by E. L. Carter
“Well, I’m not falling for you because you’re a Gypsy or not a Gypsy, or because of the way you walk. It’s just because.”
I look away. All around us, the space has filled in with people. On one side, a drunken young couple in formal attire embraces. On the other side a group of Buddhist monks sits perfectly still. The drunk couple giggles and some faceless voice reminisces about high school. The noise begins to fill up the empty potentiality of the moment.
Avi’s voice comes into the din. “I’m in love with the song I got in the mail. Day before yesterday. In love.”
I keep my gaze averted. “How can you be in love with someone you don’t even know? Art isn’t life.”
“I didn’t say I was in love with her. I might have a little crush—that’s okay without knowing anything, right? It’s the music I love.”
It makes no sense to be jealous of this make-believe woman. Is he stupid or playing me? He plays a card I’m responsible for creating. The man is many things, stupid not among them.
An orchestra jumps out of faraway speakers and the stories around us slowly fall apart, absorbing into the sound, a woman’s bold voice. We chose good seats for a picnic but not for an opera. Those lovers can’t penetrate when they look like worry dolls parading around on a miniature stage, when the queen’s fear of betrayal sounds like it’s being sung through a bean can or a bullhorn. In the absence of a good distraction or means of escape (go to the bathroom and never come back?), I take out my red pen and slash my way through the manuscript of our date. Why did I hide myself again? Why can’t I either let things lie or follow them, relax, and allow it to be more than a chess game, something earth-smelling and solid as ground?
This is my story. My stage-worthy tragedy. Get a waitress job. Make some friends, meet a man, detonate. Why do I have to sit right on the trigger? Why do I always have to lose? Once in other air—not sticky but clean and dry—I put my hands into a little stream, the kind that has dug its course around and under the rocky layer beneath the forest topsoil. The water was so cold it hurt my hands but the jolt of it brought something else into focus, the spruce trees around me and the sky up where I couldn’t see, a greater world, and for a moment in painful shock I knew I belonged to it.
I had just left the coast and a man with rough hands who wore Helly Hansens and smelled like two-stroke oil, a man with no fault but wanting me. I can see him from here on the tame New York grass, that I chose him because he was expendable, because I knew I would never love him. No fault of his. So I ran until I found a forest stream.
I don’t want this story. I don’t want to see it stretching ahead of me like a heartbreak you can’t stand but will watch for 300 years or more. When the song collapses into silence and then there’s applause all around us, like a rain squall on a tin roof, I look at Avi. He has the eyes of a man who fell for an opera, hooded and a little bit moist. Before I know what’s happening, before I can strike it out with my pen, he leans across the space between us, puts a hand on my cheek, and kisses me. His lips smell like mustard, and then behind that I find the scent of his skin.
Oh. This is the moment I’ve been hiding from.
April 26, 2004
Adam Katz, Lionel Huff, and Smokey Johnson all got to go home. Smokey is blind, but they think he’ll see again. Lionel has burns all over his chest and belly, but hey, it’s under his clothes, chicks will never know. Adam lost his left leg at the thigh. Shit, who needs two legs, anyway?
No one wants to be here anymore. No one knows what the fuck we’re doing, and why it has to cost Adam his leg. All I hear around here is fuck this place, fuck the Iraqis, they don’t want our help anyway. And fuck Connor for sending us out again tomorrow to risk our lives for nothing. And fuck Dubyah for the same thing. While we’re at it, fuck ourselves for being stupid enough to sign up.
What are we doing that’s more important than Adam’s leg, really? Is building a bridge for a bunch of dumb fucks who hate us worth his leg? Is George Bush’s popularity rating really worth his leg? Who decides how much a leg is worth anyway?
April 29
A soldier is useful if he thinks all Iraqis carry bombs in their shirts if he thinks the line between our house and theirs is made of cement and Kevlar if he thinks the grass is greener in the green zone the war is worth fighting the women don’t cry the children want to steal if he’s never tasted someone’s tea or their tears or tried to wash their blood out in a bathroom sink
HOOOAH!
April 30
Smoke close around the palm trees headlights fronds glossy street smoke smell explosives melted plastic burned flesh the essence sticks to my skin another set of clothes
A dead man’s switch the bomb car upside down it took flight
left an axle upholstery undercarriage the body burned away to bones skull laid against the springs of its seat magazine bullets on his chest metal and bone
PUSH THE BUTTON YOU’RE ABOUT TO EXPLODE
can you pray LOUD ENOUGH TO DROWN OUT YOUR FEAR
SHOUT THE PRAYER SHOUT
In a circle around the explosion bodies burn in their seats their heads thrown back by the force of the blast doors melted and recast rippled twisted. A collectivo evacuated. Bent railings. Bright splotches of blood.
Allah, Allah help me
I don’t understand
FOR A while, before Isra, I was Kris’s girl back home. I got his daily e-mail or computer message from Baghdad, and it was like we were kids and he was off on some adventure. In my mind he rode for nights across the sand, wrapped in Bedouin clothes and led by the people of the desert through the unknowable dark, the dark that his guides had always known, using stars and the shapes the wind has carved in the sand, stories he could no longer read. During the day they sheltered in caves made of old ocean bed and slept surrounded by the whoosh of the wind like waves breaking.
Other days I traveled with Kris, I heard the rustle of the wind against his cell phone and the background din of voices as he skirted through the bazaar on base looking for cheap phone cards and exploring his food options. He said things like, “I can’t say much because I don’t want to get you killed, but I’ll give you this: a smell like shit burning inside a plastic bag.”
One day he messaged me: Pupa overwintering under a pile of rebar! Pest or fluttering heaven?
Another day: I found the perfect place to plant milkweed! Do you think the wanderers will drift over here from Africa? What the hell! FIND ME SOME SEEDS TO VERNALIZE!
And then, right after I got a pair of my favorite Adidas sneakers in the mail from Amazon, the day after I e-mailed him a singing Christmas card and sent a box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts and some lehua blossom honey from Maui, he didn’t send an instant message. He didn’t reply to my card. When I called I got his voice mail. I took my new sneakers to the beach on Christmas day, left them at the edge, and walked in the wind for an hour. I found a cowrie shell washed up right in front of my feet, but my phone was quiet. I tried to listen to the shell, but it was too small to have a voice. I called Kris again and sang “Mele Kalikimaka” into his voice mail.
I went back to work the day after Christmas, and again the next day and the next, some afternoons with sand rubbing between my feet and my flip-flops or with my hair roughened by salt so it looked like I wore hairspray. People here said “Aloha” instead of good-bye and practically rear-ended you if you drove only ten miles per hour over the speed limit. The water was so clear when the wind laid down that you could watch yourself swim like an underwater mirror, and if you went under you could hear the whales sing.
Kris finally sent an e-mail. It went like this: Thank you for the lovely presents and the card. I hope you had a merry Christmas. Best, Kris
My first thought: he meant to send this one to Mom and Dad. What did the one they got say? It made me smile. I replied, You were kidding, right?
Nothing.
So I wrote again, only two words this time. What’s wrong?
He responded even m
ore concisely. Everything.
He was falling again. Backed into the corner of a foreign country in the middle of a vicious war, with no way to turn except to me, the one who knew that he was a refugee. He had killed a man. This time he didn’t turn to me, return to our tiny civilization. He went off alone into the sand where not even I belonged. Now there was no green zone, not for him in Iraq or me in my own little war. When I went back to the beach that day the sun hadn’t been up for long, and the light on the palm trees was the color of whiskey. When the surf rolled over my feet it was warmer than the air, and the mynah birds argued so beautifully that I didn’t want them to resolve it. Paradise is only paradise when circumstances permit. If you’ve created a hell for yourself there’s no get-out-free card, not even with a hibiscus behind one ear.
Now this message appeared on my phone: I feel like I am made of arsenic. Like I could ruin your life just by brushing against you. I don’t want to be near you.
I wrote back quickly. What if I still want to be near you?
Nothing. So I wrote again. Is there anything I can do?
He said, I’m not even sure Jesus could get me out of this one.
My only good excuse is that I’m not the holy virgin. I just shut up. I went back to work and let the din of the pizza place drown out my thoughts. It was dark inside with wooden walls, hand-painted signs everywhere, and hardly space to walk between the tables. I let myself compose a song to the din, to the padding of my shoes against the floor. I went home that very night with a bus boy, long-haired with skin like polished bronze and raised on a long board. Luckily he didn’t want to talk either, and we had hardly anything to take off. The locusts chirred all night outside the window of my ohana and the plumerias smelled like perfume.
The truth is, I left Kris then. He said Jesus couldn’t help, but what he meant was that maybe I could.
That was the first time I left. And then he came home burned and helpless and pleading me with his eyes to save him. I put my hands over my ears and sang. He had no right to go on living when I was lost. He had no right to shut me out, to turn into someone I didn’t recognize. He had no right to die.
My last e-mail to Benja read: Tell me about Isra. She was someone’s daughter too.
His reply: I don’t know anything about Isra. I didn’t want to know. Maybe that makes me a cold bastard, but it’s true. All I know is that she was a little grain of sand in your brother’s eye, and he couldn’t see straight anymore. I know that because of her he was doing stupid shit to try to get himself discharged. Then he got hit.
You’re asking too many questions.
Dad chose a bad night to pick on me. Some days he’s like that, he’ll sting me like a mosquito. There’s a food stain on this plate. The meat is overcooked. It’s too hot in here, can’t you open a window. I want to hand him a drink just to shut him up. And Mom glides across his mood like a skater, as always when Dad is sour. She smiles as though she’s toasting a wedding. Her voice is crystalline. Maybe she likes it this way. Maybe this is her normal. It should be so for me too; I should be like one of those ladies who carries water on her head. I should expect this pressure, and find lightness unfamiliar.
But I can’t stand it, the weight of a plate of food, my duty to join them once a week, taking my turn under the whip. I help set the kitchen table with cloth napkins and laminated cork placemats, a picture of an old house with forest-green trim. Flatware, molded into a slight curve on the end like something not fully conceived, still waiting its turn at the forge. Blue china plates. Peas, flank steak, and rice.
Barely are our chairs pushed in when he pounces again.
“Why are you still here?” His decorum, as always, is precious.
“Can I have the salt, please?”
Mom hands it to me.
“Are you still trying to figure out Kris’s note? The mystery gift? How long does it take to let it go?”
When it’s your dead brother, a long time. My fork clinks against my plate as I take a bite. Scoop, insert, chew.
“Maddy,” he says. There is a softness to his tone that stops me. I look up at him, my fork suspended over my plate. “What are you doing with your life?”
I put down my fork so slowly it makes no sound. What was I afraid of? He has the shakes tonight, self-inflicted torture. His skin washed out like a sick man or a prisoner. “What are you doing with your life, Dad?”
He looks genuinely surprised by my question. “I raised a family. Now I take care of your mother. What do you mean?”
Is he kidding? No, I know he is not. I look at Mom. She’s deadpan.
“Dad,” I say. All the times I wanted to hurt him and had no voice. I have a voice; now, suddenly, I don’t want to hurt him. “Dad, you have a gift too. Where is it? It’s not on the market. Its value is not dependent on the price of oil.”
“It’s right here at the table with me.”
“No, Dad. Your gift. The one that’s yours. That matters too.”
He looks at his plate. He likes a lot of butter on his peas, and they’re shiny with animal fat now that it’s melted in. He’s already cut his meat into tiny pieces. The rice got mixed up in the juice, so it’s a little bit bloody. Dad has always been a good eater, but there’s no question what that plate looks like right now.
He pushes his chair back. It squeaks against the wood. “Excuse me,” he says quietly. And like that, he’s gone.
I eat every last grain of my rice. Nothing is wasted.
Mom and I make it through dinner and dishes without a single word. After she dries the final plate and stalks off to stand by her man, I head into the study and grab a book from their shelf, an old hardback of Anna Karenina. Then I can’t see. I can’t see the page, it’s like trying to read underwater. I grab the box of Kleenex and shove the tissue against my eyes. Two holes burn right through the paper. So I throw it down and get another, and then another, and finally I’m still on the same page and I have a pile of burned-out eyes scattered around staring at me.
I give up. Close the book. Look at the paper eyes, fire and water mixed together. What do you need? I ask them. And I get it: they’re hungry little children, and I have their food.
The study is full of mahogany tones in the light of the lamps beside the chairs. The door to the harp, three steps away if I run. I stand so fast the book falls off my lap and lands on the floor with the thud of tragedy.
“Sorry, Leo.” I hoist it by the spine back to its resting place, gather up the scattered eyes into a fluffy white pile.
Their food will be arpeggios, plucked harmonics, and a glissando, index finger to thumb. I will play to them all the way to the last octave. I will once again drum on the table. The burned-out eyes stare back at me, the neglected instrument, myself. The harp once fit a woman’s body. The strings soothed her fingers and the forepillar curved outward to support her. Men tried to make it a man’s instrument, because that’s what men do with everything they find beautiful. I challenge their annexation, string for string. If they want to play Goliath, my every note will be a little stone. Pretty is for some other gal. Pretty is another word for colonized. Those hungry little girls need food grown in their very own garden.
Mom’s keys, hung on a little wooden knob over the kitchen side table, clink gently together in my hand. There’s no easy way to remove a harp from a closet full of clothes, the trail of fallen coats behind me, and the tedious sticky work of hanging each jacket back in its approximate place. I hold the harp close as I drag it across the room.
When the harp is on the porch I extricate myself from its embrace and back the Jeep out of the garage. The rear door pops open with a hollow click. Now I bet Mom’s eyes are open. Tonight Dad’s not sleeping either, but for a different reason—he has his ears held against the squeal of his blood cells, starving for poison. I know Mom won’t come down. Even if she thinks I’m stealing the car and heading to Belize. She wants me to run, with legs strong enough for two. I haul the harp into the back. The door won’t close so
I lay down the seats and then shove it forward until it fits.
I wish it were more than a mile—the line that demarcates someone else’s song from mine.
But it’s enough. Far enough to hoist the harp stair by stair up to my apartment, to drag it into the middle of the floor, and even to steal a song before I return the car and walk home.
May 9, 2004
Cicadas in the eucalyptus trees a hot New Jersey night a freak highway accident your worst enemy the sound of gunfire someone is hunting a deer explosions for celebrations drive a road look at the scenery a stone house the night breeze through the screens my beautiful sister a Kalishnikov the compound walls
no one is with me tonight
not even bugs
May 24
Benja said going to Combat Stress helps. The counselor took my hand with what I guess was supposed to be empathy or warmth or something. Sticky. Too hot for empathy.
The script: [Soldier speaks]
“You feel a lot of anxiety.”
[Soldier speaks]
“Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is common among soldiers, especially those who have seen face-to-face combat.” [Solider speaks]
“You might feel crazy, but you’re just reacting to a very stressful situation.”
[Soldier speaks]
“Why don’t you try some medication?”
So now I have two pills. Zoloft to get through the day and Ambien to get through the night.
How many pills can you shove up your ass? My broken heart can’t be sewn up with tablets, coated for easy swallowing. Are these two bottles what a soldier’s mind is worth? I’d rather walk the walls all night weeping and die crazy than swallow your complacency.
June 3
Our security loop is supposed to be different every day, but at a certain point you want to know what you’re in for. What the houses look like, who smiles and who wants you dead. You want to know where the kids hang out smoking, and where the men sit and talk in the shade. You know that when you’re coming toward them, past the palm trees and the sparse grass and the litter on the dusty road, they’ll look at you over their shoulders and fall silent. You know how you must appear to them in your big sand-colored rig with the gunman in the turret and the gun pointed right at them.