New Title 1

by Lestewka, Patrick

  Vera, you have no idea.

  “Who dropped you off?”

  I shrugged. “A kind soul who took pity on a wayward traveler.”

  “And he left you in a heap why…?”

  “He didn’t want his secret identity revealed?”

  “Seriously, Mr. Grant, why—?”

  “Vera? It’s Jerome. And I think I’ll use the bathroom now.”

  I didn’t have to go but I didn’t want to answer any more questions. Questions are dangerous things: sometimes blindly, sometimes falteringly, but somehow instinctively, they have a way of leading you back to the truth. And the truth was something I didn’t want to face.

  They kept me for two weeks. Call it a re-education period. I had to learn to walk again, for starters. My leg was fractured, not broken, so I was able to put weight on it within a few days. But my toes, one-quarter of the space I’d grown accustomed to balancing on, were gone. It’s difficult to explain what it’s like to walk without your toes. The closest comparison I can draw is this: imagine standing on the ledge of a building with your toes dangling over the edge and a strong headwind kicking up. Can you feel it—the loss of equilibrium and that involuntary urge to rock back on your heels, the constant sense you’ll overbalance and fall face-first into empty space? That’s how every step felt for me. And when they took the bandages off my injured hand and I saw those three sorry-ass fingers…Christ, it reminded me of those shiny metal pincers kids use to pick up stuffed animals at the arcade.

  Still, plenty of folks have had it worse than me—Helen Keller would’ve slammed me as a pussy.

  These were the choices: curl up and die or deal with it.

  And I don’t even know how to curl up and die.

  The doctors tried fitting me for prosthetics but I said piss all over that plan. Instead I wadded newspapers into the toes of a pair of sneakers and started staggering around. And fell. And fell. And, just to shake things up a bit, I’d fall some more. My knees were scraped raw on the tile flooring; at night the healing flesh would knit itself to the sheet and come morning the nurse would have to strip the sheet off like peeling an industrial-sized bandage. Afterwards she’d dress my wounds and help me on with my sneakers so I could shamble out into the hallway…where, inevitably (and, were you to ask the charge nurse, often comically) I’d go ass-over-teakettle again. Got so bad I seriously considered gluing a spring to my forehead so I’d bounce back upright every time I fell forward. But the nurses were encouraging and the physiotherapist supportive, and I needed to prove it to myself so eventually I got the hang of it.

  The first few nights were the worst. I mean, every night is pretty damn bad—that’s another thing I’ve learned to live with—but those first few…bad, bad times.

  The door to my room. That damn door. I was always watching it. In the darkness of my room, the only light came from the narrow gap separating the bottom of the door from the floor. Just that tiny slit of light bleeding under the doorframe and spreading weakly across the tiles. And a hospital is a busy, busy place—code reds and code blues and code yellows, a rainbow of codes, nurses and unit aides rushing up and down the ward at all hours of the night. I’d listen to their footsteps and every time the slit of light—my slit of light—was darkened by the length of a passing shoe, I’d flinch. Every…single…time. At night that unbroken stretch of light became everything to me…man, it became the whole fucking world.

  Worst of all was this repeating…vision, I guess you’d call it. I’d be lying there, blankets tucked up under my chin, and the door opens. The harsh light of the hall streams into the room and I squint and shield my face. A figure stands in the doorway. I can never make out features: only the stark outline of a body carved in shadow, every angle and curve of it repelling the light so utterly that it seems as if someone has taken a pair of shears and cut it, the utter blackness of it, out of the light. In the black hole forming its head, to the left side, a red pit glows balefully. I hear this voice, so familiar and at the same time completely inhuman, and that voice is saying: “The world needs a little chaos…”

  And that’s when I’d start to scream. Long, wracking screams, so loud I’d end up hoarse the next morning. I’ve never screamed like that, before or since. Dawn would come and with it a sense of humiliation and shame…but there was no room for shame during those first few nights. Terror was king, those nights.

  Sometimes Vera would come to me. She’d press a cold cloth to my forehead and my arms would find their way around her waist and pull her to me, needing her warmth and her permanence and her sweet, clean smell. I remember saying things to her between the sobs and screams: confessions, I think, of all the terrible things I’d done to others, of the people I’d killed, some of whom deserved it but most of whom were just in the wrong places at the wrong times or whose ideologies disagreed with those of my government. Confessions of a man who felt his purpose on this Earth was to lead others to their deaths.

  “Shhhh,” Vera would say. “It’s alright, now.”

  Once, when it got really bad, she kissed me on the forehead, and again, on the cheek. There was nothing sexual in the gesture: it was just one human being comforting another human being in the most essential way they knew how. And it’s a big world, you know? A big, fucked-up world. But it’s acts like that—just the briefest and most instinctive acts of kindness and warmth—that somehow make it just a little bit smaller, and little bit safer, and a little bit more beautiful.

  They released me on Christmas eve, thinking there must be someplace I’d rather pass the holidays. I spent Christmas in a Greyhound bus driving through Saskatchewan. Christmas dinner was a hot hamburger sandwich at a truckstop outside Regina. Boxing Day found me washed up in Pittsburgh, standing in front of the same P.O. box where, one month and a lifetime ago, I’d received the letter that had set it all in motion.

  I inserted my spare key and opened the box. My heart skipped a beat.

  Another letter.

  The frigate captain descends from the bridge to sit with me. He is older, perhaps sixty, his accent impossible to place. A certain sadness expresses itself in the lines around his eyes and the set of his mouth. We have reached an unspoken agreement: our pasts are our own. In his hands he carries a silver flask and two small cups. He sets the cups on the deck between his spread legs and pours them full from the flask. He hands one to me. We click rims and he says:

  “May you live in interesting times, friend.”

  “And you.”

  The liquor is very smooth and leaves a taste of burnt lemon on the tongue. He pours another cup. I don’t protest. He knows a lot of people in Syria. The type of people I need to meet. He says they’ll sell me whatever I need—automatic rifles, rocket launchers, stinger missiles—and offer me safe passage into Iraq. He said they’d fight alongside me, if the cause—and the price—is right. It’s amazing, he says, the kind of loyalty the American greenback can buy.

  I told him I didn’t need anyone fighting beside me. I’ve taken enough young men down that dead-end road. This is the last time I will go to war, and I will go alone.

  The envelope in the P.O. box was white and inside was a small strip of paper. Two sets of numbers were typed on it. One of them was a telephone number; the –011 prefix identified it as European. The other was a string of eight numbers.

  I walked across the road to a bank of telephone booths and dialed the number. An automated operator told me how much change to insert. There was a series of distant clicks and snaps and, after a single ring, a pleasant female voice said, “International Bank of Stockholm, how may I help you?”

  “I…I don’t know,” I said.

  The woman laughed. “Do you have your access number?”

  “No, I—” Then I saw the strip of paper in my hand, the eight-digit string below the telephone number. I read it off.

  There was the sound of a keyboard being tapped. Then, “Alright, Mr. Grant, how can I serve your needs—will you be making a withdrawal?”

 
; I felt like I’d been stabbed in the gut. I braced my hand on the booth’s scarred Plexiglas.

  “H-how much do I have?”

  “Five million dollars,” she said. “A little more now, with interest.”

  I staggered and fell forward, ringing my head off the booth. The receiver slipped from my fingers to swing on its flexible metal cord.

  Distant, tinny: “Mr. Grant? Are you alright?”

  It was the only promise the fucking thing ever kept, one it knew would hurt me more than any bullet. One last dirty trick.

  I steadied myself and picked up the receiver. “I’m here.”

  “Is everything alright? It sounded like—”

  “I’m fine. Bobbled the phone.”

  “Alright. Now, would you like to make a—”

  “Withdrawal. Yes, I would.”

  “And how much would you like?”

  “All of it.”

  I donated the money, in one lump sum, to the International Coalition for World Peace. It was the largest single donation the organization had ever received, and I was assured it would help a lot of people. When their press rep asked me who to thank for such generosity, I gave her the names of the Magnificent Seven, and Grosevoir’s. There was a press release, and the story made quite a few papers.

  I want to believe, wherever that thing was, it read the article.

  And I want to believe the irony ate its fucking guts.

  The question that remained was: What do you do when the whole world falls apart? It had been hard enough to get my life back on track after ’Nam—and now, after this? Forget about it.

  Still, I tried. I had money stashed from the Keybank job and with it I rented a one-room apartment near the Pittsburgh Public Library. Every day I’d rise at eight o’clock following a dreamless sleep, shit, shave, get dressed. I’d eat breakfast at a diner facing the library and, at nine o’clock sharp, cross the road and walk inside. There were sections of the Post-Gazette threaded onto long wooden dowels and I would take the World News section and sit in a faintly urine-smelling chair facing the wall. I would read the section front to back, even the adverts—Losing your hair, or lost most of it? Call DeOliviera Hair Care Systems, Inc.—and set it back on the rack.

  Afterwards I would sit and stare at the wall. The wall was white pigmented concrete and I’d stare at it, all the tiny perforations and cracks on its surface, losing myself in the emptiness. My major focus was to think of nothing, to let the wall’s whiteness sink into me and render my mind as blank and whitewashed as it was. I became very good at it: hours passed, my stomach rumbled and joints ached, day passed into night and yet I noticed none of it, gone and away in that cold white world. Then the lights would be clicking off and on, twice, to signal closing time.

  I’d eat supper at the same diner and walk home. By the time I reached the apartment my boots would be wet from the slush, the wadded newspapers in the toes a cold, sodden mess.

  I would draw a bath, strip down, and slip into the steaming water. I bought a radio and plugged it in and set it on the sink’s ledge. I never turned it on. Sometimes I would try to lose myself in the bathroom tiles as I did in the library wall, but the faded floral pattern and corridors of dark grime marred the necessary whiteness. That’s when my mind would wander, spiraling in an ever-tighter orbit like water circling a drain, approaching that center of perfect darkness. There was nothing good down there: only misery, and recrimination, and slowly-creeping insanity.

  But I couldn’t help myself from probing that darkness, in the same way I’d probe a rotted molar with my tongue. And, sooner or later, I’d probe deep enough and peel away enough layers that I’d end up screaming, screaming and thrashing in the water with my toeless feet rattling against the porcelain while my next-door neighbor hammered his fist on the wall telling me to shut the hell up.

  Once, and only once, I found myself holding the radio in front of my face, the red numbers flashing 12:00 six inches above the water. The cord was black with a white stripe running its length and a sticker near the plug read CAUTION: TO PREVENT ELECTRIC SHOCK MATCH WIDE BLADE TO WIDE SLOT AND FULLY INSERT. I switched it on. “Sweet Dreams,” by the Eurythmics. Then my hand lowered until the radio’s plastic casing broke the water and suddenly Annie Lennox’s voice resonated waterily and little bubbles rose from the speaker holes to burst on the bath’s surface. I wondered how long it would take the water to find a live circuit…

  …and, as I watched those pinprick bubbles break the water’s surface, I thought about a time in the jungle during those small still moments preceding an engagement. Tripwire had asked, “Sarge, if my ticket’s punched, you think I’m going to hell?” My initial reaction had been anger: “Shitcan that lip. Nobody’s getting their ticket punched.” Then, after the firefight: “We’re soldiers, son. Soldiers don’t go to hell. Soldiers kill other soldiers. We’re in a situation where everybody involved knows the stakes. And if you’re going to accept those stakes, you’ve got to do certain things. Simplicity itself. We’re soldiers. We follow codes. Orders. There is dignity in that. Honor. So, no, son, you wouldn’t have gone to hell. Soldiers don’t go to hell…”

  …and then my arm was rocketing up, the radio pulled clear of the water, spinning end-over-end to smash against the wall.

  Soldiers don’t go to hell.

  But maybe cowards do.

  The next day I woke at my regular hour and walked to the library. I grabbed the World News section and sat in my urine-stink chair.

  And that’s when I saw it.

  The headline read: “Iran-Iraq War: Blood in the Streets of Kuwait.” It was accompanied by a quarter-page color photograph; a street scene. The road was a narrow stretch of dirt tamped flat by an endless procession of feet and scooter tires. On either side stood squat buildings—or, more accurately, their remains. They resembled sand castles in the midst of being washed away by an advancing tide. Chunks of brick were strewn haphazardly about, crumbling walls pockmarked with bullet holes. To the far left, a tattered and charred Iraqi flag was caught in mid-flutter on a twisted flagpole.

  A pair of bodies lay amidst the rubble. Their limbs were bent at angles that would’ve been physically impossible had they been alive. There was an uneven ring around one of the heads, tinted a slightly darker hue than the red dirt it was lain across. In the right foreground a young boy, maybe fourteen, crouched behind an overturned Jeep. He was firing an AK-47 at something or someone off-frame.

  If that had been all the photograph depicted I would have turned the page.

  But it wasn’t.

  A lone figure stood in the doorway of a gutted building. He was not hunched over or cowering; instead he leaned, one hand casually pocketed, against the doorframe. It was a posture suggestive of complete comfort and ease: a director watching an expertly-orchestrated action sequence playing itself out. Sunlight streamed through shell-holes in the building to veil his face in muted yellow tones…

  But there was no mistaking the shock of curly red hair.

  Or the oh-so-familiar smile touching the corners of that delicate upturned mouth.

  Or that cold, red, utterly unfeeling stare.

  Answer. Chaos.

  Two emotions swept through me, starkly conflicting: hate and love. Hatred for Answer, or whatever he had become, and, on a higher cosmic level, hatred for whatever forces were at work to necessitate such realities as war, and violence, and evil. But, cresting in a surprising wave, was the opposing emotion.

  Love.

  It slammed together in my head with all the crushing weight of epiphany: I loved those men. Gunner and Slash, Crosshairs and Tripwire and Zippo—loved. There was no shame in the admission, only the unshakeable certainty that I should love them. It was not the love of a man for a woman, or of a father for his child. That is an elemental love, love expressed at the depth of bone, and blood, and soul. The love I felt for those men was one of circumstance: the element of choice did not exist for us. We did not choose one another but instead were thrown
into a situation that forced us to place our trust and our lives in those we fought beside. Soldiers in a warzone enter into a pact, whether knowingly or unknowingly: whatever goes down, whoever goes down, they all go down together, as a unit, live or die.

  So, yeah, I loved those men. It was a reckless and extreme kind of love, but love all the same. Perhaps the only kind I’ve ever really known.

  I set the newspaper back on the rack and walked out the library’s front doors.

  I would never return.

  A Greyhound took me from Pittsburgh to Macon, Georgia, where I spent the day with an old friend. Another Greyhound brought me to Key Largo. I took a motel room a few blocks from the seaport. The next morning I walked the pier and made casual enquiries. A longshoreman pointed me towards the Monkey Sea. I met the captain and we struck a handshake deal: seven-thousand dollars for passage to Syria and safe entry into Iraq.