The Running War

by E. L. Carter

  I want to believe in something right now. Heaven and hell? A mirage that turns to grit when you try to taste it?

  We medevaced the little girl. She was bleeding from her head but the medics said she was stable. And then we’re supposed to go home. To sleep? To walk like a madman around the base crying? To tell Benja to fuck off and then hold myself the way I held the man I shot and ask the movie to stop?

  The earth is rotating at 1,000 miles an hour.

  Occupation is for shit. I want to give in to the hate and open fire on the place. But then there are just more dead people.

  I snuck in. I had meant to trick everyone—Mom, Dad, Avi. I hauled the harp out and carried it to the corner of the house farthest from the master bedroom. I got the stool, tuned the new strings I’d bought, still in the process of conditioning, and began my midnight concert. I came here to practice an old piece so I could transpose it, then send it to Avi in the mail like a secret admirer note; but this has nothing to do with Avi anymore, with showing him up or even earning his respect. Kris comes into the song instead, and I can hear the whoosh of his breath but not the words he’s trying to tell me.

  I have lost myself somewhere in the music, a forest of straight and vibrating trees. I’m lost in my inner ear, where the song resides, and in the feelings that come out of hiding to lay themselves in the quivering air.

  Will Dad come stand in the doorframe? Will Mom bring me tea and sit, hands in her lap, listening? Can they hear me, are they lying up in bed with their mouths hanging open? It’s like the exam my first teacher forced on me, an imposed song I had to play to perfection. I have to pass this fierce test, have to cut this thread holding me to them, this caterpillar silk that looks like nothing but tests stronger than steel. My left hand stumbles through the chords and then finds itself. I play a different meter on each hand. The notes come faster, crescendo.

  The pause between notes, not the notes themselves, holds the power. If you really listen, the pause can swallow the whole song. Silence eats up what I didn’t know I was afraid of. It eats up the hate song I’ve never made into music before. I let it fill the house, so full the windows might start to crumble from the pressure, little shards of glass raining down around the doors and into the quiet flower beds. Then I begin to cry.

  The need for music will never go away. It lurks even when there is no note played; silence will wait forever.

  In high school I began to compose, lost in music-time for hours until my cramping wrists and burning fingers forced me to stop. The feelings I expressed were at last not my parents’, or my music teacher’s, or even Carlos Salzedo’s. I demanded that my audience listen, for me, for the song.

  Have you ever tried to throw water on an electrical fire? The harp strings were live, sparking, the light show almost blinded me, and I had no idea how to put them out. Music was love. I composed and played and filled the house almost to bursting with my noise.

  And then?

  And then I was nineteen, pregnant, and everything changed forever.

  Only the space between notes and the tops of mountains can be quiet enough for the voice of God to speak. I knew that when I was on top of Mount Sinai and the desert cold exploded with warmth and yellow light, and on the afternoon I put my backpack down for lunch on that pass in the Yukon, looking down at the toe of a glacier and the ice that melted there into a new river, water thousands of years old. I hear it right now, that same silence, hidden behind the din of my everyday life, waiting to be heard.

  Once upon a time, I held my body back from the world. It wasn’t a friend, but it wasn’t a weapon either. I thought french kissing was mildly gross, and I lay in bed and touched myself, imagining the sensation of lips on lips. Before I ever ran away from Kris, I abandoned that innocence, because I believed the harp must be my only child. Maybe it was Mom’s idea—I can see her now, standing with her arms across her chest, a diminutive thug willing me to play, her blouse not even wrinkled on that day. Her blouse mattered more than my baby.

  She didn’t tell me I was too young, or that I needed to focus solely on music, although I unrolled those stories off of her closed lips myself. I’ve never looked at her in that moment as an adult does. I always believed that she knew what she was doing. Now I have another vision. The crossed arms and the lips pressed together are a gesture of fierce ignorance—she doesn’t know why she wants me to get rid of that baby. She just does. She was like a kid: I don’t know why, I just want it.

  When Kris shot that man, or when he got hit, nothing would ever be the same. Not at that moment or this one either, sitting on a harp stool in my parents’ kitchen, trying to divine the future and rewrite the past.

  I stand from the harp and walk across the kitchen, through the doorway. The light from behind guides me through the dining room, down the little hall, into the living room, and to the base of the stairs below the master bedroom. I stop there. Dad’s snores waft down through the floorboards, the sweet sound of a man asleep, a man lost at sea and never to come to shore. Mom lies next to him. Her eyes might be open. She might be listening for the squeak in the stair that means I’m ascending. She might be mad, or she might be fast asleep. In the dark room the eyes of the ancestors stare, and a pair of hands lies neatly in an unknown lap.

  Here I am, twenty-nine years old, a little girl at the bottom of the stairs, listening. For what?

  A note hangs in space, waiting for its master to respond.

  I close my fist. The note ends. Now I’m the conductor.

  BAGHDAD—AUGUST 2005

  I’m here to take notes.

  I have a brown clipboard, yellow lined paper, a disposable blue pen, and a grey metal folding chair. The meeting place is a residential neighborhood full of large houses with gates in front. The visitors will have to buzz our gate. There’s no other way—we’re supposed to go to people’s homes and help them, but what kind of aid can a dead person offer? So we do it like this. They come begging at the gate.

  First, a woman by herself in a black abaya. Her face barely peeks out between the folds.

  Name: Zahra

  Age: Twenty-five

  Address: South Baghdad

  Story: She was going into a store. A water store. With her husband, their two sons, and their daughter. The oldest son is five. She was behind them. Then out of nowhere, out of the street, came a car, off the street onto the sidewalk, right into the door where her husband had just disappeared.

  She saw red and then black and then nothing.

  When she saw something again it was white walls, a floor with blood on it, and a row of people on the floor in the blood wearing bandages.

  It was no one she knew.

  No husband.

  No sons.

  No daughter.

  She was alone.

  I write down Raed’s translation of what she says. I look down at my clipboard and my pad and my pen. I don’t look up. I want to, but I don’t.

  She says she has burns on her torso, her arms, and the side of her head. She says she sleeps on her parents’ couch. She says she has no income. Her husband’s brother has offered to marry her, but she is still on the couch. She doesn’t want to marry her husband’s brother. She doesn’t want to have more children. She wants to die too.

  She speaks without emotion. I look up into her eyes. They are wet, completely full of tears, but not a single drop has slid down from that vast pool.

  I’m supposed to make a list of needs. I write Job Training. Cross it out. Write Housing. Cross it out. Write Money??

  “What do you need?” I ask.

  She grunts, as if someone pushed her. “I don’t know why I came here. How can you change the past?”

  I tap my pen against my clipboard. “I can’t offer you a new past. Do you want a future?”

  She starts to cry. “Of course. That’s why I came.”

  Zahra is not the last person to come in for an interview. I meet a teenage boy with no legs. An old woman with a pair of twins, their parents killed b
y US troops when they drove through a checkpoint after being ordered in English to stop.

  What can I do?

  I can take notes on my clipboard.

  I can give the notes to my boss.

  I can go back to my hotel room and lie on my bed, put my hands on both ears, and close my eyes.

  I wish I knew what to do.

  NEW JERSEY—LATE JUNE 2005

  Over the bridge, beyond the Riverstone Café and my apartment, the road meanders through second-growth forest along the river, past gravel driveways and the occasional house peeking through the foliage. The trees, walnut, sumac, oak, and birch, have turned the brilliant green of early summer and the air has thickened with smells—the river, old leaves, someone’s garden. It’s an easy bike ride, little ups and downs and scarcely a car to contend with. The occasional drop of sweat slides down from my helmet and stings my eyes.

  Toward the end of the road, where it intersects with a county route and changes names on the other side, I see the elementary school off to the right. Only one car is parked in front, an older model Mazda sedan, too new to be cool, too old to be chic, white with grey fabric seats. Avi must’ve gotten a deal from his accountant. I put down the kickstand in the next space over and walk past the concrete building, past the little crayon artworks hanging in the corner window, and around the back to the basketball court.

  It’s sized for little kids, and you can run the length of it in ten good strides. They dropped one net down to five feet and left the other at the standard height. The tar buckles in places from frost. Today the veins of repairs that run across it stick to my feet in the sun.

  Holding a basketball, Avi looks like an oversize student in short sleeves and a pair of drawstring shorts. The humidity makes his hair curl at the ends, thick and unruly. His eyes are unruly too, full of reflections, ready for a fight. Dining apparel never suggested he would have pecs. He’s supposed to be ribby and awkward.

  I, on the other hand, am supposed to have no body at all. Just empty clothes that run around dribbling. I chose a tank top and a pair of army-issue shorts, the most unattractive outfit I could wrestle from my wardrobe. But there’s no getting around it. He’s staring at me.

  Avi throws me the ball as I approach, and I catch it without thinking and shoot. It’s a smooth basket. He whistles. I haven’t played much in the past few years, since Kris has been in other states and countries. Kris was why I was good. Because he was good, and he needed a way to stay good. We had a net set up in the driveway between the garage doors and we spent hours out there, dribbling, passing, and shooting. Testing each other, stealing the ball back and forth, practicing our crossover and our jab, trying to be mean and still not foul. I never played on a team. But Kris was a star, and I hid inside his pocket like a rabbit’s foot while he played.

  Now Avi comes at me and steals the ball. I steal it back and shoot. Basket again. He looks genuinely peeved for a second—a competitive fellow. Then his face relaxes into a smile and he says, “You’re good.” With that he has the ball again and he makes a basket.

  We parry for a solid hour, keeping up with each other almost shot for shot, out of breath and drenched in sweat in the sticky air. I keep the ball low on my fingers, look right over him, fake him out, spin around. He jabs, steals my crossover, dribbles with both hands, shoots from anywhere on the court.

  I’m three points behind, and extract the ball just as it leaves his hands and before it has really begun its flight toward the basket. I shoot, get the rebound too, and make four points in so many seconds. Avi throws his hands up. “Holy Jesus,” he says, his voice whistling.

  I drop the ball and it rolls off to the side to rest. I put my hands on my hips and circle slowly while I catch my breath.

  Avi speaks again, his voice stronger now. “That almost wasn’t fun. I mean, I just didn’t expect that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No apologies. You just brought out the lion in me.”

  He was talking about his own rage, not mine. How unpredictable. “I guess that’s how I learned to play.”

  “Well, I’ll never corner you in a dark alley, I promise.”

  “You didn’t learn at band camp either, my friend.”

  He looks at me. “You must’ve won a few state tournaments yourself.”

  “No, I was just my brother’s practice buddy. He was the one who wanted to be a star.”

  “I bet he was too.”

  I sigh. “Yeah. He was.”

  Avi catches the emphasis. He says, “You mean he isn’t.”

  “I don’t know. What makes an is or an isn’t.” I look to see if Avi’s still with me. He’s quiet, and his arms stay open by his sides, neither inviting nor pushing away. “He was in the war. Came home wounded. Then—I still don’t understand how or why it all happened.”

  Avi doesn’t say anything.

  “That’s what I’m doing here. I guess. Trying to figure it out. His legacy. My feelings. What to do next. How to do anything next.”

  He’s still quiet, his face solemn and sweaty, eyes no longer full of fight—a relief because there’s nothing to say and he knows it, he’s not going to throw bullshit into the void.

  I push on. “Time the great healer was a myth invented by either a sadist or someone who had their heart cut out.”

  “Time the healer, time the destroyer.”

  I smile. “First I kick your ass in basketball, and then I open my mouth and drop the A-bomb. You must think I’m a barrel of monkeys.”

  Avi shakes his head. “Whoever invented the rule that we all have to be smiling all the time was a sadist too.”

  “So does that mean you have a tragedy to download?”

  Avi laughs. “Maybe one tragedy per day is enough? How about I give you a ride home.”

  Oh, right. This is the part where we go home. The part where we make it halfway up the steps before we’re kissing, and his hands are under my shirt, and I wonder if Stella will look out the window and laugh. Except too much has been said already. The story line can’t move forward; the story has taken a turn I’ve never followed.

  I wheel my bike over to his car. He lifts it awkwardly and shoves it half-in, half-out of the trunk, the wheel sideways and poking out the side. He closes the trunk as far as he can and ties it down with a loose bungee. I shrug. “You’re not a detail man.”

  “I’m only a detail man when it really doesn’t matter. I’ll spend three hours trying to get one bar of music just right. And then I’m too exhausted to worry about much else.”

  We climb in and the automatic shoulder belt begins to zoom toward my head. I duck, and it retreats and begins again, stopping partway across my chest.

  “Just lean back,” he says.

  We head out onto the road, driving too fast, the bike bumping against the rear quarter panel. I say, “I’m here because my brother is dead. Why are you here?”

  “In the trust fund wasteland? You mean I don’t fit in?” He bats his eyes. “Is it my hairdo or is it that I don’t have a nose like Ken?”

  “Whatever. Ken comes in every color now. I was thinking more of your career, perhaps it’s better suited to Manhattan. You don’t just play weddings, I gather.”

  “Oh.” He frowns now. “Being from Queens, I get to play the expat living out here. My career is only a commute away. I can read the whole Times and listen to a concerto on the train every morning. Where’s the sacrifice in that?” He doesn’t look at me as he continues. “And I get to go to the Riverstone for weekend brunch and flirt with the beautiful out-of-place waitress who works there. You don’t fit here either, you know.”

  I look out the side window. “But I went to that elementary school.” I want to steer the conversation now, away from where he’s edging. “My great-grandparents lived here. Right? This is my home, right? The kids at school called me a Jew because of my coloring.”

  “You were the only Jew.”

  “I’m nothing. My grandmother was a Gypsy. She left when my mother was born
. I ended up with dark skin, that’s all.”

  Avi shakes his head. “That’s not nothing. Do you know where your grandmother came from?”

  “Yeah. France. She was kind of like a refugee.”

  “Kind of like a refugee. Is the word Holocaust not allowed in your house?”

  “My brother used to say Grandma was in a tough spot because Gypsies think white people are dirty. So what could she do? But I mean, leaving your kid? Why did she have to bring the Holocaust home?”

  He laughs. “Your home would be perfect if she had just left her damned history behind.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “So what did you mean?”

  “That it would have made things easier.”

  “Yeah,” he responds. “It sucks having to find room in your heart for someone’s tragedy.”

  I consider asking him to let me out of the car. “What is this, family therapy?”

  He stops short. “Sorry. Sometimes I forget the difference between being assertive and being an asshole.”

  I want to say I don’t care, but I’ve already stopped him. Not because he’s an asshole. Because I want to be the conductor this time, or at least the first violinist. Not the oboe player. Not the harpist still tuning the forty-fourth string while the rest of the orchestra is already in the rondo.

  He pulls over in front of the apartment and cuts the engine. We both know he’s not coming in. I don’t even know why he turned the car off. I look at him straight for the first time since we played ball, and what I see there shocks me—not disgust or pity or condescension, but frank curiosity, unabashed desire.