by Trevor Cole
The sunlight drew her to the oeil-de-boeuf, and when she got close, she could see a faint layer of drywall dust clinging to the glass. Vicki placed her lips near to puff it away, but she had no breath to do it.
3
The cat was obviously equa-mouse. Which won’t make any sense, but I can explain. I’d been sticking to my room for about a week, mostly sitting in front of my computer, locked into this site I’d found, just watching the screen, listening to the blips, clicking when I was supposed to click. (After a few hours it kind of felt like floating, which was perfect.) When I wasn’t looking at the screen I was watching this cat my parents got while I was away. Which was a weird thing in itself because my dad hates everything about cats (“sociopaths of the pet world” he calls them). But after watching it for a few days, it seemed to me this cat had the exact quality Legg used to call “equa-mouse.” It was his version of “equanimous,” which was a word he’d found in one of the reports they handed out to the guys in the D&S platoon (Defence and Security) on the state of relations between soldiers and the warlords that were carving up Balakhet, where the camp was located. (“After a period of hostility, exacerbated by the actions of Mullah Takhar Dashti, now under ISAF custody, the temper of interactions between CF personnel and the local Afghan community appears, for the moment, to be equanimous.”)
Legg made quick decisions on which things to take seriously and which to make fun of, and to him using “equanimous” in that report was mockable for two factors: (1) its total ignorance of the antagonism the D&S guys felt from some of the Afghan locals during the presence patrols they conducted around Balakhet; and (2) its “ass-licking-lieutenant-typed fuck-headedness” (classic Legg). But he liked the sound of “equamouse,” I guess, and to him it came to identify a quality he valued pretty highly, which was the quality of not giving a shit. As far as the future went, he told me, as far as having a career, having a family, worrying about anyone else or even about his own personal safety, he was equa-mouse. I didn’t know what to make of it the first time I heard it, but I came to understand. I got the whole better-off-not-caring lesson.
The cat made me think of all this because the cat really seemed to be guided by the same principles. Food didn’t interest it, or people; its behaviour seemed totally disconnected and arbitrary. One day it might jump from the top of the refrigerator onto Dad’s neck, and the next day, not. It didn’t seem to have any needs or aims, not even enough ambition to become a regular menace. And the more I watched it, the more I figured out it was this carelessness that gave it a kind of power in the house. And so I just figured Legg would’ve liked the cat, and would’ve thought it was okay that I used his word.
Legg’s full name and title was Corporal Marc Sebastien Leggado, rifleman, which he never allowed anyone to use. I met him just a few weeks after I’d arrived at Camp Laverne.
I knew zip about the military before I signed up for the COF-AP program, but it turns out that in a few sensitive areas around the world they keep sustainment bases that hardly anyone knows about. When people talk about the Canadians in Afghanistan, they think of Camp Nathan Smith or Kandahar Airport, or before that Camp Julien. Nobody ever mentions Camp Laverne because they don’t know it exists. But it’s there, unofficially I guess, sitting on the outskirts of a place called Balakhet, a really messed-up old city in the central Wardak province. Legg said we were there “killing two birds” – the camp was about an hour away from Kabul, so it was close enough to get troops and supplies there fast if they needed to; and Wardak was also the site of the Taliban’s last stand in 2001 and now, he said, “the shit was bubbling again.” Rival militias were fighting each other and the jihadists were getting noisy. He figured the coalition wanted to beef up its presence before Balakhet went all Kandahar on them.
From what I understand about military camps, Camp Laverne is a sort of small-scale, necessities-only version, dug into the desert. It’s ringed by tall, thick bastion walls, which are like stiff, ten-foot-high bags filled with sand and topped with razor wire, and it features all the usual flat-painted G-Wagons and LAVS (light armoured vehicles) that are either being driven or repaired. Most of the buildings are canvas Quonset huts called weather havens – big ones for common areas like the kitchen and the messes, smaller ones for the sleeping quarters for officers and soldiers. (Civilian support staff like me generally slept in smaller tents that weren’t as insulated from the heat.) There’s also a bunch of ISO units, which look like those long steel boxes that get loaded into ships, but they can be stacked or lined up and turned into offices or washrooms or storage units or, in my case, the portable water treatment facility I worked in.
I spent the first few weeks in camp pretty much the way I’d spent most of my life up to that point: keeping to myself, eating whenever they let me, focusing on the work I had to do, and just watching other people go about their lives. I’ve never been too good at making friends; it’s like there’s a trick to it I couldn’t figure out. Part of it, I think, is people consider my sense of humour a bit off, somehow. Obscure. I tend to say things that make them go “Huh?” And I guess “huh?” is hard to get past. The more trouble I had making friends the less work I put into it. By about grade six I decided it wasn’t important.
Before I even met Legg, I heard him. There was this faint, high whine coming through the dead afternoon air as I walked through the compound, across silt the colour of milky tea. I was headed for the ambulance, the closest Camp Laverne ever got to a proper medical facility while I was there, parked under a big tarpaulin to try and keep it out of the August heat. (That heat – the first time it hit me, when I stepped off the plane, it made me think of grade four recess when a big kid named Gary Millson used to sit on my stomach until I almost passed out so he could watch my eyes roll back in my head.)
I was going to the ambulance to get my hand treated for burns. Somebody had set a bunch of metal filter canisters down by the door at the treatment facility, right in the way. And when I came on duty, after they’d been sitting in direct Afghan sunlight for a few hours, I tried to pick one up, which it turns out is something only a fairly new arrival would do.
The whine was coming from the ambulance, and I knocked on the door and waited in the shade of the tarp so I could breathe. Finally a short female medic in white shirt and pants opened the door for me and I squeezed inside.
They had a generator running a small air conditioner, so it was instantly cooler in there. Once my pupils adjusted to the blueish light I saw there were three other people besides me: the medic, a doctor, and a soldier who was lying on a pad, gripping its edges and making a sound like the steam whistle of a kettle.
In the middle of pressing and prodding around the bubbled skin on my hand, the medic glanced up and saw me staring at the soldier. The doctor was bent over his face, so I couldn’t see what was going on, but the guy was obviously in a lot of pain. “Sand devil,” she said. “A little whirlwind, whipped sand into his eyes. Happens all the time here.” She leaned toward the soldier. “Which is why soldiers on patrol are supposed to wear their goggles.”
The soldier stopped whining and ground out a few words through a clenched jaw, which sounded like “Hate those fucking goggles.” The doctor shifted and for a second I could see through a space under his arm. He seemed to be prodding the solider’s left eyeball with a Q-tip, which made the soldier stamp his foot on the platform.
“Don’t!” said the doctor.
The medic seemed mildly amused. “Just try to breathe evenly, corporal.”
“Can’t stand shit in my eye!”
I mentioned my sense of humour? As much as it seems to put people off, it’s probably the only thing I like about myself. Generally, when it comes to my positive qualities, I prefer to reject someone else’s list rather than come up with my own. At home I’d be heading through the foyer on my way out the door and my mother would introduce me to some client I’d never met as “our lovely, intelligent boy” with “a real passion for the sciences.” S
he’d push the hair off my forehead with her soft fingers and say, “We think there’s medicine in Kyle’s future.” And through all this I’d have to chew on my tongue, literally crush my flesh between my molars until I tasted blood, to keep from screaming at my mother how fucking wrong she was, and how she sounded like she was writing a newspaper ad about some completely different person. She’d smile this proud little smile and I’d have to force my way past her and get out before I started yelling at her, “Who are you talking about? What’s his name? Where does he live?”
But I do notice ironies, and absurd juxtapositions, like the professor with dandruff who talks about “precipitating insolubles,” or the politician who stands behind bulletproof glass to tell viewers not to let the suicide bombers win. And I think it’s good that I notice them, because somebody should. And since they always hit me as funny, I usually can’t stop myself from saying something about them.
So when the soldier on the pad talked about “shit in my eye,” I immediately said, “I think you mean ‘mica shists.’ ” The medic was spreading ointment around my palm and I was kind of hypnotized by that and not really thinking about what should or shouldn’t be coming out of my mouth. “But that’s an easy mistake,” I said. Then I laughed.
“Who’s that?” breathed the soldier on the table.
I jerked up straight. “Um.” Usually, after I say something that confuses people, I feel a wave as though I might throw up, and I was feeling that now – “I’m the water tech. Kyle Woodlore. I run the water treatment –”
“Fuck you, asshole.”
The medic tsked and shook her head. “ ‘Fuck me, fuck you.’ ” She winked at me. “How’d all this hostility squeeze in here?”
The doctor straightened and tossed his Q-tip into a can, and I could see the white of the soldier’s left eye was meat red, which made me feel worse. “All right,” said the doctor, “I think we can try irrigating again.” He held a hand out behind him. “Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sorry.” The medic held my bandage in place with one hand, twisted around, and passed a banana-sized syringe to the doctor with the other. He bent over the soldier again and soon I could hear a trickle of water hitting the metal floor. After a second I realized, hey, that’s my water; I made that. Normally I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but I guess at that point, in terms of my self-image, I was in take-anything-I-could-get mode. So the idea went through my mind that maybe this was something good I’d done … maybe the only thing. Which made me feel good and bad at the same time. Which is sort of typical.
The canvas that covered the kitchen tent was the same aridregion beige that covered just about everything else in the camp - what my mother might have called “a drought motif.” Inside it featured a steam table for hot food, a bread table, a couple of fountain dispensers with orange and purple pseudo-juice, a place where you could get coffee and hot water for tea (which I didn’t see too many people drinking), a salad and fruit bar that was always stocked up, and enough long tables and chairs for ninety diners at a time to eat and not think about all the things they’d been told in the orientation briefings about the IEDS (improvised explosive devices) the jihadists were busy making and the disease-bearing sandflies everywhere and the Russian PMN mines, Bouncing Bettys, and “green parrots” that were sitting out there just beyond the walls.
I was in there taking my lunch hour early, and I saw Legg getting a glass of Tang. And maybe because it seemed weird, after we’d been in an ambulance together, to sit on opposite sides of the room, we ended up grabbing two chairs at the same table near the entrance. He told me his full name and said there’d be “negatory consequences” if he ever heard me use it.
“I was in B-H for Roto five,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck hard as if scraping away dried sweat or boredom. He brought his hand up and through the cropped hair of his head and every movement he made seemed to carry a vehemence.
“B-H?” I still wasn’t used to the whole military acronym thing.
“Bosnia-Herzegovina,” he said, mocking me. “Stationed up at Camp Casa Berardi in Drvar, this old bread factory they cleaned out. ‘Castle Greyskull’ we called it. Looked fuckin’ spooky in the fog. And they was all’ays moving us out into weather havens ’cause of the bedbugs.” Legg brought his drink halfway to his mouth. “Roto five, that was pretty fuckin’ hot.” He took a noisy swig and gave a long gargley sigh of satisfaction. “Not as hot as this though.”
I nodded and tried to think of something to say that he’d consider relevant. “How long have you been here?”
“We was prob’ly on the same flight, so, pretty much same as you,” Legg said. “’Cept you get to stay a lot longer.” This I knew; soldiers’ rotations lasted six months, but support personnel were contracted for a year. Before I signed I was warned that a lot of people found it difficult being away from home and family that long; I told them I was looking forward to it.
“After that I had to wait a few years, got shipped around, and they sent me to V-K for Roto twelve.” Legg gave me a glance. “That’s Velika-Kladusa. No patrols, nothin’, just bureaucracy. Human resources and public relations.” Legg shook his head. “Total fuckin’ waste.”
There was movement around us while he talked, soldiers in CADPAT fatigues soaked in sweat and embossed with grit coming back from patrols, others heading off to drills or illegal weapons searches. Some of them would lift a hand to Legg or nod or say something and … it was weird. In chemistry there are certain molecules that like to cluster – in the treatment facility we used a process called “flocculation,” where we’d inject polymers into the water to pull the contaminant molecules together so they could be swept away – and, when I was talking to Legg, I had this sense that these bodies moving around us were trying to catch him and drag him off somewhere, to pull us apart. I couldn’t have explained why I didn’t want that to happen just yet, but I didn’t. Thinking about it, what I’d probably say is that talking to this soldier, who was so different from anybody I would normally have met or talked to in my life, felt like I’d won some sort of prize or something, like I’d graduated into a whole new level. And I felt this need to counteract the pulling action of all the soldiers walking around us, and the only thing I could think to do was ask questions.
“What do you mean, a waste?”
When Legg grinned, which he did just then, I couldn’t help noticing his right eye. His face was already … I guess vivid is a good word. He was tanned, with curved creases around his mouth that looked whiter than the rest of his skin. He had a snub nose over a dense, dark moustache that looked like it might be hiding a faint hare lip scar (which I figured was not something I could ask about). And now over the left eye the doctor had taped a square patch of gauze, which Legg kept worrying with his blunt fingers. And it had the effect of making the right eye seem unnaturally big and round and alive, because it was doing the work of two.
“Waste of me, for fucksake. You got a guy who’s equa-mouse, you should fuckin’ use him properly, put him in the right situations. But these assholes don’t know what they’re doing.” He glanced around, spreading scorn over the uniforms sitting nearby.
That was the first time I’d heard him use that word. “Sorry, what’s that you said? Mouse something?”
Legg’s eye lit up – questions seemed to work for him – and he explained the meaning and origins of equa-mouse. “A situation like up at V-K, you know, no shit happening. Everything all fuckin’ ruled out, planned out. This here, that there. Nothin’ to worry about. That’s fuckin’ boring for a guy like me. That’s actually dangerous. ’Cause, the thing is, the world moves random, right? It’s the survivors that move with it. You can’t stop the fuckin’ storm from blowing, you know? It’s gonna fuckin’ blow. And if you try and stand still you’re just gonna get hit with shit. So you move with it. You with me so far?” He waited.
“Uh, yeah.”
“Okay. And why do people try to stand still in a fuckin’ storm?”
&n
bsp; I shook my head.
“Because they got shit they’re trying to protect, that’s why. They got a house or kids or career plans or whatever so …” For a second Legg seemed to lose his train of thought. “Fuck, I dunno.”
“So they … shouldn’t have those things?” Legg leaned back in his chair, looking depressed. “Something like that.”
I hesitated. “Is it –”
“It’s bullshit, I dunno, it’s bullshit!” Legg waved the bullshit away. “Alls I’m saying is like with me, I don’t want shit all planned out. It’s like” – he stabbed the table with two thick fingers – “that’s like strappin’ me down in the middle of the storm. And I gotta be able to move.”
Legg downed half the drink in his glass and stared off.
“Kinda weird you’re in the D&S platoon then, isn’t it? Protecting people?”
He looked at me with his eye half closed. “That’s just my job, asshole, not my life. Life’s a totally fuckin’ different thing.” He shook his head as though he was fed up with all the idiots in the world.
“Right,” I said.
“Look.” He leaned forward. “Some people hate surprises, right? But me, I like ’em. ’Cause that’s all the real world is, just one surprise after another. And that makes me good at my job, because if you’re a guy like me, you stay cool when shit’s happening because you don’t give a fuck, you just do what you need to do. Right? But you put me in a situation where surprises are like, what, like artificially removed, and that’s when it’s fuckin’ dangerous. ’Cause then you get lulled.” He held his hand up as if it were floating, and his voice went soft. “And if you’re lulled, you’re not movin’. And the thing is, you can’t keep the surprises out forever, ’cause the storm’s still fuckin’ blowin’. And sure enough … one day … bam!” He brought his hand down as a fist and rattled the cutlery of two captains half a table away.
“Hey!”