A Hard and Heavy Thing

by Matthew J. Hefti

  “What else?”

  “We lifted weights at night when we couldn’t sleep.”

  “What else?”

  “We took up chewing tobacco to quit smoking cigarettes and we ended up doing both.”

  “What else?”

  “We read cheap books that people sent to us and we learned the value of pulp fiction.”

  “What else?”

  “We filled a shower entirely with shaving cream and videotaped some new guy opening the curtain.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He said ‘aw’ and went to another shower.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What else?”

  “We played our guitars together late at night when we got back from missions. The adrenaline flowed, so we’d start loud. Other guys sat around us and smoked Cuban cigars. Each night, like a ritual, we slowed down.”

  “What else?” she whispered.

  “We were the lullabies.” Levi picked up the coffee mug that sat next to his closed notebook. He looked in it, swirled it. “This guy,” he said. “A big guy named Tom Hooper liked to sing harmony.”

  She said nothing. She held her breath, hoping he would say more.

  He set the mug on the table, picked up his notebook, and stood up. “I suppose I have things to do.”

  “C’mon. What else?” She did not want him to stop.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I want to know what you guys did over there. I want to know why Nick never talks anymore.”

  “He never talks because he listens.”

  “He doesn’t listen to me.”

  A pained look came across his face. He put his hand on the doorknob.

  “Another time?”

  “I don’t know,” he said looking down. He looked up and into her eyes. He looked conflicted, but as if he were searching her instead of himself. “Sure. Yeah. Sometime. I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Decisive. So I can take you at your word?”

  “You can take me however you want.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  He sighed deeply. “Okay. Yes.”

  3.8 CHEKHOV’S GUN

  [I had a 6,000-word section here in which I described the few weeks I spent bumming around right after leaving the army. I tried to explain my lack of direction. I bemoaned how the army didn’t even give me a chance to plan my exit, just kicked me out the door. My to-do list included only two things: 1) Going to Walter Reed every day for two weeks to visit a member of my unit named Toby, and 2) Getting extremely wasted for the entire month after the visit except for the hours I spent laid out in my Weston bed in the perfect midday blackness of my hotel room.

  Toby was already a skinny kid, but he instantly lost seventy-three pounds when some pressure plate hooked up to a jug of homemade explosives took both legs and an arm while we were on a dismounted patrol on some unnamed goat trail in some worthless village between Sperwan and Masum Ghars. The sad thing is, Toby didn’t get the worst of it. He just stared at the wall while I was there—his silence making no secret of his bitterness.

  And so I tore up all those pages because you don’t need to hear about that. You don’t need to hear 500 words on the loneliness of the hospital bed because you’ve been there. You don’t need me to pontificate on the fierce warrior-ethos of so many and the deep despair of more. You don’t need a graph on the medicinal sting of the air, because it resides in your own memory. Mostly, I thought as I tore up all those pages, you don’t need to be reminded of how when I visited you, I spent all of five minutes in your room before once again leaving you to deal with it all alone.

  I tore up the pages because I didn’t want to share with you that—despite the fact that Toby wanted to curse God and die, despite the fact that he wanted nothing do with me or anyone else—I stayed. I showed up and I stayed, just to be there. Sure, I was hung over every day for every visit; and yes, just like with you, I had nothing to offer, nothing at all that would make it better; but at least I was there. In a way, it was easier to stay with him because even in our silence we commiserated. Our shared gall made us a kindred pair.

  I destroyed the pages because I didn’t think you should know any of that. I didn’t do it because you’d think less of me. I thought it would make you think less of what I think of you. And that’s the last thing I want this note to do. The thing is, everyone there who knew I was there to see you raved about what an inspiration you were, how you touched so many.

  I could see it even in those few minutes. You were so positive. You were so optimistic. Worse, you were so thankful. I had none of that in me, and I was ashamed. Worse, I was angry that something like that could happen to you. And every cheery word you said about the goodness of God made me want to slap you across the grafts on your melted face for your stupid and misplaced foolishness.

  The truth is, along with everything else, I’m sorry for that too. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.]

  Now that Levi had returned home, he felt as lost as ever. He was back, but he didn’t know why. There had been no job lined up, no school admittance, no plan of any kind. His return, rather than serving a purpose, felt like nothing more than natal homing.

  Nick told Levi to make himself comfortable in his house, but after showering and setting up a small space in the basement, Levi felt strange wandering the home of a friend he hadn’t seen in years, sitting in the kitchen of his wife, who—with her laundry baskets, bold green curtains, matching sofa set, bank job, and probing questions—seemed strange, domestic, adult, completely humorless, and utterly normal. This new Eris, although still a beauty to behold, seemed nothing like the sensuous, snarky, and rebellious girl he had wanted when he was younger. This new Eris matched his friend. In fact, she seemed made for him.

  To get away from her, he had gone down to the basement with meaningless mumbles and stammers. He lay on the simple double mattress set up in the corner of the broad semi-furnished room. He knew he had things he could do—get a car, apply for jobs, pick up his stuff from his parents, find an apartment—but he was tired, hung over, and overwhelmed. He didn’t know where to begin.

  He’d start with a car, he thought. Then a job. He’d look for an apartment next week, or the week after. He just needed a little time to get over whatever funk he had been in, or whatever it was. Maybe he had been spending too much time alone. Maybe in his quest for the perfect ascetic life, he had given up too much. Maybe he just needed a little time around normal people, friends, a little normal conversation. Maybe he just needed someone who would drink with him. Someone to talk to. He needed time to hear the thoughts of someone other than himself. He needed some time to get it together. Just a little time. It wouldn’t last forever. He’d start with a car. But he was so tired, he couldn’t get going.

  [Of course because of the party I had slept poorly, but I had woken worse.

  That morning, even as drunk as I was, I woke in a snap to footsteps near my head. I kept my eyes closed and stayed still, but I was certain that if movement didn’t give me away, the thunderous beating of my heart surely would. I moved my fingers gently under the pillow, trying to get a firm handhold on my M9 without being too obvious, but I couldn’t find it. I swept my hand along the ground to put my fingers on the rifle that slept mere inches beneath my cot, but that wasn’t there either. The adrenaline rush had turned into a full-blown panic. I popped my eyes open, ready to catapult into whatever Afghan National Army troop was getting ready to blast me, hoping at least to surprise him, or at the very least, keep his fire from becoming accurate or lethal. I was not ready to be the next victim in some green-on-blue shooting, which had grown all too common while I was over there in Afghanistan.

  Of course, all I could see was your wife bent over a laundry basket.

  I closed my eyes again to take account of my senses. My hip sank into a plush cushion. Too soft for a cot. My fingers had been dragging along the pile of thick mid-grade carpet. Too n
ice, too soft, too clean. Too dissimilar from wood, concrete, or dirt to be the floor in a safe house, qalat, or combat outpost. No rifle because they took that from me. Breathing through my nose had been difficult, as stuffy as it was, yet still, I smelled vanilla, not goat dung.

  Eris had no idea what I had been through by the time I rolled over, looked at the ceiling, put my hands on my chest, and told her that she scared the hell out of me. Perhaps if she did, she wouldn’t have given me such a hard time.]

  Yes, he’d get the car. But first, a nap.

  He drifted into a semi-somnolent state, which wasn’t quite sleeping, but it wasn’t far from dreaming. The fresh image of Nick’s scarring manifested itself in front of his eyes. Although the burns weren’t as gruesome as when they were fresh, their permanence almost made them worse. He replayed the particulars of the attack in his mind and he thought of how he had pulled and yanked on Nick. How much worse had that injured him? He could almost feel the skin sliding away from Nick’s hamstrings and buttocks as he lifted him toward the opening where the door had been. He thought how if the IED would have gone off a second—one single second––earlier it would have rung all their bells, but they would all be alive. Everything would have been different.

  He thought the same things he had thought a thousand times: One wire touches another and the stupid bomb shorts out. A tanker doesn’t crash and Tampa doesn’t get backed up, changing their plans. Gassner doesn’t go nuts on some kids and Levi doesn’t try covering it up. EOD shows up sooner to clear the first IED site. Nick drives the Humvee one foot farther left as he travels along Boa. Anything. Any little stupid thing. One single change of one single link in the chain of events and things would have been different, and Levi wouldn’t have been trapped staring down an eternity of circuitous and obsessive thoughts that wouldn’t stop turning, churning, burning, and repeating in his mind. If it wasn’t the attack in Iraq, it was any number of battles on his first trip to Afghanistan. If it wasn’t that, it was what got him kicked out of the army.

  And this, he thought. All of this is what it means to regret.

  He flung off the blanket, enraged that he should never be allowed to enjoy a moment’s rest, even when alone with no agenda. He threw his pillow across the room, furious that he should never enjoy a single moment of silence for as long as he might live because the memories never left and the pictures and images remained and the questions were never answered and the past could never change.

  He left the house and waited for half an hour in a Plexiglas booth, shivering the entire time. He stepped onto the first bus and stopped at the first car dealership he saw. He bought the cheapest car on the lot, a rusted-out maroon Blazer, circa 1992. He paid with his debit card, had the temporary plates fixed, and he drove straight to his parents’ house in Bangor.

  He hoped to get some of his stuff before they got home from work. He knew he’d have to sit down and apologize to his mother for how he had embarrassed her at the party, but he was not yet ready for that confrontation. He knew that the boxes he had mailed had to be there by now, and that included all the boxes of books he had mailed back from Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else because he didn’t want to lug them around the world, yet neither could he bring himself to get rid of them.

  He first went to the unfinished half of the basement with the storage shelves and the laundry machines. He found some taped-up cardboard boxes underneath the stairs, but they only contained Christmas decorations and ornaments. Checking his bedroom next, he grabbed a paring knife from the kitchen and walked down the hall, expecting to find the heavily taped boxes stacked in the middle of the room. When he opened the door, sunlight framed two white-and-blue-striped curtains, which hung mostly closed on a modern stainless steel rod. There were no boxes on the cream carpet, which had stripes from a recent vacuuming, even visible in the relative darkness. Levi didn’t recognize the queen bed that took up half the room’s right side, nor did he recognize the red, white, and blue striped bedding. The wall on the left held an elaborate modular shelving system, which had been set up around a dresser matching the bed’s headboard.

  He nearly didn’t enter the room at all, thinking maybe his parents had set up a guest room, or maybe they had a strange arrangement with a boarder that he didn’t know about, or maybe Paul had moved the stuff in since returning from DC. The bed, however, had a folded note on the pillow, and it was this note that piqued his curiosity enough to get him in the room. He flipped on the light and thought it strange that he should feel like an intruder.

  He picked up the note, which was short and written in his mother’s handwriting.

  •••

  My dearest Levi, Son,

  Forgive the liberties we took with the furnishings. We figured you were a little old for the single bed and basketball curtains that were in here when you left. Combo to the safe is your birthday. Books are in alphabetical order, in the same way you packed them in the boxes. OCD much?

  I can’t tell you how happy we are to have you back. You make us both so proud.

  All our love,

  Mom and Dad

  •••

  He read the note again and turned around to look at the shelving system lined with all the books he had mailed back. Sherman Alexie . . . Charles Bukowski . . . Stephen Crane . . . David James Duncan . . . Denis Johnson . . . Ken Kesey . . . Jack Kerouac . . . Tim O’Brien . . . George Saunders . . . Kurt Vonnegut . . . David Foster Wallace. Sure enough, he thought. Everything in order, spines flush. Sitting on top of the dresser and recessed into the shelving system was a small digital safe, similar to the ones found in hotel closets.

  He opened the drawers in the dresser and found the T-shirts he had mailed back, all neatly folded. He shook one out and smelled it. His mother had washed the laundry he had mailed back. She had folded it. She had placed it in drawers for him. His heart broke as he pictured his mother whistling and smiling and putting this room together with the best of intentions.

  He turned around and rushed to the closet, fearing what he would find. Indeed, when he pulled the string to turn on the light, all the pants and the few button-up shirts he had mailed home hung in a neat row. Several pairs of boots and low quarters sat in a neat row on the floor. His class A uniform had the position of honor. It was encased in plastic that was clear except for the logo of the local dry cleaning shop. Each ribbon and accoutrement had been returned to its proper place on the uniform with care and precision. Levi pictured his mother asking his father a million questions as she tried putting the uniform back together before his dad got tired of answering questions and got up from his recliner to patiently do the work himself, referring his questions about new and unfamiliar ribbons and their proper placements to an Internet search engine.

  He pulled the string and turned off the light. He slid down with his back on the doorjamb of the closet until he sat on the floor. He shook his head in disbelief. He wanted to hug them for their sweetness and their unconditional love and their misguided pride and their total obliviousness to everything about him. But did they really expect a twenty-six-year-old combat vet to come home and live in his childhood bedroom?

  He was past all that. A grown man. Self-reliant.

  He stood and grabbed one of the trunks from the back of the closet and tossed it onto the bed. He flung it open and pulled his pants and shirts from the closet. He threw the clothes into the trunk. He pulled an assortment of books from the shelf and did the same with them. Likewise, he packed a handful of clothes from each drawer. The safe once again caught his eye, and he punched his six-digit numerical birthday into the number pad on the safe. He opened it, and his Glock 19 lay inside. Two loaded magazines and two boxes of ammo lay next to it. He had mailed it home rather than get arrested with it in DC. The magazine well of the weapon was clear, but Levi racked the slide to be sure the chamber was clear. He put the weapon, magazines, and ammo in his trunk. He gave the foreign room one last lingering look before turning off the light and closing the door.


  3.9 DID YOU THINK I COULDN’T HEAR EVERY WORD THROUGH THE VENTS?

  When Nick got home from work, he didn’t see the Blazer in the driveway, nor did he see it parked on the street. He crawled into bed with his already sleeping wife. He asked if she had seen Levi since that morning. She mumbled into her pillow. He couldn’t understand her so he asked, “What did you say?”

  She lifted her head slightly, but kept her eyes closed. “You need to knock this off. Hire another manager already.”

  He said, “This again? Should I just start ticking down the list of why that won’t work right now? You want to quit your job to get your graduate degree. Great. I’m proud of you, but it’s not free. We have renovations left to pay off. Your idea, by the way. We have a mortgage here. Your idea, by the way. The profit margins are nonexistent, and we lost too much with the whole Kathy ordeal. Hired on your recommendation, by the way. Should I keep going?”

  “Whatever.” She turned her head so her mouth wasn’t smooshed into the pillow. “Then sell the place. You ever do the math? With what you bring home and with the hours you’re working, you make like, three bucks an hour.”

  “Five years. Five years is how long most businesses in the food industry take to turn a profit. Do we really need go over this again too?”

  “Ha.” There was only cynicism in her laughter. “Most businesses in the food industry need to secure financing to open. They need to build from the ground up. Most haven’t been around fifteen years before being inherited.”

  “Hello?” He propped himself up on his elbow. “You’re the one who convinced me to get financing for the renovations that were your idea. Do you really want to start a fight or throw this back on me now that it’s too late?”

  She sat up and tugged a blanket from him and pulled it toward her side of the bed. “I agreed to spruce it up a little. I didn’t think you were going to tear the place apart.”