[But trust me in this: She wouldn’t do anything. Nothing. She wouldn’t kiss me back. She wouldn’t relent. And she wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. I’m the one to blame here.]
“I said get out.”
He swung his legs out and sat up.
“Now.”
Everything about her boiled up inside him and he stood up and moved in front of her. She didn’t move, though his shoulders heaved and his breath seethed and he felt seconds from exploding in anger. She stared him down and wouldn’t relent.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
He brushed past her through the house. He closed the front door lightly, not knowing if he’d ever return. He lingered in the vestibule for a moment, and then silently placed his spare key above the door. He winced at the creaking of the screen door that led outside, and he held it so it wouldn’t slam.
Levi turned the corner, walked west on Wall Street, and tucked his hands into his pockets to protect them from the early morning chill. He walked from Liberty Street, from the home Eris and Nick had made for themselves, all the way west through the mud puddles in Copeland Park, along the banks of the frigid Black River. He rested on a bench before getting up and making his way to Riverside Park. He found some rocks near the water and sat like he always used to do before he left town years ago.
He thought of nothing. He didn’t think of the way the plastic on a Humvee seat bubbled and boiled when licked by flames. He didn’t think of the way human skin did the same. He didn’t think about the way a nine-millimeter Beretta looks in the mirror when it’s pressed against your own temple. Or how before he saw the bullet-hole in Brian’s neck just south of Sperwan Ghar, he saw the shock in his eyes—the wide and vacant stare that accompanied the complete and immediate occlusion of his airway, which was born from shock and not pain. The shock was born from Brian’s realization that things like this really did happen to you and not the other guy, and this is exactly what it feels like. He didn’t think of the screaming. The multitude of screams. The myriad screams. The plethora of screams. The innumerable screams. All the various screams. He didn’t think of how, when he was cranking a tourniquet on Brody Gassner’s thigh, he wanted to use the tourniquet as a garrote so Brody would just shut the hell up already. He didn’t think of Tom Hooper suspended against a backdrop of smoke and flames or of the way Weber’s eyes bulged in death. He didn’t think of Nick, and he certainly didn’t think of Eris.
CODA
REWRITES & RETROSPECTS
IN HOC SIGNO VINCES
C.1 THIS IS WHERE WE MUST BEGIN
April 6th, 2010–July 4th, 2010
Levi didn’t think of how easy it would be to walk into the water. How many kids in their twenties had simply disappeared into the water there? He’d just be one more. They could hardly even call it suicide. Just another drunk kid stumbling into the river. Happens every year in this town. As comforting as the water seemed, he could not do that to his friends and family. At least not yet. Not that he couldn’t walk into the water or end it all, but he couldn’t leave without telling Nick everything, without at least giving him a note to tell him why he did it.
The wind bit his cheeks. His ears burned. His toes slowly deadened, and he sat there until he could no longer move them. When he felt sufficiently numb, he stood and walked on wooden legs up State Street until it connected with Third and took him to his apartment downtown.
He smoked a cigarette outside Coconut Joe’s, cupping the asthenic cherry against the ever-growing wind. After finishing, Levi trudged up the stairs to the modest apartment above the bar.
The bass music from the club bludgeoned his ears, and the sound of parties and pleasure beckoned to him. He was filled with an urge to lose himself in the drinks and the girls and the music, but for once, he resisted.
He went to the card table and folding chair he had set up in the corner of the studio. He took a black-and-white composition book from the top of a stack of black-and-white composition books, and he opened it to the first blank page. He set the book on the table, and he sat down to complete his confession.
He sat down to do what Nick told him to do.
He sat down to write.
He had to explain things, had to make some sense of everything, had to get it all off his chest. He wrote about Eris. He wrote about Nick. About his dead friends, his family, himself.
He wrote until his wrist grew sore; he took a break to ponder, and then he took up his pen and continued.
He put people in convoys and threw bullets at them, and he wrote people into Humvees with bombs underneath them. It wasn’t that hard, because they were only characters, right? He forced young kids to make the worst decisions of their lives and he made them walk into no-win situations with blindfolds on. He put people in trees and threw rocks at them, most of the time not even bothering to get them down—because that’s how life really worked.
What if? he thought. What if Cain never killed Abel?
He wrote about his own tight fingers around the neck of his best friend, his beloved brother, mere seconds from the satisfying pop of a crushed windpipe.
Sometimes he cried. Salty tears plopped onto the white paper, and later, when they dried, left little circular ripples that stiffened the pages; but this was all part of the process, all part of the upheaval. He put into words what he couldn’t think about at the river, what he couldn’t explain to his dad, and what he couldn’t express aloud since he’d come home. He didn’t know what good it would do, but at least he was doing something.
When he could no longer think straight and when his wrist was so swollen he could barely move it—long after the club had ushered her patrons home—when the sky turned pink and then blue outside, he adjusted the painter’s drop cloths that he used to curtain the windows and he took off his clothes.
He folded them and put them in neat and sorted piles instead of strewing them across the floor as he had done for the past year. He did it consciously as if this action meant he was turning things around. As if caring about a detail was evidence that he was making progress.
As he did when he was a child, he got down to petition the Lord in the old-fashioned way, on his knees, and he said some bedtime prayers. For the first time in a very long time, he asked for mercy, for daily bread, for serenity, and for wisdom.
When he woke, he typed what he had written, and he wrote again. At some point in the night before—he didn’t know when—what he had been writing turned into something more than a simple suicide note. It had turned into a love letter, and he felt like he couldn’t stop until he finished. Until he had written every word he had inside him to write, he could not in any way give up the ghost.
He continued his confessional. Each night he returned to the river and thought the same dark thoughts, but he was not yet ready. Each night he returned home to pray the same desperate prayers, and each morning he woke to continue that, or rather this, note. It was in this process that Levi walked, until one night in early July, something extraordinary happened.
He typed his final word. His fingers rested on the keyboard. There was a moment of complete stillness between breaths. There was no clattering of keys. There was no percussion from the club below. There was no conversation in the hallway, no buzzing of electronics, no whooshing of ventilation, and no humming of traffic. Even the wind had stopped blowing. He was done. He had written every word. There was nothing left to be said. For the first time in his life, he was content.
Then he exhaled and the world returned. The smoky stench of the apartment filled his nose when he inhaled again. The fan rattled in the window. Tires screeched and a horn honked. Someone in the hallway yelled an obscenity and slammed the door.
When Levi was immersed in his work, he had felt better. He felt like what he was doing was important. Each word that came out of him made him lighter. Now, he was done.
Levi’s heart quickened. He grew nervous. He chewed on a fingernail. He saved the file and sent it to the printer. He stood up and p
aced as it printed, and when the printer ran out of paper, he refilled it. He smoked a cigarette as he stacked the hundreds of pages and waited for it to quit printing. When it was complete, he picked up the stack of paper and felt the thing that he held in his hands. It was hard and it was heavy and it was just as he had feared.
It was nothing but a stack of paper. Nothing but words. He had begun the process alone and now that he had finished, he remained alone. If he had confessed, if he had explained, if he had said anything of value at all, he had said it only to himself, and that meant nothing.
He paced and he smoked. He rummaged through his cupboards looking for a drink. When he found none, he rummaged through the footlockers under his bed. Finally, he found two single-drink bottles of vodka stuffed inside some toilet paper rolls in his old duffel bag. He slurped them down, welcoming the burn down his throat.
He stood over his manuscript again. He resisted the urge to throw it in the incinerator. He turned to the end and scribbled a final apology note in his own hand. Among other things, he wrote, “I know: too little, too late.”
He wrapped the thing up in a large rubber band, put it in a collapsible folder, and took it out of his apartment.
The night was hot. The air felt full and thick with humidity. Levi began sweating before he had walked across the street to the parking ramp. Once inside his truck, he drove in silence to the north side of town. He wiped his hand against his dripping forehead as he sat across the street from the comfortable home on Liberty Street where his old friends lived.
The lights were off. Levi took the folder from his passenger seat and stepped outside his truck. He left his door open to minimize noise. He walked across the street. He slowly opened the front door that led to the little mudroom between the garage and the house. He set the folder on the mat where someone was sure to see it, and he left.
He felt lighter as he left, but it was not a good feeling. He felt hollow, as if he had torn his own insides out and left nothing but the shell.
When he returned home, he was too tired to follow through with anything but sleep. He lay on his side and put his hands together under his head. He pulled his knees up and imagined himself as an oil painting of an angelic, innocent, and untainted child. He ignored the stubble that pressed into the back of his hand, and he imagined the rosy cheeks of a cherub.
C.2 YOU’RE NO CHRIST, BUT YOU MAKE A PRETTY GOOD REDEMPTIVE ARCHETYPE
Pièce de Résistance
Levi woke to the sounds of the street and of guns. It was a night that sounded like Baghdad. When he peered out the window, he saw that it was early evening, and the rapid cracking of gunfire came from two teenage boys lighting Black Cat fireworks at the edge of the alley near the parking garage.
As a matter of habit, he cleaned himself up, ate a bit of food, and put his feet to the pavement as a way to wake his mind in preparation for the writing he would do at night. But as he moved among the crowds of revelers passing in and out of bars and restaurants in preparation for a wilder celebration that night, he faced the melancholic truth that his writing was done and there was nothing, nothing at all, left for him to do.
Levi made his way to Riverside. Several middle-aged and elderly couples had arrived hours too soon to begin saving their places along the river, but the park was not yet as crowded as it would surely become. He moved south through the park, nearly as far as the big blue suspension bridge on Cass Street. He stopped at a secluded patch of grass where he could be alone to think.
Levi stood on the eastern bank of the mighty Mississippi, his feet planted firmly on the grass in front of the large rocks that led out to the river. The still water sprawled out in front of him like glass. The setting sun reflected brightly in its surface. It looked solid, as if he could walk on it like Saint Peter, if only he had enough faith. An occasional series of cracks or the whistling of bottle rockets floated over from Pettibone Beach on the far side.
He was alone.
The sound of the summer slowly and faintly gave way to that ancient instrument of war, the bagpipes, playing an old familiar song. At first, the notes forcing their way into his consciousness were indistinguishable from the cicadas and their singing tymbals. As the notes came closer, however, they grew louder until the song of the pipes carried across the river, and he had no choice but to acknowledge the melody.
He had heard this same song as the centerpiece of every funeral he had ever attended. Some of the words moved through his head with an involuntary force. Through many dangers, toils, and snares I have already come. He took a step closer to the water.
The music grew louder so he turned, trying to find where the notes were coming from. He saw Nick walking toward him from the edge of the open expanse of grass. Levi tried dismissing the music as nothing more than part of a parade or some other part of the festivities of the day, but as Nick grew closer, holding his standard high, looking as though he were walking in perfect step with the rolling rudiments of the snare drums accompanying the pipes, Levi began to think that Nick was somehow bringing the tune to his ears. In a way, it was as if the song were coming from inside Nick himself. He had no beauty or majesty that he should attract anyone, yet there he was, magnetic and glorious, yet terrifying because of all Levi had done to betray him.
He grew closer and closer and Levi watched wide-eyed until Nick stood in front of him. The notes from the bagpipes pierced his ears at such a close range. When it reached the point that Levi couldn’t take it any longer, Nick lifted a hand. The music and the drums—in fact all sound—stopped.
Nick reached out his hand and touched his friend. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
“I didn’t want you to find me.”
“Why are you here?” Nick asked.
“I can’t carry it any further. Not alone.”
“You can’t carry what?”
“My guilt. My failures. This stone.” Levi held up the rock from that day long ago in Iraq.
“Come down to the river,” Nick said.
They stepped along the rocks until they looked down into the water. Nick pointed at the murky waters and their skewed reflection. “Why do you still see us in old clothes?”
In the dark surface, Levi saw himself as he once was. He ran his hand down his chest and touched the brass buttons on his uniform with reverence. He straightened his ribbons and the accolades of that other life he had once known. He reached over and picked lint from Nick’s shoulder. He cinched and smoothed his tie. Yet, despite the old clothes with all their superficial pomp, he saw no recognition in the eyes of the soldiers in the water. Their features were less linear. Their jaws were softer. The hair was a bit too long at the ears.
He pulled at the bottom hem of his coat. “We look like we’re just playing dress up.” He tried out the position of attention and lifted his chin. He tried to look proud, in control of himself, in command of things. He simply looked tired. “We were just boys playing dress up back then, and we’re just playing dress up now.”
“It’s never too late for new clothes,” Nick said.
“Didn’t you read what I wrote you?”
Nick nodded.
“Didn’t you read the end?”
“This isn’t some story. This is your life. You don’t get to choose when it ends.”
“It’s too late,” said Levi sadly.
“It’s never too late to rewrite it. It’s never too late to rewrite the future.”
Levi shook his head. “That’s just wishful thinking.”
“So then,” Nick said. “Why are you here?”
Levi lifted up the stone that he still held. He gave it to Nick. “It would be well within your right,” he said. “To crush me with it.”
Nick took the rock, felt its weight, and looked at the rock as if he didn’t recognize it. As if it were something he had never seen before. He reached back and then threw it with great force. It arched high over their heads, above the glassy surface in front of them, and it landed with a small plop in th
e river. The water rippled and the concentric rings coming from where it landed wiped out the reflection of their old selves. The muddied images were soon invisible and forgotten.
Levi was—for a moment—stung by the fear that there had to be more to it. He looked over at Nick, his countenance unchanged except for a small satisfied smile. “That’s it?” he asked him.
Nick nodded. “It’s finished.”
“That’s it,” Levi whispered in wonder.
In this way, the stone was cast into the depths forever.
“But what about you and Eris?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did, but I don’t. Only characters get resolutions; real people keep living.”
“I’m sorry, Nick. I never meant to—”
He shook his head. “I know.” He smiled sadly. “Why don’t you write us a happy ending?”
Levi nodded. “And then? And now? What am I supposed to do?”
“Walk with me,” Nick said.
The drums rolled. The pipes played. Levi fell in step and they walked together; they walked home.
As they walked, they called to more people, and some of them joined their throng. A float adorned with flags and fighting men fell in line behind them. Cars and fire trucks joined, and more floats too. They walked around town and grabbed people from the bars and restaurants, gas stations and farms. They gathered the children from the Little League games and called to the parents sipping beer on the top row of the rickety wooden bleachers at the diamonds. They pulled the homeless from under the bridges and the forgotten from under their shadows. Soon the trailers and floats were swallowed by the crowd. They called to everyone they saw until they had a full parade.
As night fell, they—that is, we—we walked into the park. The music stopped and most found places to sit. We buzzed from excitement, waiting to see the sky light up in celebration of our freedom.
A Hard and Heavy Thing Page 33