately, he had a sudden flashback of what the man with the shiny shoes had said to him, and he shuddered.
The laughter died down.
The sergeant sobered, and spoke up again: “You’re serious about all this? Some ghost man popped out of nowhere and told you what’s going to happen on our mission?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then tell us then?” he said, trying to joke again, but nobody laughed this time.
The soldier nodded anxiously. “…The man said that go to the complex and find it deserted. There won’t be a damn thing there…but he said I’ll see a white cat.”
“A white cat?” the sergeant interrupted him again.
“Yeah, he said I’ll see a white cat; and that if we all followed it, we’ll stay alive.”
“What?”
“He said that we’d die if we stayed in the building.”
“Die how?”
“I don’t know. He just said that we’d die—all of us—if we stayed in the building. Our only chance to live is to follow the cat.”
“Goddamn! What kind of fucked up story is that to tell before a mission!” the sergeant screamed; the other men began to grumble. Even the man with the welcoming eyes seemed exasperated with him.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the soldier apologized. “…I told you it was weird. I didn’t want to talk about it, but you asked me to…I’m sorry, sir.”
“Well, just keep out of our way on this mission, soldier!” the sergeant screamed again.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the soldier said again. H
e stared down at the ground, because he could sense the other members of the unit glaring at him. He willed his mind to wander. He conjured images of his mother and father, sister and brother; he thought about the little house on Long Island that his parents had scraped and sacrificed to buy. He thought about how he had called his parents today, hoping to pacify a strange, nameless feeling that had been building in him lately. He would typically call his parents a couple times a week, and close his eyes as he listened to them, pretending that he was listening to them from the kitchen table. He would allow himself to believe, for those few moments, that the war was all a dream to be forgotten. …But when the soldier called his parents that morning, something strange had happened. A woman whose voice he had never heard before had answered the phone; when the soldier asked her who she was, she had said she was his mother. He had asked her questions—trying to test her—but she had ignored him, and talked excitedly about her house redecorating plans. It had driven him over the edge somehow, so that he had found himself screaming and cursing—but the strange woman on the other end of the line had only kept on babbling about how beautiful her flower bed looked. He had slammed down the phone and redialed his parents’ number, but there had been no answer, and he had walked away, looking dazed and wretched.
The soldier shook his head. Even that memory seemed farfetched. Was he coming undone? Maybe. …Maybe he needed to come undone. He thought about that for a moment, allowing his mind to accept the possibility that madness might have its benefits….
The other soldiers were still brooding over the bad omen of his story; outside the vehicle, it was deathly quiet in the sprawling slums of the city—except for the intermittent sounds of gunfire and sirens. Most of the people in the city were refugees—from war and famine and the dissolution of civilization. Even before the Americans rolled into the desert, there had been war: between Christians and Muslims; between those who looked the same and had lived side-by-side for centuries, but who claimed to be of different ethnic groups. The irreconcilable differences spawned by religion and ethnicity had left hundreds of thousands dead and maimed; millions of others wandered the desert—like ancient Jews looking for some elusive Promised Land.
How to Kill Your Boyfriend (in 10 Easy Steps) Page 30