The Road Ahead

by Adrian Bonenberger

  He heard the last words he said, clearly. “Who sent you?”

  He realized his mistake too late. The vulture had wanted anything but to attack him. It had been graceless in its retreat, terrified that its long search for the dead had led to something living, drawn into a trap by a rival posing as prey. It must have hopped down from the large rock near his feet, to wait for him to stop breathing. But to get at the open sky when he awoke, it would have to fly over him, bounding onto his chest to get away.

  He lay frozen, horrified, blood pulsing in his eyes and ears, shocked at how easily he had been found and approached while he slept. Hunger was shutting his body down. He had to move to stay awake. He could hear the vulture still hissing in his head, its harsh alarm to the predatory world that something had been found alive. Like his pilot coughing words. He’d been yelling too. He tried to write down what he’d said but it was already difficult to recall. “Who sent you?” He was sick with paranoia, certain that all eyes were on the hill now, whatever eyes there were. Someone would come for him.

  He ran from the wreck into the split rock valley, a pack over a shoulder and his other arm cradling a helmet with a head in it. The eyes were still open, staring up, lips parted over the teeth. The shock kept him in a suspended state, running in daylight as if he couldn’t be seen toward an end where everything that had happened could be reversed, the head he held restored to a body. He felt hollowed out by acids. Men called out from the heights and his pursuit began. The sun was at his back, his shadow getting long and monstrous as it broke on stones ahead of him, dark pieces of him shedding off and returning to a core.

  At dark he stopped. There was a pickup truck adrift in waves of stone, its headlight visible and then gone as it pitched and turned. He felt his vest for the infrared strobe, but it was missing. The rescue wouldn’t have any way to tell him from anyone else. They came though. He heard them, a cargo with two escorts flying fast and low over a mountain and then circling the wreck. He could see the door gun flicker, the attack helicopters open up on someone. He was far away, miles, driven by the pickup to keep moving. The birds began to turn in widening circles. He sifted the objects in his bag for a signal. They’d be bingo on fuel soon at this range and have to turn back without finding him. After thirty minutes on station, they did. They would drop troops in the valley the next morning to sweep for his body and the head.

  He wanted to approach the house with the last light, but now he felt exposed again and would wait until night. A dead field surrounded the home, sparse pine replaced with fence posts, and he would have to cross in the open. It felt dangerous even in the dark. He stumbled on several barbed strands that had dipped between posts, and the scrapes on his stomach from the vulture kept him bent over. They began to burn and he worried about tetanus. He needed to find some alcohol and proper bandages. He would also need to cook the bird as soon as possible. He carried it by the feet, swung over a shoulder, its wings spread open and head thumping on the back of his leg.

  He entered the house at sunrise and she sat facing him. He couldn’t tell how long she’d been dead. The air was dry and the window was hot with sun. Her body had hardened, skin tightening around the bones, and she looked alert, her head held up so it didn’t rest against the back of the chair. The book she’d been reading was open on her lap, a children’s picture book, her right hand on the top corner with a page pinched between her thumb and a finger. Goodnight Moon. Americans had donated thousands of books for Afghan children. He remembered the green and red images from his own childhood, but not the exact wording. She’d stopped on: “Goodnight stars,” “Goodnight air.” He heard his mother’s voice. They were colorless pages, the night sky grey and the land a white silhouette, roadless, treeless dunes or snow on hills. He looked around. There was no other evidence of a child. The house was full of stuffed furniture, more chairs and couches than anyone could fill, thick carpet on the floors and everything looked soft, reds and oranges faded by sunlight. Even the walls were covered by something that had the feeling of cloth. It was as if he was inside her body, all its organs dry, sponges waiting for water to swell back into the space. He crept through the room, moving, he realized, as if he were a thief, hunched and making no sound but that of his knees cracking.

  He turned a corner and paused at the door to a bedroom. It felt like a milkweed pod had cracked open to reveal a room with white crocheted curtains and a large bed covered with a green knitted blanket. There was a dent on one side of the bed and a doll laid on the other. Three mirrors stood floor to ceiling on each wall away from the window, also framed with curtains, and they made the room appear to branch into narrow downy corridors. He did not enter. Beds made him uneasy. They looked like the last place you went. His reflections in the mirrors were suspicious versions of himself. The hollows of his eyes were deepening with terminal exhaustion. He watched himself as he took a few steps, legs stiffened and jaw clamped. It wasn’t clear if he was still favoring his left knee from the crash, still careful on his ankles, or if he had aged. Either way he had the appearance of a man who needed repair.

  Back in the living room he stood trying to make sure he was awake. He could have dreamed this, could be dreaming it. The struggle with the vulture had opened the bullet wound on his arm and blood formed drops on his fingers. His path through the house was marked by red spots on the rug. A blood trail was the worst kind to leave. Any tracker could follow that. A dog would. The man in the pickup with his sallow son. He moved again, willing himself past the woman to find a kitchen. He needed water and he had lost enough blood for the room to brighten.

  In a cabinet he found a bottle of isopropyl alcohol and a towel that hadn’t been chewed or sprinkled with mouse droppings. He dabbed at the bullet wound and vulture scratches, wincing at the sting. How much blood did he have left? He’d been dripping it out since the crash, across the valley, ocean, desert, mountains, and plains. All the way here. He had been writing about blood on his map for years or days. The corner where Nimroz Province began was blackened by it. Blood tries to save everyone. He could feel it trying to put a scab on him, rusting on his arm, armor forming one color thick and cracking in his palm. He had never thought about blood cracking.

  How long had it been? He’d lost track. He was only making a few miles a day, slowed by caution, superstition, and fatigue. The rescue bird must have found the helo by now. He expected disappointment. He had come to rely on its constancy, a comfort from the labor of carrying possibilities. He went through the motions anyway, by habit, laying out the evasion chart and marking his way through territory outside Kandahar. He kept hearing the rasp of the truck. It seemed to be keeping its distance. He wasn’t sure if it was there, what part of his mind heard it. It kept him from any true rest, afraid of the sound of engines real or otherwise. Men with rifles. Groundlings.

  The land got large as he stumbled across it. He imagined that it grew in front of him, and he began to think that he had been walking in circles. The earth was spinning, orbiting the light. The sun moved too. His route was necessarily serpentine, the tilted terrain shrugging him one way or another. He was learning just how different maps and land were, his simple acceptance of symbols wearing away as he travelled. He had lost trust in depiction. No, that wasn’t it. Representation. There had been such certainty in the air, all the hills, forests, dunes, and towns clearly identified and named. He worried that he was just wandering. He thought he knew where the outpost was. His mother’s letter was all he had. An address blurred by winters and springs working on the ink. He recognized the name from briefings or classrooms or radio traffic or childhood. A name like it. His name. He wasn’t even sure he was reading it right, the words and numbers bled into blue shapes. How long had it been since anyone had written his name? His mother sent it to him with her new address when she moved so that he could find her when he returned. She wanted to die at home. Somewhere far out west. It wasn’t in her handwriting. She never wrote again. The letter arrived in the war and he carried it tuck
ed in his chart. He thought of her telling him he couldn’t find his ass with both hands. He remembered strands of her hair everywhere when the chemotherapy began.

  All helo missions returned to the place they started. The barracks was comfortable enough, but he slept in the bird out on the tarmac. He left his room empty but for a box that kept his mail. Cards from a kindergarten class in Virginia that wrote to him: “Dear Soldier, You are brave. Thank you for protecting us.” They drew flowers and tanks and eagles that looked like parrots and flags with too few stars. There was the letter from his mother telling him she had moved. She was sorry she couldn’t take all his things with her. He tried to remember what he had saved from his first nineteen years, but he couldn’t recall anything important. Their house was old, roof bent like a saddle and the hay barn collapsed. It was not a place anyone would buy. His room was probably still as he had left it, comics in the closet, plastic soldiers in a box under the bed, and a metal globe in the corner, names rusting off nations. He wondered if she had kept his copy of Goodnight Moon.

  He saw the Afghans from high above their fields, herds, and villages, the thump of the blades on his helo shaking dust down onto their beds and babies from the roofs of their huts. He wondered how he would know who he was looking for from so high. He only felt calm in the air. Some of the men in his unit stopped talking about going home after the first bird went down in the mountains. He was one of them. He wondered if the war was still being fought, patrols still chasing tracers, soldiers getting cards from kindergarten classes.

  He spread his map on the ground and studied it. It had been a long time since he had seen it in its entirety, the outline of a country cut by a frayed grid. The fold lines were rubbed bare and each square was now covered with layers of notes. The colors of contour lines, rivers and roads were consumed by language written in various inks, faded and smudged. Some had been written in the dark and was illegible, large childish letters trailing off an edge. The only rule was that nothing was written across a fold.

  He felt no urge to return to a world of rooms, no need inside him to belong anywhere with a single view. He didn’t consider himself homeless. A home wasn’t what he wanted anymore. He was dead reckoning, a term he liked to say to himself. “Dead reckoning.” He had thought a good bit on what it meant. Every meaning it could take on. His crash stayed in the present. There was no way out of the war but back up, airborne, the ground broken and troubled, people held to it by force. He moved again. Night came and he lay watching a wasted town by a dry lake. If no lights went on, he would explore at sunrise. Goodnight stars. Goodnight air.

  He sat in the gravel beside an abandoned library, books thrown through its windows, shattered glass blown onto the ground in their paths with the reference cards that had once marked their order. Every book had been tossed, the effort of some kind of rage. He sat there not reading, picking through pieces of a smashed plastic globe. The Taliban outlawed reading. They didn’t use maps either. They followed the paths of stories. It was hot, the sun bright, and he was in the shadow of the empty building. Most of the town had been burned or bombed years ago, the library upwind, full of paper, preserved. The street was straight, dropping out of sight into the valley. He had traced the road from the highway, an arrow directing passers to a town that was gone. A sign. The street ended at a ridge and smoke rose beyond it. Black smoke that came from oil. He couldn’t guess the distance. Too far to get to and close enough to see. It rose in a slow coil, heat twisting over the fire. He fell asleep.

  The dogs woke him. It was night and he was stiff, still propped against the library, a plastic fragment of the earth in his hand. They had encircled him at a distance and began yelping and howling, pacing as he stirred. He drew his feet back and pushed himself up the wall until he stood. They moved like coyotes, but looked larger, dark-shaped descendants of abandoned pets born with no memory of man as master. They could smell his wounds, sense his fright. Now he was certain they were from the war. The same dogs. He backed into the building, climbed the shelves, and lay on the dust. He floated there near the ceiling, dark filling the room and the outside all dirt and dogs for a thousand miles.

  In the morning they were gone. Vanished. He looked at the ridge. Smoke still rose far away. Tires, he thought. Maybe trash. His helicopter, crashed and burning, the dead crew cooking in their harnesses. He may have just come from it or circled all the way back. Fires didn’t light themselves out here in the barrens. He could hear an engine on the road. Someone was coming. The Afghans. The boy. He would have to move on, out into the blank badlands. Far off he could see the grey shapes of mountains. He held up the piece of puzzle he’d carried with him, matching it to a distant peak. He could make it if he kept moving. He wasn’t looking for anyplace on earth. He was searching for a way back into the sky.

  DEATH OF TIME

  by Maurice Emerson Decaul

  TESTIMONY OF SAFIA H.

  Purity

  Fire choked his house. A bandit at night, it came to steal what was most dear. Fire sneaked around corners and laid blankets of ash and rubble over faces. Someone danced in flames, locked in a death tango. Fire walked from sky to house and into courtyards and into the leader. Flames leapfrogged from room to room smashing windows like delinquent boys. The Outsiders pointed machines at the sky in defiance of fire but their dragon smoke was timid and ineffectual. Fire consumed them like a haboob consuming a city. Fire played with them like children playing in mud. Fire played with them like girls making snow angels in snow. Fire played with them like people dancing at a dance party. It licked them the way horny strangers lick each other’s faces. Fire fucked them hard and sweet like a couple on the verge. Fire lifted up a rock and found them hiding like scorpions. Fire fingered their assholes and came in their mouths. Fire painted the snow with them. Fire spun them in circles until they were dizzy and fell over. Fire dug holes and threw them in. Fire made new words come out of their mouths. Fire whistled to them. Fire made up songs and sang to them. Fire dressed like a demon and frightened them. Fire invented a new language and cursed them. Fire was a like a spider casting a web. Fire took them for a walk and showed them their sins. Fire stared them down. Fire walked into them. Fire knocked them down. Fire laughed at them and called them stupid. Fire pissed on their faces. Fire shot them when they ran. Fire hunted them. Fire invaded their bodies. Fire tongued them. Fire groped their cocks. Fire got rough with them and tied them up. Fire fucked them quickly and lost interest. Fire squatted above them and shat on their corpses.

  I

  The day the Outsiders showed up, I was on my way home with a chicken for dinner. Sporting beards extending past their throats to their suprasternal notches, they had shown up wearing black from top to bottom.

  Black shirts, black pants, and black head wraps.

  Some wore cartridge belts strapped across their chests. Some wore green bandanas. Others let loose their hair which varied in color and texture from blond curls to straight dark browns.

  They were uniformly dirty.

  Filthy from long months in the field. They smelled bad but were in good spirits, having overrun the last government checkpoints, killing some soldiers and parading the captured like slaves in a coffle, through the streets of my town.

  Some of them rode atop battle tanks, hair, blond and brown and black, like fire tinged wheat on the wind.

  Most of them carried a weapon known as the Machine. I knew the Machine because my father and brothers had kept several in their homes for self-protection. My brothers and father had taken their Machines which they named after their wives with them when they went to fight the Outsiders. It had been two weeks since my mother and younger sister Maryam, who was twelve, and I had heard from them.

  Later when the sun reached apogee they honked the horns of their dusty trucks. Using stolen bullhorns they called the residents to town center. Some of them went house to house knocking then entering, leaving with men and boys who were older than twelve. They spoke in accents unfamiliar to me, som
e more guttural than others. These were the leaders.

  They used loudspeakers to call everyone out to town center and when most everyone had shown up and pledged loyalty their leader addressed the crowd. He was short, ramrod slim after months in the field. He looked fatigued and in need of a bath to wash months of muck from his bullet colored hair. He looked too young. He was loquacious to a fault and went on and on about obedience to laws and stressed to us the importance of abiding by god’s path on earth.

  There would be no further sex outside of marriage or adultery no alcohol drinking or smoking no theft or banditry no games or music and no poetry since poets and poetry competed with god for attention he said.

  Women would now be under their guardianship at all times and women even as young as me would have to be completely covered in public. They threatened punishment for waywardness: public flogging, stoning, amputation, execution by crucifixion, or other methods up to and including firing squad, immolation, drowning, or beheading would be introduced.

  As they eulogized I weaved through the crowd searching for my mother and sister.

  My mother had sent me to buy provision for dinner. I had bought a chicken, some rice, and bread. These foodstuffs were expensive and hard to come by during the siege but a few vendors courageous or foolish, set up market for a few hours before morning shelling. Morning shelling was more of a nuisance. The Outsiders were wildly inaccurate. On occasion they would land a shell in the market or on a roadway or hospital but most shells landed without incident.