by Greg Hrbek
“Jeezus, Dorian!”
He says something in response; Mitch removes the canalphones and says, “What?”
“I was talking but you didn’t hear me.”
“Sorry.”
“You have waves on?”
Mitch nods. The sound is audible, though faint as a secret being whispered into a single ear.
“So, you’re writing …”
“Dodo, do you know what time it is?”
“I’ve been standing here for about three minutes, so it’s probably about one forty-five. Can I sit down?”
As Dorian sits beside him on the couch, Mitch minimizes the document.
“I thought you were writing.”
“Not really.”
His son picks up the canalphones and inserts them in his own ears. Then leans into Mitch, a childlike thing he rarely does anymore. By the end of the year, he’ll be twelve—and one day soon thereafter (just as it happened with his older son), Mitch will understand that the child has gone missing and won’t ever be found. He puts an arm around him. Can’t hear the ocean any more and yet he can; his ears seem to echo like seashells. Probably a bad dream, he thinks. Dream about her. Trying to think: Should I ask. Or just be here quietly … In therapy, Dorian has told about the dreams, which point with the fixation of a compass needle to the same place and time, same landscape of destruction, same fear. “But what is he scared of?” And the psychiatrist had taken a breath and said something like: “In terms of fear, he’s afraid that the world is going to end. He thinks a lot about 8-11, and he worries it’ll happen again, or something just as bad—chemical, biological—or something even worse. This isn’t abnormal. We’re all afraid, to differing degrees. At the most extreme, the fear becomes a phobia. Your son,” he went on, “isn’t phobic. He doesn’t have the associated anxiety or the physical symptoms.” “But the girl,” Mitch and Kathryn said. “Who is not just a dream to him. Who he believes was a real person (isn’t that a delusion?) and whom he believes is being hidden from him (isn’t that paranoia?), and aren’t these signs—? What we mean is, we’ve read that there’s an early-onset form of schizophrenia.” To which the doctor replied: “Or perhaps he simply has a highly imaginative mind.” He went on to discuss the concept of paracosms: imaginary worlds, fantasy worlds conceived in childhood. Often by gifted children. Usually to process and understand a loss, like the death of a loved one. “In Dorian’s case, there hasn’t been any loss. But we also might say: There hasn’t been one yet. He’s afraid of what might happen. This we know. Perhaps afraid enough that his mind is reacting ahead of time. The fantasy is helping him process his fears about the future.” The explanation sounded conclusive, and Mitch glanced then at Kathryn, whose face was somehow both brightened by faith and lined with skepticism. “That makes sense,” Mitch said. The psychiatrist lifted an eyebrow, as if changing his mind, and said: “But we can’t rule out every other possibility right now.” Then one day, a few weeks later, a few therapy sessions later, Dorian told them that the dreams had stopped. The last two months of the school year passed quietly. Not another accusation, no mention of the girl. Until the other day at breakfast. Now here they are, father and son, at two in the morning, awake, the computer fallen asleep before them, dreaming a slideshow of photos …
Autumn past, Dorian at the entrance to a corn maze.
Last month, Cliff in a cap and gown.
Then a long-ago picture Mitch can’t quite place. On a beach. He and Kathryn and Cliff. Cliff maybe three. All of them lying in the sand. Faces close up, looking into the camera, chins resting on their hands. All smiles while a blue ocean wave crests in the background—and Kathryn is wearing huge sunglasses he doesn’t recall her ever having.
“California,” Dorian says.
“Looks like— Yes, must be California.”
The picture fades, replaced by another much more recent and recognizable. School play from last year. Dorian, fake-bearded, and Plaxico, wild-wigged: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
“About last night, Mitch says. I think your mother was a little hard on you.”
“A little.”
“The thing is, she’s basically right. We need to live with people. And not just tolerate them. Be friends with them. Go to their parties once in a while. You know what Lincoln said about the better angels of our nature. This is just one of those times when you have to be a better angel.”
“I don’t know anything about Lincoln.”
“Sure you do.”
Pictures form and unform. They are like keys. Every picture opens a lock in the mind. Depending on the image, the room gets somewhat brighter or darker—a slow strobe, conducive to entry into suggestible states.
“Who took that picture,” Dorian asks suddenly.
“That one?”
“No, the one on the beach.”
“Who took that. I have no idea. Probably some friend I haven’t spoken to in ten years. Maybe the Magic Paparazzi.”
“I’m too old for that joke,” he says.
“Okay.”
“It wasn’t the timer. You can tell from the angle. Someone was lying down in front of you.”
“Didn’t notice.”
His son breaks from the embrace and sits forward and asks: “Can you go back to it?”
“The saver’s on random shuffle.”
“Well, let me look through the folder, then, okay?”
“No, not okay.”
Dorian turns to him. Against the dim backlight, Mitch can’t make out the expression. Not yet thinking: He thinks she took it. That thought is buried, hidden below the surface of his confusion about what his son wants with the picture.
“Why not.”
“First of all,” Mitch says, “it’s two in the morning. Second, there are a lot of old pictures in there.”
“So?”
“So maybe there are some I don’t want you to see.”
“Of what,” he says. “Of who.”
“Of who? Of your mother. And that’s not a dis. There really might be naked pictures of her in there. From back in the day.”
And Mitchell Wakefield isn’t just making excuses. Because recently he has found a flash drive (lost and forgotten until the finding, like an arrowhead unearthed thirty summers ago in the woods in Connecticut), and discovered saved to it a folder of photos. The one on the beach is from that folder, as is another which has already surprised him: of Kathryn before children (after the abortion but before the marriage, in the tweens of the century) on the observation deck of the Space Spire, her hair long and blonde and frenzied by a gust of wind. That picture fit smoothly into the lock it was fashioned for. When Mitch rediscovered it, the cylinder of memory turned, and he saw himself and her, twenty-four or -five, driving north on the coast road of the Oregon Territory, and he could recall how at that time (after she had confessed about him and what she’d done about the pregnancy)—how emotions had seemed conjoined, as if love and anger shared a heart …
Now, nearly twenty years later, say to your son: “Come on, Dodo.” Walk him to his bedroom. At the door, embrace him and tell him you’ll talk in the morning. You’ll find him the photo in the morning. In your own bedroom, in the bathroom: on the toilet seat, a single drop of blood. Clean it with tissue paper. In the bed, your wife is perfectly still. As she sleeps, think of the photo, the one taken on the beach, which unlocks nothing, as if it’s not your key, as if it were made to fit a lock in someone else’s mind—and all at once the burrowed thought will break the surface of thinking. That’s why Dorian wants the photo. Because he thinks the person behind the image, lying on the sand, the one holding the camera, is her.
6
What he did in the third war was vastly different from what he had done in the first. First, second, third. Arbitrary system of numeration. For there was only ever one war, decades ongoing, so long it was hardly surprising if your role, to say nothing of your stance, were to change along with presidential elections and dictatorial regimes and occupat
ional governments from the beginning to what we were promised again and again would be the end. In the third war, when he was forty, forty-one, William Banfelder had been paid by a private American contractor called Securiforce to protect—by any means, necessary or unjustified—cargoes ranging from computer hardware for forward-operating bases in the Forbidden Zone to frozen hamburgers for the fast-food chains in the Diplomatic Bubble. He took the job for the money (several million dinars a week stuffed into a yellow envelope like a ransom payoff), and soon came to understand that one could not do the job without doing violence, and so the making of money had become very quickly and hopelessly equal to the taking of life.
But the first war.
A twenty-, twenty-one-year-old Marine, William Banfelder had been paid by the United States government little better than federal minimum wage (a couple thousand dollars a month direct-deposited into his Armed Forces bank account) to transport food, water, medical supplies, and building materials to about two million refugees who, through the winter, had been starving to death and freezing to death in the Taurus Mountains on the border of Turkish Anatolia and the Islamic Caliphate. He was then a lance corporal. Had served two quiet years in a quiet world. His unit deploying routinely to the Mediterranean then sailing back to the Carolina Colonies across the imitative fallacy of an ocean at peace. Until a breakaway republic within the Caliphate—or a republic sponsored covertly by the Caliphate (the whole truth was, and still is, uncertain, though no one disagrees that they were Baathists from Iraq led by an Army general named Saddam Hussein)—crossed the border into British Kuwait and seized the Al Burqan fields of the Kuwait Oil Company. Will Banfelder and the other men of the 24th MEU did not go to the Gulf. When the air war began, they were floating on the USS Charleston off the coast of Sardinia—and when the air war ended thirty days later, they were still floating there, and were still floating when the ground war began and a hundred hours later ended. And that, it was proclaimed, was the end. End of a war whose curtain had in truthful reality only just gone up, and onto the stage of which Will would not enter for another month when the Charleston would dock at Iskenderun and the humanitarian operation would get under way. Convoys of cargo trucks and Humvees and M934s ring-mounted with .50-caliber machine guns manned by grunts like Will. Four hundred miles overland from the harbor to a forward base in a Turkish village of mud huts and mules called Silopi—and from Silopi, two times daily, over the border into what some called Kurdistan, to a city named Zakho, where an international brigade of soldiers was pitching tents for the people coming down out of the mountains they had fled into when the war had not so much ended as divided like a parent cell to spawn a next generation of fighting, civil and sectarian—and though many had died in the winter, now it was spring in the valley and the people were coming down out of the mountains and not being hurt, they were being helped, and Will Banfelder was helping them.
He was twenty, twenty-one then. He is seventy, seventy-one now. And still, in a ring box furred with velvet, he keeps a thing he earned then, which looks like money though it has no monetary value. A silver medallion: on the heads side is a relief pallet parachuting past an Islamic moon; on tails, an American soldier holding hands with a boy.
•
The kids will arrive at eleven: five boys and a girl. Two of them, Dorian and Zebedee, he has met. The others, from the mosque, he hasn’t; and yet he knows them better—not because they’re Muslim, but because they have already friended him on Lifebook. Karim has known for a long time about social networking. In the camp, however, he didn’t really understand what it was, since there weren’t any devices to network with.
One time back before the deaths of loved ones and the addictions of drugs, Hazem had said:
You try to get as many friends as you can.
So it’s like a game?
Right. You try to know the most about what all your friends are doing and thinking all the time.
Back then, Karim wasn’t so amazed by the idea. His only frame of reference was a pair of walkie-talkies he and Hazem and Yassim had found, still packaged, in a not entirely looted department store: You held a button to speak, pushed another to transmit messages with high-pitched beeps. They were good for playing war: two of the boys with the radios, tracking the third whose mission was to reach undetected, with a dirty bomb fashioned from the viscera of a clock radio, one of two possible targets, like an old barber shop imagined to be a foreign embassy or a dumpy motor inn imagined to be an opulent tourist hotel. But Karim thinks now, with a kind of embarrassment, that all you could do was talk on them (or attempt to through a constant crackle of static). Whereas the smartphone is also a television, a camera, a clock. It can show you where you are on a map and the path to where you want to go. Though most incredible to him is that, after only five days in this new place, this new life, he has made fifteen friends without meeting a single one of them.
“Hey, bud. You awake?”
“Yeah.”
The door opens; and as the old guy takes one step over the threshold, Karim sets the phone aside and sits up straight on the edge of the bed.
“You know what I forgot?”
“What?”
“Fudge sauce. I got whipped cream and ice cream but I forgot the sauce.”
“I think it’s okay.”
The old guy shakes his head and says a sundae cannot kick ass without fudge sauce. In other words, Karim thinks, get some real clothes on because we’re going to the supermarket. But then he says, “But maybe you’d rather hang here.” And it takes Karim a moment to understand that he is being asked if he would rather stay for the first time in the house alone. He says, “Yeah, I’ll hang here.” The old guy nods, almost says something but stops himself, and then departs. As he hears the closing of the front door, Karim can almost see: It’s not that he doesn’t trust me; it’s something else. On the way downstairs, he checks his news feed and learns that the girl who’s coming to the party later (her name is Khaleela and she’s Muslim but not Arabic) is eating Lucky Charms for breakfast. Two people like the post. Karim hasn’t liked a post yet, but he decides to like this one—and then he decides to write a comment (I’m eating Cocoa Pops), and almost instantly, his comment has two likes, and someone else has written: I’m eating Corn Crackos. He smiles. Raises a spoonful of cereal to his mouth. For a few seconds, there’s nothing but the conversation thread and the sugary crunch—and then, suddenly, it’s like the other day in the swimming pool when he was floating alone, drowsy and content. He wonders if he is being tricked. If the devil is filling his head with illusions.
Think.
What were you just feeling? That the food tastes delicious. That it’s nice to know what your friends are eating, too. But this, these brown balls of chocolate, this isn’t food. And the names and pictures on the screen … It seems a hole has opened up in him and his heart is falling into it. This is not food. Food is the flatbread and honey the sheikh would bring you at night after a day of eating next to nothing—and a friend is someone you ate alongside, with whom you ate flatbread soaked in honey while sitting on a hunk of blasted concrete under a slivered moon while saliva dripped dog-like from your tongues—and a father, a father is not a man with a swimming pool; a father is a man you find in the shadow of a pillar of black smoke after the remote-controlled plane has passed out of sight, skin of his face studded with shrapnel of glass and a dagger of glass set in the neck.
Staring now out of the sliding glass door of this kitchen he is in. Beyond which can be seen a swimming pool and a reflection of morning sun on the dome that covers the pool and strange insects posed here and there on the dome. He signs off from Lifebook. Touches the phone app. He does not have to try to remember the numbers, which a part of his mind has been reciting constantly ever since the learning of them; merely has to touch the symbols on the screen, which correspond to the sounds of the words. One: 1. Five: 5. Three: 3. Nine: 9. Karim is not at all unsure about the next digit. But he sits motionless as if the mes
sage has strayed from the path between brain and hand. Four numbers typed, but not a fifth … In the camp, there had been no confusion, no paradox. It all made easy sense. Your family is gone (the sheikh had told them) and you have nothing left on Earth. But if you leave this Earth as a shahid, as a martyr for the sake of Allah: Boys, if you do this, you will have everything … But now. What is he afraid of now? What is he not afraid of? He is afraid of: the sheikh, the ten numbers, what will begin if he makes the call, what will happen to him if he doesn’t, the man he calls jaddi seeing him now talking on the phone, the will of God, defying the will of God, seeing the light shining from the face of God in Paradise, the chance that there is no such thing as Paradise, the belt with its tubes of nitroglycerin and concentrations of nails and screws, the button on the belt, to die, to cause others to die, to live instead of dying, to live forever instead of living … These thoughts moving through his mind simultaneously like nails and screws propelled outward in all directions by an explosive charge in a half-moment hardly known before its passing—while beyond the glass door there is not only the pool, but also, nearer to the door, a bird feeder, a little house on a pole where a bird with brilliant red feathers is perched and pecking at the seed; and now another flying into sight to land alongside the first, same kind though gray with a red beak; and then, suddenly, though much later, the birds are gone and the old guy is opening the door. He’s got a jar. Not honey, fudge sauce. Holding it up like a trophy newly won until he really sees the boy at the table.