by Ray Cluley
“Soldiers coming back in boxes,” he said, “or with bits missing, or just plain used up, you know? Used up and messed up.” Here he twirled a finger around the side of his head, and though I was sure there was someone else I could say hello to, I decided to endure more in the hope of a snatch of gossip about General John Smith.
“Injured, was he?”
The man looked at me as if he’d forgotten I was there, or I’d startled him. “Who?” he said, downing what remained in his glass. “The General?”
I nodded.
At this, the man began to laugh. It was an absurd response to such a question, but my scowl only made him laugh harder. When he’d recovered, he said, “You serious?”
Which, of course, was when the show began.
The moment it began I realized how amateur it was and little time passed before I decided to leave, though in truth it wasn’t as bad as that. I simply didn’t want to admit to being stood up.
One of the performers, painted bronze to play Talos in some Greek story I barely followed, delivered his lines with enthusiasm if not skill. Created to protect his island, he pretended to throw food and drink at “invaders” who were merely bemused guests. I gave him a tight smile and continued past, though it meant shouldering a path quite forcefully through the other guests gathered to watch.
“Excuse me,” I said, “pardon me. Coming through. Ex—”
My exit met the General’s entrance and we faced each other, close in the crowd.
“I’m late,” he said. “Sorry.” Some of his confidence was gone. He stood a little less straight than previously and I realized he was nervous.
“That’s okay,” I said.
“I booked a room.”
I was surprised by such a forward admission and at once thankful that a performance was taking place around us, distracting others from the one we were making a mess of. I laughed and blurted, “Me too.”
We went to my room. I didn’t know whether that was a gracious allowance on his part, or simply a willingness to be led in this, and I wondered if it was a first time for him. I took no delight in the idea. In fact, it rather worried me. Perhaps, though, with being a sudden public figure, it was merely the anxiety of being discovered. He was a man of many parts, military and political amongst others, but it only made managing his private life more awkward.
However, my fears of first time nerves were, I think, more accurate. I won’t divulge the details of what happened in that hotel room, except to say that although I was pleased enough, I was allowed less physical contact with him than he with me. He dictated what little grappling there was and removed nothing of his clothing, though I longed to see the body I supposed was perfect underneath. Much of the pleasure came as a release of tension rather than anything as intimate as I’d hoped. And there was another problem.
“Who’s Thompson?” I asked him afterwards. I was fastening my tie at the mirror but glanced at him in the reflection to gauge the honesty of his response.
John, already sitting ramrod straight on the edge of the bed, seemed to stiffen even more, but said nothing.
“You called me Thompson,” I said.
“I did not.”
I tugged the knot into place and straightened my collar.
“I didn’t,” he said again, standing this time.
I turned to face him. “Not just now. Earlier. The first time we met.”
I stepped aside to pick up my jacket and left him facing his own reflection. When I turned back he was staring at himself with such an expression of regret that I felt terrible for my pettiness and pressed the matter no further, despite the letter I had found that day at the cemetery. The letter I had gone back for, and taken, and read, though it was no business of mine.
“People say I’m brave,” John said. He scowled at his reflection. “They’re wrong. I’m not brave.” He turned away from the mirror and looked at me. “I spent the first half of my life doing as I was told, and all it did was ruin the second half.”
“I’m sorry.”
He grabbed his jacket from the bed, suddenly in a hurry. “I better go.”
“No, John, wait. Please—”
“I’m going home.” He tugged his jacket on, rather clumsy in his haste. I tried to stop him but I think I’ve remarked already on the man’s build, his stature. He’s built solid. When he barged past my outstretched arm there was little I could do. He was polite enough at the door to face me for a goodbye, but he said it in such a stern way that I knew it stood for more than just this evening.
I gave him a few minutes to make his exit before making my own.
S
Sitting in the car outside his place, I tried to clear my mind enough to go home and leave him be. He lived in a reputable part of the city, in a house far beyond my means, but admiring the property did little to distract me.
I’d fully intended to let our tryst be the brief encounter it seemed destined to be, but in moving through the lobby I bumped into the guest with whom I’d shared a few words earlier that evening. The performers were enjoying something of an interval, though mingling with the crowd it was difficult to tell, and many of the audience members were flitting between function rooms and the bar. I spoke a few hellos and a few goodbyes to some of them, including Mr. TNT.
“Ah,” he said, “wonderful show.” It was a different opinion to the one he’d begun the evening with, but then I knew how that felt. In his case I believe the way the actresses were dressed played a great part in his new view of things.
“I’m glad,” I said, with a terse nod that should have bid him a good night, but he chose not to see it.
“Your friend’s here,” he said.
“My friend?”
“The General. At least, he was.” The man glanced around. “I saw him.”
“Thank you. I’ll catch up with him some other time.”
“Brave man.” He slurped from his glass in a way that revealed it was only the last so far in a long line of many.
“So I’ve heard.”
“Lives with one of them, you know.”
“Excuse me?”
“Of course,” he said, and I realized with a humourless laugh that now he thought I was bidding him goodnight.
So I made my way to the car, but all the way to it I wondered at his meaning. One of them? Lived with? And instead of driving home I found myself on the streets leading to John’s side of town.
I waited and I watched.
Before long I saw John at a window, looking out into the street. He was focused on his thoughts rather than anything he saw and seemed to be on his own. He removed his jacket and began unbuttoning his shirt.
“Goodnight, John.”
But as I was reaching to start the car I saw another man at the window. He was behind John, reaching around him to help him with his shirt buttons. I watched, and their two shapes merged as one undressed the other, and though they turned, then, from the window, and drew curtains closed behind them, it was very clear that this man was seeing more of John than I had been allowed.
I’m usually a calm and considered man, but the sight of them at the window combined with the evening’s events sparked a sudden impulse in me that had me out of the car and striding to the house. I beat at the door rather than push at the bell and when it eventually opened I put my hand to it and pushed it open further, forcing my way past the startled man who asked what it was I wanted. He was dusky-skinned, Middle-Eastern, and his English was heavily accented. Clear enough, though, for me to know he was demanding I leave. I ignored him, save to spare a disdainful glance, and made my way up the stairs calling for John.
The man pursued me up the stairs.
“John!” I cried, more upset than I had supposed, less angry than I had intended.
“Please,” called the
man behind me, “he is not decent.”
“No, he’s not,” I threw back.
The man pursued me but I was quicker.
“Let him get himself together,” the man tried.
It was too late. I was in the room.
“Where is he?” I demanded of the man who followed me inside. I gave him no chance to answer but instead picked up the heap of clothes that had been discarded onto a chair. I had intended to sling them at the man, jealous and already embarrassed but unable to stop. The clothes were heavy. I’d picked something else up with them.
The bundle shifted in my arms and a face peered at me from the crumpled clothes. I let out a cry of alarm and horror at what I held and cast it aside. Something of the face had been John’s. But not much of it.
The other man cried out as well, though his was one of concern as he rushed forward to catch what I had thrown. He was too late; a groan that was all John—had I not heard it only an hour ago?—issued from the floor. The face I had briefly seen contorted momentarily in pain. Then it rolled with the tumble of garments and heavier items.
The other man knelt by the bundle and rummaged amongst it, casting foul looks my way as he righted the pile into something . . . squat. It smiled a grin that was all lips and blackness, no teeth, and said my name with a harsh rasp of breath.
The Middle-Eastern man hushed him. “Quiet, Mr. Smith. Wait a moment. Let me help you.”
I backed towards the wall with both hands covering my mouth, a child disturbed by a nightmare, but the nightmare I saw took a more certain shape before me at the hands of this foreign man.
What I saw was a torso, a very stunted one, with a face that peered from a shirt that had gathered around it in the chaos of my tantrum. The Middle-Eastern man pulled this down and John’s head emerged from the collar. It was stripped of hair, all pink skin on scalp and jaw. One eye was missing. He had a nose but it had slipped to reveal the cavity behind. John spoke too quietly for me to hear, but the man with him nodded, absently but efficiently fixing the nose before going to a nearby dresser. In a moment he was settling a wig in place and then pressing something into the vacant socket of John’s eye. Then he put his fingers into John’s mouth, prised it open, and inserted something not unlike a denture plate, only with more substance. It gave John’s face a more defined chin which settled left and right with a series of clicks as John worked his jaw.
“Better,” he said. His voice still had something of a croak but the other massaged the throat and suddenly John was coughing. There was a resounding thrum for a moment, and then when next he spoke he had the same strong, clear voice I knew.
“Not much to look at, am I?” he said, and laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound.
I could only shake my head, dismissing what I saw rather than agreeing.
“This good man here is Hakim.”
The good Hakim was inserting something into John’s trouser leg, turning it once, twice, three times, and then fussing with the cuff so it settled over a foot that was entirely shoe. He repeated the procedure with the other side, screwing apparatus into place and then leaning John up into a standing position. He kept his arms around John’s waist and looked around the floor. I could see the piece he wanted but could only point.
“There,” said John for me. “Go on, I’ll be all right.”
His companion stepped away from him and John took an experimental step without him, finding his balance. His shirt sleeves hung empty by his sides and I wondered, if he fell, could I find the strength to catch him?
“My Bradley took a hit in ’91,” he said.
I nodded, and tried to keep eye contact.
“It’s a tank, not a person. I thought I’d better explain, in case you became jealous.”
The foolishness I’d feel for my behaviour would not come until later. Right then I stared with wonder that was, I’m ashamed to say, something like horror. My gaze was drawn to this or that part of his body, and the places where his body used to be. Now Hakim was attaching another prosthetic, an arm, connecting valves and screwing slim cables into place. He went about his business like a tailor who had known Smith’s custom for years. Perhaps he had.
“The Gulf War?” I managed.
“Sort of. Part of that, anyway. The Hundred Hour War they call it, as if it was a play. But it was very real.”
The story he told had the sound of practice about it, though I can’t imagine who he may have told it to. Perhaps, judging from how his friend nodded at intervals, it was part of the dressing process. His . . . assembly.
“The Iraqis had these God-awful tanks Hussein had bought from the Soviet Union. Piece of shit hand-me-down heaps that were slow and inaccurate and popped their tops when they took a hit. Literally fell to pieces.” He countered something in my expression with, “Ha! Like I can talk.” It was too bitter to be part of any rehearsed speech, and his companion slowed in what he was doing at John’s other sleeve.
“You can leave us, Hakim.”
“Your hands, sir.”
John looked at his blunt wrists then put them in his pockets, dismissing his assistant with, “Problem solved.”
When the man was gone, I tried to explain my presence but John cut me off before I could get any further than his name.
“We waited in the night through a heavy storm. Middle of the fucking desert and it was raining. Wind howling, battering us with wet sand. That’s a sound you don’t forget in a hurry. Sounds like the night is hissing laughter at you. Maybe it was. Maybe it knew what was coming.”
It was a sound I couldn’t imagine at the time, but I’ve dreamt it many nights since.
“They came at us, and we expected that, but there were more of them than anticipated. I was forced to take evasive action, breaking out of formation, cutting ahead at the right flank as the Iraqi numbers tripled right before our eyes.”
Here he touched the eye I’d seen Hakim insert.
“I have seen such terrible things,” he said. His stump of a wrist pressed against the pupil, an accident that shifted it slightly in the socket so that he seemed to stare beyond my right shoulder with one eye when he added, “I’ve done such terrible things.”
“It was war,” I said, rather pointlessly. He ignored the comment, as he had every right to. He was still there.
“Round after round,” he said. “Twenty-five cal slamming into hard packed sand. Blasting the desert and tossing tanks into torn shreds of metal.”
John closed his eyes at the memory. I was selfishly thankful to be rid of that skewed gaze.
Eventually he spoke again. His voice was soft. “We wiped them out.” When he opened his eyes the crooked one had somehow righted itself. He met my gaze with a fierce stare, but his anger was clearly aimed at someone or something other than me. “Of course we wiped them out. We were better armed, better equipped. I mean, isn’t technology wonderful?”
He lifted the stumps of his wrists to me before realizing his hands were elsewhere. He compensated by rubbing appallingly at his crotch. “They think of everything!”
I was disgusted, and then ashamed of my disgust, and then I didn’t have to think of it because he continued his story. The one I had so wanted to hear until I was hearing it.
“Like I said, we were out of position. Sand was flying, bursts of metal flying in the night. Explosions rocked us, but we targeted tank after tank.
“One of them was ours.”
He wiped at one of his eyes—the one that worked—and was silent for so long that I thought he’d finished. Before I could say anything, something that would no doubt make it worse even as I tried to make it better, he said, “Friendly fire. That’s what they call it.”
“John, you don’t need to—”
“Yes I do.”
He moved to where I’d seen him at the window. The curtains were d
rawn but he stared anyway.
“Thompson was the name of one of the men in the tank we hit.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He died.”
Thompson was more than an accidental casualty. I knew, because I had read the letter John had left at the cenotaph. John could not have known, but he knew that I understood. Thompson was the line in the sand neither of us would cross, but we both knew he was there.
“I can’t remember who fired first, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change what happened.”
John cleared his throat, a sound most of us make when overcome with emotion but in his case it sounded like a mechanical necessity. I imagined him gargling lubricant to allow his strong smooth speech and I hated myself for it.
“We’ve got laser-guided sensors that can identify vehicles by their heat signatures. We’ve got satellite pictures. We’ve got fucking night vision for Christ’s sake. But it makes no difference if your men are tired. And we were tired. Hundreds of hours of combat experience and simulations, but no amount of training can counter sleep deprivation. Took a while for them to learn from it, too, because twelve years later you’ve got Operation Iraqi fucking Freedom and tanks are veering off course and—”
By this point I was finally able to go to him.
“Now I don’t even want to sleep,” he said.
I put my arm around his shoulders and tried not to think about how hard they felt. The strength I had admired in him earlier had become something . . . else, and I’m loath to describe my feelings to you because of how I would seem. I did my best, let me leave it at that, and he must’ve taken some comfort from it because he settled against me. I put a hand to his hair to stroke it, remembered it was not his, and stopped.
He said something I didn’t hear.
“Pardon?”
“It was hell. Fire. Metal. Shells exploding. I was burning in hell, just as I knew I would. You know, our suits can withstand temperatures of two thousand degrees. Two thousand.”