The Writing on the Wall: A Novel

by W. D. Wetherell

  “I noticed. Some weirdo come to stare, I figured, but then she smiled over at me. Who is she?”

  “Pam Cord.”

  The name meant nothing to her. She started complaining about her phone again, how she was going to go nuts without it—this seemed to be what worried her most. It surprised me, she’d never been particularly addicted before, and I was slow in understanding what emotion that masked.

  The visiting room looked like a bad motel, and now, like at a bad motel, we could hear what sounded like a couple arguing three rooms down. Someone must have decided to turn the air-conditioning on, because it suddenly shot down on us like a fist, bringing with it the smell of french fries and ketchup.

  “So,” Cassie said. She dropped her eyes to her hands. “There’s something else you probably should know about.”

  “About the photo?”

  “After the photo. A week after. Something worse.”

  When she was little she had a funny grimace she made whenever she was nervous. Getting ready for a Christmas pageant, having to make a speech in class, even standing at the plate in softball. Her eyebrows, thin already, tightened into invisibility. Her mouth became tiny, her lips started trembling, she would suck in her cheeks. By high school she had outgrown that look— but here it was back.

  “So, Cassie’s shy, right?”

  “You’re better than you used to be.”

  She shook her head. “Cassie Savino is shy, right? She likes time alone. Great move, huh? Join the U.S. Army and get all the privacy you want.”

  I couldn’t see where this was going.

  “It must be hard on you,” I said.

  She shrugged the way people do when they’re trying to shed words that don’t count, grasp better ones just beneath.

  “It was all so weird. Everywhere you looked and all the time, not just once and a while like at home. There were prisoners with no hands because they had been cut off for stealing before we got there, and no one thought that was unusual except me. No one thought the screaming was a big deal either. Little things got so they bothered you even more, until they became big things, way big.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Lightbulbs, right? At home they’re white, end of story. In the prison they were blue, these frosted Iraqi lightbulbs that hardly give off any light. The frosting was all cracked and peeling, so they looked like bad Easter eggs poked in the ceiling just above your bunk. I wanted to smash one, just to break apart the knot I felt inside all the time. After a while I realized smashing one wouldn’t be enough, that I needed to smash at least a dozen to feel better. I dreamed about that, taking a baseball bat running down the hall smashing the ugly blue lights, and not just dozens either, but every last bulb in prison. That scared me, wanting to do that so badly. But that’s not really what I need to explain.”

  The air-conditioning, as if listening, suddenly went still.

  “So, I’m over there trying not to smash lightbulbs, and meanwhile every woman in the brigade is hooking up with someone. A boyfriend, a girlfriend. Doesn’t matter which, but you better find someone to watch your ass, or else you’re going to catch all kinds of shit from the tough ones. But I’m not doing it, Cassie’s not playing along, and sure enough I start getting shit. A snot they called me. Barbie. Little Miss Virgin. I’m getting this morning, noon and night. It’s like I either have to immediately hook up with someone or show them I can be as bad a dick as they are.”

  She looked up at me now—and, seeing her eyes, I wish she hadn’t.

  “There’s a prisoner on the hard site named Rassoul or some weird Iraqi name. Truck had a friend called Nascar, he was so crazy about racing. Nascar was civilian but he was harder than any MI dude. He told us that Rassoul wasted three soldiers from 24th Brigade and raped one after she was already dead. They were trying to soften him up to get some high value intelligence but he was hanging pretty tough. They kept trying to scare him with all these stories about what would happen if he didn’t play along. One of the stories was about the Ice Princess—about how the Ice Princess was going to come into his cell and make the things they had already done to him seem like kid stuff. She was going to cut off his balls for starters. The only problem was, it was only a story, the Ice Princess didn’t really exist, it was just this crazy thing Nascar dreamed up.”

  Cassie reached her hand to the net between us, pressed it down with her fingers.

  “I’d been volunteering in the kennel, the dogs had learned to trust me, and now Nascar’s telling me I won’t be allowed to anymore if I don’t help them out by pretending to be the Ice Princess. They thought it would break him, having a girl come to his cell. That’s all I was supposed to do, just duck my head in. It’s eight at night, I’m just coming off shift, I go down there and they tell me to go into his cell and stare down at him like I was icy and mean. Yeah, roger that Staff Sergeant. No problem. I guess Rassoul believed their stories, because the moment I go in he cowers back in the corner and puts his hands in front of his balls. He had all kinds of gross cuts on his arms, they had interrogated him pretty good. I stared down at him for a few seconds then left, that’s all it was at first.”

  “At first?” Never had my mouth been so dry.

  “We kept a box of supplies at the end of the cell block. We called it the crap box because that’s what was in it, random crap, including these green light sticks, the kind we played with as kids. Don’t ask me what they were there for. Halloween parties or the Fourth of July or something . . . I go right over to the box and take out a light stick, go and find Nascar, have him take me back to Rassoul’s cell. He holds him down from behind. I break the light stick in two and jab at it with my knife until I pierce the plastic skin. There’s phosphorous in there, I knew that from fooling around with them as a kid. I cup the stick in my hands upside down so it won’t leak. Nascar holds Rassoul’s arm. It’s like Jesus’s arm—I remember thinking that with his beard and cuts he looked like he’d been pulled off a crucifix or something. I focused on the deepest cut and dribbled phosphorous down on it like a milky kind of soap. He screamed—right away he screamed. That surprised me because they told me he wasn’t a screamer, no matter what they did to him.”

  Her eyes had never left mine, all the time she talked.

  “It was over pretty fast. They pulled me out of the cell and I heard the door slam. I went up to my tier, changed my clothes, went to the kennel to play with the dogs.”

  Never left mine, not once all the while she talked.

  “That’s what I did, Mom.”

  She leaned closer to the net, but just when her forehead almost touched it she snapped herself back and sat at attention. Say something, her posture said. Ask me questions, shout at me, scream. But I only had one question that first second, one that hammered me. And then? And then? And then? Finish the suspense for me. And then I’m just kidding. And then I made it all up. And then I so had you, Mom, you actually thought I was telling the truth.

  She must have seen that in my expression, my need for her to say she was just horribly kidding, but she only shook her head. We sat there in silence, waiting for life to get past this unbearable moment to whatever barely bearable moment came next.

  That was the first second. The next one is harder to describe, since my thoughts came faster than I ever believed possible. I felt an overwhelming feeling of negligence, the kind that makes parents want to slap their foreheads again and again. All the things we had told her over the years, all the warnings and cautions we rained down on her—they broke over me in a wave, every last one of them in a detailed list. Don’t forget to brush your teeth. Don’t swim right after lunch. Don’t jaywalk. Don’t accept rides from strangers. Don’t smoke. Don’t do drugs. Don’t drink and drive. Don’t have sex before you’re ready. All the standard don’ts, all that vigilance to keep her safe, and it was bullshit, it was crap, because while I spent nineteen years trying to think of every bad thing that could possible happen, I missed the real danger by a million
miles. Don’t torture anyone, I should have said, starting when she was seven. Whatever else you do in life, don’t torture.

  At the same time I tried sheltering under the same savage decision I briefly made during her court martial. Not my daughter. At the trial it had been my desperate attempt to renounce her, a trick that hadn’t fooled my emotions for even a second. Now it came to me differently. Not my daughter—but it wasn’t me saying that, it was the actual sense of life separating us, severing everything that held us close. And that feeling, of all the feelings I ever experienced, was by far the most terrible.

  “It was just once,” Cassie mumbled.

  As painful as it was, that first breaking wave of emotion finished with me fast. I could feel it sweep on past my shoulders toward whatever blind, unsuspecting parents waited next on line.

  “I felt numb afterwards,” Cassie said. She pressed her knees together, twisted sideways on the stool. She didn’t stare at me anymore—she already understood I could say nothing to put it right.

  “You felt numb?”

  She nodded. “Big time.”

  “How did your prisoner feel?”

  Now she looked at me.

  “Rassoul?”

  “How did he feel?”

  “I don’t know. Frightened I guess.”

  “How old is he?”

  “How old? I don’t know. Twenty something. He had a beard. We called him Gilligan.”

  “Does he have a wife? Does he have kids? What town is he from?”

  “I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

  “Does he have a mother? A father?”

  “I don’t—”

  “For God’s sake, Cassie!”

  “Mom—”

  “You tortured him!”

  I yelled this loud as I could, as loud as I ever yelled anything. And that broke Cassie more than my words. Her face dissolved in tears—always before I thought that was just a cliché, but that’s what happened, to the point where it made no sense as a face anymore, it was just this runny wet blob sloshing crazily from side to side.

  “I can’t hear you,” I said, trying to make my voice gentle. She struggled to say something through the tears, but it took a long time before the words were strong enough to make sense. She was sorry at fucking up so bad, making us ashamed. She would leave the army and all that went with it, she was applying to veterinarian school, she had been saving this to tell me since she wanted to make us proud. She sobbed this out, and the sobs broke me just like my scream had broke her, and all I could do about it was reach my hand toward the net that separated us, the wire ping-pong net, and rest it there until she touched the other side.

  “That’s wonderful, Cassie,” I said. “I’ll tell Dad. No, that’s wonderful news.”

  I kept my voice soft and eventually the sobbing stopped. A buzzer went off in the ceiling which meant our time was over. She stood up, smiled or at least tried. When she turned away to the door I saw fresh scratches on the back of her neck extending up past her uniform collar, the kind of bloody scratches that come when someone digs their fingernails as deep into their own flesh as they can possibly go, then rakes them savagely upwards.

  Dad had taken a taxi to the entrance gate and waited for me there. As usual, he had made an instant buddy, the soldier on guard duty, and the two of them shook hands before he hurried over to the car.

  “How was your museum?” I asked—simple words, but it was all I could do to get them out.

  “Those were the days all right. Jitterbug music, K-rations, Rosie the Riveter. It’s really well done.”

  “Do you mind driving?”

  “Sure.”

  He didn’t say much more than that, and even the obvious question was a long time coming.

  “How’s Cassie?”

  “Fine. She misses her phone.”

  I said it too quickly—he noticed, but said nothing. Both of us needed coffee so we stopped at the first rest area we came to. While Dan waited on line, I found a quiet corner and made my call.

  “Pam? This is Vera Savino. We had coffee together yesterday.”

  “Of course. How are you?”

  “I know you’re flying out later, and we are, too, but I wonder if we could get a few minutes to talk?”

  “Flying out of Tulsa? We could meet at my gate. Let’s see, I’ve got my boarding pass right here . . . Gate twenty-seven at five-thirty. Would that work?”

  “I’ll see you there.”

  The drive took longer than we thought, there was the usual hassle checking in, and by the time we got through security it was already past four. “Be right back,” I said, once we got to our gate. Dan glanced over his shoulder toward the rest rooms and nodded.

  If Pam looked tired and harried yesterday, she looked even more so today, despite the crisp linen neatness of her skirt and blouse. She had her laptop open and was typing away while she talked on her phone, but she stopped the moment she caught sight of me through the crowd. We shook hands, but that wasn’t enough for her, and she gave me a big hug.

  “We don’t have much time,” she said, frowning.

  At the counter was the sign saying where the flight was going—Vancouver, which surprised me. Right above us was the TV monitor, but Pam gave it the finger and moved us to a quieter spot.

  Before, when I wrote about my visit with Cassie, I left something out. After she told me what she had done, after she cried, I asked her one question. Does anyone else know? She said no. Nascar of course and Sergeant Mendoza, but no one higher up than that. Good, I remember thinking. Good! She was safe, no one would find out about it, she wouldn’t be charged with an extra crime. This is what I needed to explain to Pam, my shame at being glad, but how could I ever find the right way to begin?

  She sensed my hesitation. “How was your visit with your daughter?”

  “Difficult.”

  She nodded. “I know about difficult. Before Jimmy shipped out that last time, we talked about whether to try and have a baby. It wasn’t about whether we wanted one, of course we wanted one, but whether or not the timing would work. It was all logistics, whether he would be home to help between deployments, whether or not his mom could come down from Chicago, whether I could get maternity leave. We even talked about whether it would be better to have a baby in the spring or fall, and we decided on spring, but the timing wasn’t right for that, so—” She pressed her palms together. “No baby.”

  I took my deep breath. “Cassie and I had a game we played when she was little, something we did when we went out to eat. Watch the people coming in, I told her. Watch—”

  That’s as far as I got with my explanation. Pre-boarding was announced for her flight, and the line formed on our toes.

  “You’re flying to Canada?”

  She nodded, ruefully nodded, and made a dismissive motion with her hand.

  “The other members of the committee think I need a break. They might be right, too. What I’ve learned during our campaign is that most people can only be courageous in brief little flashes, that’s all the vast majority of them can manage. One act of courage, one moment of heroic goodness, then poof—their capacity for doing it is gone forever, either that or they never get another chance.”

  “You’ve done lots of good.”

  “My little flash? Maybe. But they’re right about my needing a vacation. What I worry about, really worry about, is how I’m going to be standing behind a microphone lecturing people who already agree with me that war is wrong, delivering my standard speech, and then I’m going to remember Jimmy and my anger gets the best of me and I blurt it out right in front of the cameras. ‘I hate America! I hate America!’ I’m going to yell that out and in one moment of weakness all the good work we’ve done comes crashing down in flames.”

  They were announcing her flight now, she began gathering up her things.

  “Anyway, it’s not a vacation, it’s a reconnaissance. Apartment hunting. I’m thinking of moving there. I want to live in a country that
doesn’t bully. If I’m ever lucky enough to have a girl like yours that’s where I want to bring her up.”

  “I’m going to call you,” I said.

  “My co-chair is a wonderful man named Hank Clarkson. He lost a son in Afghanistan. Here, I’ll write down his number. We badly need new blood.”

  I took the card, nodded. “You better hurry.”

  “Love it or leave it, right? . . . You’re a good listener. Cassie’s lucky to have you.”

  I took the card out on my first day here, taped it to the refrigerator where I would see it every morning. Pam Cord had crossed out her name, written in Hank Clarkson’s, the wonderful man, the man who lost his son in Afghanistan. But it’s her I want to call. I want to volunteer when I finish here, though I need to ask how exactly I can help. Will I actually have the nerve? I think Pam is right, that most people find courage only in sudden flashes. Here at the end I’m remembering Beth’s story, and how her husband Alan, so weak and manipulated, plunged into an icy river to try and save a man he hated. I can picture it so clearly, that brief moment standing on the bank before he made his decision. I will dive in, I picture him thinking. I will dive in. I will.

  There’s lots more work left of course. Jeannie’s wallpaper, the rolls she picked out, waits in the parlor for me to hang. I must take my time with this, learn to use these new tools correctly. Brushes, yardsticks, trim knives, straight edges, seam rollers— tools not for ripping and tearing, but smoothing, pasting, prettying up. The paper is peach colored and gently Victorian, with a pattern that should be easy to match. Papering over won’t take nearly as long as stripping off, and then the walls will be far too beautiful not to like. The paper will hang here for fifty, sixty, maybe even a hundred years, so our stories will sleep on the walls for the rest of this century, or at least until Cassie is an old woman and what happened in Iraq is a line in a history book, nothing more.

  There’s only a little space left before my words hit the edge of the wall and drop toward the floor. You who have found this will need to stoop to read the rest. But there’s so much left to confess, here in these last few inches where I can still confess anything. I stole paperclips from my teacher’s desk when I was seven and hid them in my closet in a silver horde. I hated saying prayers when I was little and by eleven decided there was no God. I resented Jeannie when she was born, how she stole my mother’s attention. I gave a girl named Judy Popp a quarter to be my friend. The two of us took ribbons from the fabric store and once I stole buttons entirely on my own. I smoked a cigarette behind Munten’s supermarket when I was twelve. I was boy crazy in school, a terrible flirt. I cheated on a history test in seventh grade. I necked with Zack Reese on our living room sofa when I was supposed to be babysitting. I smoked pot when I was a sophomore, hardly ever did homework. I waitressed in summers and never reported tips on my taxes. Dan on our honeymoon made love to me behind the wall in Washington in the middle of the day. For many years I drove without my seatbelt fastened. I always tell Dan I’m voting for one candidate, then go into the booth and vote for the other. As a young mother I was a failure at breast feeding. Five years ago at a convention in Phoenix I danced with a handsome teacher from Pennsylvania and let him tug me back to his room. I don’t read as much as I should. I color my hair to hide the gray. I’m ten pounds overweight. My daughter is a torturer.