by John Grant
We were sitting on the porch watching a late-Fall sun head toward the horizon. The sky was painting the tree-splashed hills the colors of toasted bread. It was the end of another day marked by little except the fact that I'd lived through it.
I made no reply to her. Most of the time I didn't.
"You should wipe those thoughts out of your head, Quinn," she continued, nodding as if I'd said something. She was standing with her hands on the porch rail, looking out defiantly toward the sunset. There was enough of a breeze to press her dress against her legs. "If you don't, you're letting them be the bars to the prison cell you've locked yourself into."
She turned to face me, and I tried to meet her gaze. I couldn't, so instead I looked down at my own arms, what was left of them.
The months had etiolated them. They looked like empty denim shirt-sleeves hanging on a line, one of them tucked up by the wind more than the other. The people with the resigned faces had saved my left arm down as far as the wrist, my right not so far as that, only to a few inches below the elbow. Freakishly, the explosion hadn't harmed the rest of me at all beyond a few superficial shrapnel wounds that had soon healed, leaving scars that looked like nothing more serious than long pale crinkly hairs plastered by sweat to my skin. My "good looks", as the medics had called them, were still the way they'd always been, except for the waking nightmares that seethed behind my face.
I didn't have much use for mirrors, but sometimes Tania made me look into them as she shaved me, or trimmed my hair, or brushed my teeth.
As the sun came into laborious contact with the cut-out hilltops I spoke at last.
"Time for a drink," I said as I always did this time of evening. "An aperitif. Fuck the meds."
Tania slapped her hands against her cotton-covered thighs and let out a gasp of exasperation.
"Have you been listening to a single word I've been saying?"
"Yes. You've been telling me I should look on the bright side, think positive, all that."
She sighed.
It was a constant bone of contention between us, like my refusal to wear the clumsy prosthetic hands I'd been given, which lay in their box upstairs. If I wanted a more sophisticated pair we were going to have to find the money for them – a lot of money for them – from somewhere. All the government would spring for were lumps of pink plastic that looked ridiculous because of their color and chafed my stumps to agony within minutes. That was what the country could afford, they said. There were, after all, tax breaks to pay for.
"But I'm a stupid self-pitying bastard," I said, "so I just carry on wallowing in my misery and bitterness, or dreaming up crazy schemes about what I'd like to do to the fatcat fuckers who made me like this." I raised my shorter arm, the one that seemed always to be wanting to hide itself within the sleeve of my teeshirt. "The trouble is, I can't nuke Crawford, Texas, and fry Il Buce and the Stepford Wife alive because how the fuck without any fingers could I set the" – I formed the word fastidiously – "device? I can't strangle Rumsfeld in his own intestines, which is what I'd dearly love to do, because he hasn't left me with any hands to strangle him with. As for those fuckers Darth Cheney and Kindasleazy ... So all I have left is talking about how I'd like to do every one of those things and more, and getting my jollies by dreaming about those bastards' screams and them begging for a mercy I won't give as they choke on their own severed genitals, because every time I ask you for your help making my dreams real you just look disgusted or your face twists up in pain or you pretend you've not heard me, which is probably the worst and cruellest thing you could do to me. And somehow in the middle of all that I can't find room to cram in a Dale Carnegie course on encouraging my positive thoughts."
It wasn't one of my longer speeches. I was just getting started. I could go on for hours, when the spirit took me, detailing the medieval tortures I wanted to inflict on the shits who'd stolen my hands and put me here.
"I'll get you that beer," said Tania, heading for the screen door. "And something a bit stronger for myself," she appended under her breath, thinking I couldn't hear her.
She came back out a few minutes later and plonked the beer down on my chair arm. In her other hand she had something cheerily red and toxic-looking with a parasol sticking out the top. My beer was in a plastic beaker with a screw-on top and a straw. The condensation wouldn't form properly on the plastic sides, which looked blotchy and diseased rather than enticingly misted. Nonetheless, I bowed my head and sucked and the liquid was tart and cold, like the ice no one had been able to put on me when the fire possessed me.
Tania flopped into the other chair on the porch, and let her free hand dangle as she took a sip – a gulp – of her drink. Two chairs were all we needed out here these days because we didn't have visitors very often any more, and most of them didn't want to stay long. I thought it was because they were sickened or embarrassed by my deformity. Tania thought the same, only it was different deformities we were thinking of.
Dad didn't come here at all, now. A soldier without hands isn't a soldier any more. He'd made himself forget about me.
"I'm taking you away on a trip," she announced abruptly in an alcohol-colored voice.
"Yeah. Right. Another psych checkup by those terribly nice people at Newark General?"
"Nope." She put her glass carefully down on the armrest of her chair and stared at it. "I'm taking you to see my folks."
That caught my attention. Her folks hadn't come across from Scotland for the wedding, although they'd sent a bunch of tartaned ethnic objects for us to fill the attic with. We'd kept planning to go over to what Tania called, with a curious twist of her lip, "the old country", but somehow as the years passed we'd never gotten around to it. And then, of course, there'd come my Iraq posting, the murderer of all plans, real or otherwise.
I looked at her, questioning.
"I think I need their help," she said. She was still staring at her half-emptied glass of red stickiness. For once she seemed doubtful of her words.
"Their help with you, Quinn," she added, as if the glass didn't know already that this was what she meant. "I've booked us tickets for Friday. Return tickets from Newark to Glasgow. We're going for a week, just over."
"You didn't think this was something we should discuss?" I said, purely for the sake of saying it. She was the one who took my decisions for me – I was happy enough about it, because it was one less thing for me to make a mess of. But that didn't mean I couldn't voice a few words of false independence from time to time.
"I knew you'd just argue about it for days, so I thought I'd pre-empt you."
She winced. "Pre-empt" wasn't the most popular of words around our house. She gave a flutter of her hand as apology, then took another swig of her drink to distract my attention.
"I think it's a good idea," I said, surprising her. "I just wish you'd asked me first."
She grinned at me, for the first time in days. For the first time in weeks or years, I managed a grin back.
"Just remember who's the boss, woman."
"Yes, boss."
My good mood was covered over by the usual black tar before she'd finished the second word. I stood nine inches taller than her, but she'd be the one carrying the baggage or struggling with the trolley. I wondered how many times during the trip I'd reach instinctively with my left arm toward my inside right jacket pocket for the tickets or the passports or the money before realizing that of course these days they resided in Tania's pocket, not mine. I wondered how many times I'd force that embarrassed little "silly me, it doesn't really matter, honestly" laugh for the benefit of the people around me.
I didn't say anything more that evening until after she'd led me inside and fed me fried chicken and microwaved sweet potatoes followed by praline caramel ice cream, and then taken me into the bathroom and unzipped my trousers and pulled them down around my knees so I could have a shit.
When I finally spoke it was just to say thank you after she'd wiped my ass for me.
The on
e time I wished my pride would take a holiday so I could use my cheap, wrongly colored, hated prosthetics.
~
My dad made it to be a five-star general, unlike his farm-laborer father before him. Dad wanted lots of sons who'd all make it to be five-star generals, so the family tree would glow in the night like some spiral galaxy and impress the hell out of the Hubble Telescope.
It didn't turn out that way, because my mother never properly recovered after giving birth to me. I have vague recollections of the smell of soap and soft skin and summery cloth; there are other memories, too, of the smells being not so good, but by then my father had decreed it was probably best if "his little man" were kept out of the sickroom. Clear as a color photograph in my head is what I saw when, at the age of three and a half, I was held aloft for one final look at my mother, framed by the oblong of her coffin. I gazed down at the face of a stranger who bore a casual resemblance to someone I'd once known.
Dad never married again. He had a succession of lady friends, one or two of whom he succeeded in coaxing out of their military uniforms when he thought I was asleep. But their visits were few and far between. Mainly it was just him and me.
And his ambitions for me. If he couldn't have a passel of sons, then the one son his weak vessel had borne to him should fulfil a passel's worth of his dreams. I was a soldier from even before my mother died. I could get my bedclothes as tight as a drumskin by the time I was five.
Tania shouldn't have found me, but she did. Why her eyes ever alit on the stuffy youth with the micrometer-precise haircut, whose personality was hardly more than the uniform he wore, is something I've never been able to fathom. But she bubbled up to me at my cousin's wedding and introduced herself, asking me if I agreed with her a cow had probably sneezed into the vol-au-vents. Young women were a slight mystery to me at the time, although I'd read all the usual magazines, gazing with a sort of astonished fascination at the glistening revelations; and so I didn't know quite what to do with myself during that first conversation. But she was persistent, and without my ever understanding quite how it had happened I had a date with her the following week.
The years didn't change Tania. The faint accent she had, which wasn't so much an accent as a startling lack of one, never went. She had a face you'd dismiss as nothing special, really rather plain, except that at the same time you'd find yourself thinking it was maybe the most beautiful face you'd ever seen. Around that oval hung straightish blonde or muddy-mousy hair that was either lank or ethereally fine, like the flimsy webs that billow across the blackness between the stars. Her eyes were green, or perhaps brown, or perhaps even darker than that. Her skin was pallid; her skin was deliciously porcelain-pale. I wasn't so dazed during our first meeting that I didn't notice, with the highly trained reflexes of military men everywhere, that she significantly lacked the generous frontal rations enjoyed by the women in the magazines. Curiously, this made her seem far more feminine than they were.
(No, there was one thing about her that changed. She gave up smoking after she'd been properly introduced to Dad. He had moral compunctions about women smoking.)
What else did she look like?
She looked like Tania. That's all the description necessary. Certainly it's the only real description I can come up with.
Born in Scotland, midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh and a bit to the north of both, she'd been raised in a village that sounded more like a few houses, a shop, a pub and a post office than anything you'd recognize as a settlement. About the family business she was always charmingly imprecise: I got the impression her father wasn't really a farmer and not really a trader, but somewhere midway between both and a bit to the north, just like where they lived.
Somehow she'd ended up training as a dancer in London, and had come to New York as an understudy in a touring production of something by Chopin, or maybe it was Delibes. But then she'd sprained her knee (did I not mention the slight limp with which she walked ever after? it was something I had a hard job remembering, even as I watched her) and after that there could be no more question of her pursuing a career as a dancer, except perhaps along Eighth Avenue, a performance art she wasn't prepared to countenance. So she turned instead to production. She already had a work visa, and she was able to wangle that into an assistant position somewhere far enough off Broadway it was probably in the middle of the Hudson.
That was not too long before she found me.
Dad and the army laid on a hell of a military wedding, I'll give them that, even though he hid his disapproval of this "Bohemian" so deeply and effectively that it was the first thing strangers became aware of when they met him. She turned to costume design so we could be together as I finished college and then wherever around the country the army's whim took me.
My posting to Iraq represented the first time we'd spent more than a day apart since our wedding.
Dad's eyes were watery with pride as he wished me bon voyage. He put on all his old medals, the better to show off the puffing of his chest.
"Go serve your country and kill those heathen motherfuckers, son."
I'm surprised the stare Tania gave him didn't boil the flesh from his bones.
~
"I don't care what you say, sir. I think that's liquor."
Tania and I looked at each other in frustration. Behind her face, the depth of the molded plastic window frame gave me the illusion I was looking out not upon sunset-painted clouds but upon the ocean floor, where weirdly colored coral formations sprouted.
The chief stewardess, who looked like an advertisement for the Aryan race after a teenager had doctored it with Photoshop, had spied the plastic bottle full of glucose solution sitting on the fold-down tray in front of me and gotten it into her head that I was sipping scotch or brandy through the bottle's built-in straw. On these planes, she'd informed us coldly, it was a Federal Offense to drink any alcohol except that sold to us at great cost by the cabin crew.
"I strongly advise you, sir, not to drink any more out of that bottle," she concluded, fixing us in turn with a stare borrowed from an old Gestapo movie. "Know what I mean?"
She flounced off down the aisle, doubtless to phone her mother for a good weep.
Tania began to giggle. So, after a few moments, did I. My laughter felt very distant from me, but the emotion was perfectly genuine. Adversity was bringing Tania and me closer together than we'd been in months.
We'd navigated Newark International with the usual dehumanizing and, in my case, emasculating hindrances. The clerk at check-in had seemed sickened by my vulgarity in putting my elbows on the counter in front of him. The security people had taken one look at my dark face and my truncated arms and decided I was obviously a mad Arab suicide bomber – who else would go around with his hands missing, after all? We'd dissuaded them from the full body-cavity search, but they'd done just about everything else they could think of. We'd discovered the eateries and drinkeries behind the security gates all worked under the assumption that their customers could carry their own plates and glasses; burdened by our duty-free bags and our carry-on luggage, Tania had done her best to cope for two, but even so there was a corner of the hall that was going to be forever beer-stained. After she'd fed the both of us, there were still two hours to go before departure; I got through the first hour okay but eventually confessed I needed a leak, so there was a whole round of further complication when we found the disabled bathroom was closed for repairs ...
I was dreading our arrival in the airport at Glasgow, where presumably we'd have to go through the entire rigmarole all over again.
"Put it this way," said Tania, reading my thoughts, "it couldn't possibly be any worse."
"You bet?" I said, though in fact I agreed with her.
"Have a nice glug of glucose, Quinn. It'll make you feel better. If that nasty lady comes back I'll deal with her."
I chuckled again. Tania was grinning. Before Iraq, her grin had always made me chuckle. It was one of our countless ways of making love.
Time passed.
We watched a movie in which Cameron Diaz waggled her rear end at the camera. No change there. I slept for a while. A different stewardess, younger, woke me up to ask if I wanted a breakfast that I took one look at and didn't, although I accepted the coffee and the plastic demi-tasse of orange juice.
"I'm lucky," I said to Tania as she peered out the window into the beginnings of sunrise to see if Scotland were visible yet.
She turned from the window, surprised. "It's been a long time since I've heard you say that, Quinn."
I knew she was expecting me to tell her I was lucky because I had her, so instead I said: "There are countless other poor assholes who've come back who would envy me for having got off so lightly."
Her face fell, but she rallied. "Taken you a while to realize that, hasn't it?"
"And at least we've got enough money to cope," I went on. Dad might have decided I was a lost son, but either he'd forgotten to cancel his monthly allowance to us or it was his way of cancelling out his guilt for the abandonment.
"That certainly makes it easier," she said, nodding, her eyes narrowing.
I felt the corners of my mouth twitch, even though I was trying to stop them doing so.
She saw.
"You're a bastard, Quinn Hogarth," she said, the disguised offendedness draining out of her eyes, leaving behind sparkle. "But I knew that when I married you."
She took one of my ears in each hand and dragged my head towards her for a kiss.
"Say it," she whispered in my ear.
"Those are the least important things of all," I murmured back to her. "You're my luckiness, Tania, and always will be."
"You don't know the half of it," she said.
~
The airport in Glasgow was a bit of a disappointment – which was to its credit. Our adrenaline levels had geared themselves up for another dose of Newark International, only worse because of being in a foreign country. But there was neither subservience nor bored resentment and suspicion on display. The place was about a tenth the size of its Newark counterpart, which might explain some of this – not all. The attitude of the various uniformed officials seemed to be that we were all equal colleagues in achieving a common aim, which was to get arrivals through the bureaucracy as quickly and comfortably as possible.