A Hard and Heavy Thing

by Matthew J. Hefti

  His voice grew soft. “And I was so tired. So tired.”

  He put his hand over his face.

  She rubbed his back. “That’s all in the past,” she told him. “You’re here now.”

  “I picked it up,” he said. “I was just curious is all. I even cleared it two, three, four times. I swear I cleared it. I stood up and looked in the mirror. Curious is all. I put it to my head.”

  He dropped the cigarette into his nearly empty beer bottle. He turned to her. “I put it up to my temple, like this. I wondered how easy it would be to pull the trigger. I tried squeezing and I closed my eyes and I began to squeeze, but I couldn’t. I opened my eyes again and saw the placid look on my face and the void in my own eyes and I saw the pistol against my head. What difference does it make? I thought. You’re already dead. Have been dead for quite some time. I was going to pull the trigger for real then. I don’t know. Just to see if I could. To see what it would feel like.”

  Eris exhaled. She reached out and put a hand on top of Levi’s. She squeezed his hand. “What else?”

  “I didn’t get the chance.”

  Levi lit another cigarette with one hand. He leaned back against the couch and smoked. He left his other hand under Eris’s. “I didn’t get the chance. An Air Force captain I had never seen before walked in and freaked out. I guess he was part of some PRT, provincial reconstruction team, and they were stopping into our COP because they had busted a tie rod or something. He came into our B-hut because obviously the COP was nearly empty. He was looking for someone in charge.”

  Levi laughed. “A regular deus ex machina,” he said. He shook his head and turned his arm around.

  He held Eris’s hand.

  “Anyway,” he went on. “This prick signed a sworn statement saying I had a loaded magazine with me. But I swear I cleared it. Or at least, I thought I did. But he said I had a magazine and he had two bars on his collar and I had none, so that was that. And that made all the difference between the army calling it suicidal ideation and a suicide attempt. They tried to keep it low key, to keep me in country, but once it’s labeled a suicide attempt, the entire army has to have a simultaneous knee-jerk freak-out.”

  He waved his cigarette and grew agitated. She tried pulling her hand back, but he squeezed it and held on.

  “So they made me do this video chat with a psychologist whose sole purpose—or so it seemed at the time—was to get me to tell the truth to myself. ‘The truth will set you free,’ he said. ‘That’s a quote from the Bible.’ And I told him I could quote it too, and I said, ‘What is truth?’ I said it very ruefully.”

  Eris tried smiling, but it was a sad smile. “Did he get it?”

  “Of course not. He didn’t get it. He kept on howling that only if I tell the truth to myself can I heal, but I kept telling him the truth, which was that I had cleared the gun first. It wasn’t loaded. I swore it wasn’t loaded. And the Internet connection kept going out and he wasn’t listening to me. I got so angry at all of it, got so angry that this was their idea of helping me, so I threw the computer monitor against the wall. That triggered an Article 15 Non-Judicial Punishment for violations of the UCMJ, the Uniformed Code of Military Justice.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  He shrugged. “So they sent me back to Fort Drum. Purgatory in rear detachment. Rear D we called it. Everyone else in Rear D were these guys who had skated the deployment, did whatever they could to get a duty-limiting profile. They were all guys who had never been in combat, so they had no clue. None. So if I was ostracized before, after the reported suicide attempt and Article 15, imagine how I felt in Rear D.”

  “I can’t imagine.” She didn’t know what to say. She stood up and pulled her hand away as she did. “Do you want some water? I could use some water,” she said. “I think you should have some water.”

  He spilled beer down his chin. “I drank a lot,” he said. “If you think I drink a lot now, you should have seen me then. Ha. This is nothing. After I don’t even know how many days waking up late and smelling like booze, they cut me loose. Yup. That’s right,” he said. “They cut me loose. Oh, but quietly, of course.”

  Levi spoke with bravado and he stood. He swayed with his chest out against his unseen enemy. He took a step toward her. She lost her balance and fell backward until she was sitting on the couch.

  “They could have charged me with who knows how many counts of dereliction of duty and who knows what else, but the PR wouldn’t look good if they took a Silver Star Winner, a bona fide war hero to court just for being tired and depressed. And we all know nothing is more important to the military than their precious PR, their precious image, no matter how many of their own they end up eating in the process. So they burned me. Escorted me off the base like a common criminal and said they were doing me a favor. And here we are.”

  He plopped down next to her.

  “And here we are.”

  “Because I got my friends killed and I got Nick hurt.”

  She shook her head. She didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “It’s true,” he said. He put a hand on her cheek.

  She shook her head.

  She shook her head against all the ways he said he was to blame for what had happened to Nick, all the ways he was at fault, all the ways it should have been him instead. She shook her head when he pulled a small stone from his pocket and starting raving like a madman; when he begged her to look at it; when he pleaded for her to touch it so she would feel it too, so she would really know how heavy it was. She shook her head so hard she stopped hearing him.

  “Are you even listening?” he asked. “Why some and not others?” he asked. “If it’s not my fault, then whose is it? Why did it happen? Why? Why? Why?”

  She cried. “Why ask why?”

  “You sound like Nick.”

  She put her head down. She wiped at her tears.

  He took one of her hands. She sniffed, stopped crying.

  And she had an idea. She tried her best to sound like the best of Nick. She tried to sound full of grace and kindness. She tried to sound wise and knowledgeable and full of faith.

  “When the ancient Israelites were wandering in the desert,” she said, “the priests offered sacrifices to the Lord. There were sacrifices for everything.”

  He let his head lean back against the top of the couch, and he turned to look at her, bored, eyes glazed.

  His disinterest emboldened her. She would not be deterred. She was—for the first time in her life—possessed by the Holy Ghost.

  “In one of these prescribed sacrifices,” she said. “To purify an unclean house? The priest would take two birds. Imagine this priest in his robes and his turban with all twelve ornate stones on his breastplate and the Urim and Thummim hidden away inside. Imagine him carrying these two doves in their rickety wooden cage to the altar where he sets it next to a small block of cedar, a handful of hyssop, a length of scarlet yarn, and clay pot filled with water.

  “He did this,” she said. “Picture it. He opens the cage just far enough to reach inside and grab one of the birds and he takes hold of it without letting the other go. He holds this cooing dove over the clean water and he strokes its head and then he wrings its neck. He holds it there and lets the blood drip into the pot while the other bird watches. Then he tosses the dead bird to the side, discarding it like it’s less than nothing. Then he turns to the other dove, the one who saw his friend, his mate, his love killed in front of him. The priest grabs the second dove and holds it in one hand, tight enough to feel its little heart flutter with fear. And this bird looks from side to side, his eyes darting around looking for an escape. He tries lifting his wings but he can’t, and his heart beats faster and faster. With his other hand, the priest grabs the wood, hyssop, and yarn and he puts them in the water. Then he holds this terrified bird with both hands and he plunges it into the bowl, down under the water, painting his white feathers red with blood. Then he takes it out to the field, wet, scared, shaking,
covered in the blood of his friend, and he opens his hands. For no reason but grace, the bird flies free.”

  Levi let out an exasperated sigh. “Did you ever consider that bird? What a miserable life he must have led after that?”

  She shook her head sadly, her fire now gone. She had no power to make the blind see. “Are you sure you don’t want water?”

  She stood.

  He followed her to the sink. “What then?” he asked. “Is that dove ever the same? Does that blood mark him? Ostracize him? Does he share that story with all the other birds? Would they care if he did? Is he grateful? Or does he live with guilt because he lives and flies and roosts? While the other bird lies limp, broken, dead? Does he ever cry for no reason?”

  “Or,” she asked him, “does he savor every moment? Every taste of worm, every ray of sunshine, every gust that lifts his wings and allows him to coast upon the breeze? Does he savor every touch?”

  She had read accounts of soldiers in battle being in such grave danger of getting overrun by the enemy that they had no choice but to call in artillery so close to their own position that they risked injury or death from the incoming fire they had ordered. The term for this was danger close.

  As Eris ran the tap water at the sink, Levi stood danger close.

  3.17 BUT DIDN’T YOU KNOW THAT

  ERIS WAS THE GODDESS OF DISCORD

  AND WAR?

  Levi fell on his knees at the foot of her bed as if in worship, or in prayer. He cupped the narrow curve of Eris’s left foot in his hand, and he inspected her perfectly proportioned toes, each toenail glazed with pomegranate polish. The large toenail had a minuscule chip on the right side, but they were otherwise pristine. He kissed the top of her foot and held her arch against his cheek.

  “Don’t,” she said. Eris lay on her side with her head half-buried in her bare arms, the plain pink sheet covering her thighs, hips, and torso, up to the top swell of her breasts, just hiding what lay underneath. Levi couldn’t see a bra strap, but he could see her cleavage at the edge of the linen. He thought of pulling on the sheet to expose all of her, to see exactly how far he could have gone, but he didn’t dare do it.

  “What,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to do anything.”

  She yanked her foot away and pulled her covers up to her neck.

  “Please,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “And what do you have to be sorry about?” When he didn’t answer right away, she said, “Why are you even still here? You shouldn’t still be here.”

  Was he still there? He remembered stumbling up the driveway, letting the screen door clang behind him as he walked into the entryway to ring the doorbell, but that was hours ago. Still awake when he arrived, she had opened the door and looked down at the bottle of vodka in his hands. She had shaken her head when he asked about Nick, looking down at the bottle again. A starving child looking at food. She hadn’t even asked why he was wet.

  He had talked. He remembered that he had talked, but he couldn’t remember what he had said. She had looked tense. He had started crying. Blubbering like a baby was more like it. She had taken the glass right from his hands and had sipped from it before grabbing one of her own.

  In the bedroom he now said, “I’m not still here. I’m here again. I thought maybe Nick would be home by now.”

  “He’s not.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “We need to talk about this.”

  “We don’t need to talk about anything.”

  He turned around and sat on the floor with his back against the foot of her bed. He put his head in his hands and moaned. As he sat there breathing—deeply in, deeply out—his head filled with static. He knew he had done something terrible. Now he couldn’t make a decision, and he didn’t know what to say to lead this situation in the right direction. “I’m not myself.”

  “That’s what everyone has been telling you since you came home,” she said. It came out muffled as she tried to bury herself deeper into her arms and her pillow.

  He talked to himself more than to Eris. “I was going to have adventures. I was going to do things. Important things. Good things. This isn’t how my life was supposed to turn out.”

  “There is no such thing as supposed to.”

  He ignored her. “This isn’t the person I was supposed to be.”

  “Get out.”

  What had he done? He tried to remember. They had drunk the rest of the bottle together. She drank fast and she drank well. He had stopped crying at one point and they had begun laughing. Out of the blue—was it out of the blue?—he had asked if she remembered the night before he and Nick had left for the army, the night they kissed. She then looked at him slyly out of the corner of her eye. “What are you talking about?” she had said. Had she smiled? “You know what I’m talking about. The single greatest night of my life,” he had said. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” she had said smiling. “Really,” he had said. He had looked into her green eyes and he refused to look away. And she had refused to look away from him. She had giggled.

  He shook his head, trying to clear the memory, or to bring it into focus. He stood up and towered over her bed. “This is messed up,” he said. “This here.” He spread his hands out. “This is wrong. It needs to be fixed.”

  She sat up quickly in anger, and the sheet fell to her lap. Shadows and hair fell across her face, but soft light played on her breasts showing her dark nipples, perfect and round in contrast to her white skin. She snatched up the sheet again, but Levi still stared, filled with an inexplicable desire for her that tore against his intentions to reconcile, to apologize, to be better than who he was.

  “There’d be nothing to fix if you weren’t showing up at my house in the middle of the night when he’s out working,” she said.

  He lifted his eyes up to hers. She looked down at the sheets. “What?” he said. “This isn’t my—”

  “You’re going to somehow fix this by kissing my feet and trying to come onto me again?” With a fiery boldness she looked up again and locked eyes with him. “It’s creepy.”

  “Again?” he said. “What do you mean, again? I never—”

  Or had he? There were more gaps in his memory than details. They had drunk in the living room, smoking and ashing right there in the house. They leaned against each other as they sat on the floor, their backs against the couch. They had held hands. Of that he was sure. “Oh I missed you,” she had said leaning against him. Or she had said, “We missed you.” Did it matter which? At some point, they had kissed. Her lips had felt as soft as he remembered. But now, it was all fragmented. He couldn’t remember how it had all transpired.

  Here in the bedroom she maintained her eye contact. He felt accused. One more time, Levi fought the confusion that welled within. He surveyed her neck, her shoulders, the shadows across her face, the blazing eyes that reflected the ambient light, and he walked out of the room.

  He walked down the hall and stood in the middle of the living room, lost. He looked around and noticed how ordinary the room looked. How normal. How nothing at all indicated that anything unusual had gone on. The beer bottles had been cleaned up. It smelled more like Febreze than cigarette smoke. Who would ever know?

  He made a decision. He collapsed on the couch. He resolved to stay.

  As tired as he was, his mind was racing, and he didn’t dare fall asleep. There was a time when he would have stayed in her bedroom and fought. He would have rationalized. He would have cajoled or pleaded. He would have emerged triumphant. He knew as he stared at the ceiling that his younger self would have never retreated from a battle. He would have stayed in there and told her she had it all wrong; she was misremembering what had happened.

  [I know this is painful to read, but I have to tell you.]

  He would have made her question herself and everything she knew about herself as long as he came out victorious. But every old soldier knows that sometimes the casualties are not worth the win, and Levi was
an old soldier.

  He rested with the thought that the couch wasn’t an all-out assault, but at least it wasn’t an all-out retreat.

  He heard her clear her throat, and he looked up. She wore a turtleneck sweater, baggy jeans, and thick woolen socks. Her arms were crossed over her chest. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Someone has to have the courage to do the right thing,” he said.

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I’m staying. I’m waiting for Nick and I’m going to tell him.”

  “You need to leave. You need to leave right now.” Her voice shook, but it was also hard.

  “I’m going to tell him everything. Everything up to and including tonight. I need to tell him.”

  “Whatever. Just go.”

  “And you’ll tell him?” He wanted her to get down on her own knees and plead with him not to. He wanted her to beg him not to say anything. She’d make it right. She was sorry. She’d confess her own sins and take all the blame necessary and be humble and righteous and penitent. He wanted her to swear she’d seek absolution so he wouldn’t have to.

  “Hasn’t he suffered enough? What will that gain? Seriously. And you think he’ll take your side about tonight? You think he’ll listen to you? Find you blameless?”

  “You don’t know what we have. We’re brothers,” he said. “We’ve been through war together; we can get through this.” As he said it, and as he heard his words aloud with his own ears, he felt hopelessly stupid. But still, he hoped she would fall on her knees and paw at his chest. He hoped she would pull her shirt off and slide out of her pants and claw at her socks and present herself to him. He hoped she’d lean over him naked, place her hands on his cheeks and turn his face to her and kiss his mouth, his closed eyes, and his forehead as she cried and said she’d do anything at all if he didn’t tell Nick that they’d kissed. Anything. She’d do anything.