The Running War

by E. L. Carter

  You want to know you’ll see the big house with the tarps on the side, and you know you want to stop and offer up something—anything—chewing gum, a hair from your head, your ripped-out heart flopping around like a fish. Sometimes you will stop and sometimes you’ll drive right by like you know nothing of what’s inside, like you don’t know that the rug is red and blue and brown, that the staircase has a curved metal railing, that the walls are white and the windows long thin rectangles. You’ll drive right by like you don’t know that your own soul lives in there, your only chance of survival.

  This time—today—I had a case of canned peaches. Organic canned peaches. We were on foot now, I was carrying the peaches and it was so hot the metal burned. Isra’s uncle met us by the gate. Sometimes we chat for a minute, and I smiled as I approached.

  He looked right past me.

  “Asalaamu aleichem,” I said.

  He nodded his head once, very stiffly. The sun was directly overhead, but a shadow fell across us, I could feel its chill and I turned, and kept walking, put the peaches on the street, and I knew I wouldn’t see him again.

  The Riverstone doesn’t have A/C. We have the white wooden door propped open to the street and all the windows pushed as high as they’ll go. The kitchen door is wide open and a fan hums in it as we swat at the incoming flies and curse. The customers, grumpy from the heat, look at me with doleful eyes as I pass their table, as if the weather were my responsibility along with the flavor of the food and the way the napkins washed out.

  The screen door squeaks and then slams, announcing the arrival of a couple. As I turn to seat them, it takes a moment to register—a couple. I stop in my tracks between tables one and three, and stare at Avi and his date. He smiles across the room, eyes bland as Hershey’s chocolate. His poor date, hand tucked into his elbow, gives me the stare of a blue-eyed deer, innocent accomplice to the crime.

  He’s as afraid as I am. At least I run and hide. Avi’s tactic is mean.

  “Come this way,” I say, and seat them across from each other at a table for six with a bench seat on one side, all the way in the back away from the windows. The date holds her purse with both hands and stares at the table until Avi pulls back a chair for her. She sits. He slides into the bench across from her, too far away to hold hands. Mission accomplished. I don’t look at her. I look at Avi and say, “What do you want?”

  I want him to say me. He says, “Jennifer?”

  The woman speaks to my turned face. “I’d like an iced tea, please, with mint.” I don’t want to hate her. I keep my eyes to myself.

  “And you, sir?”

  “A breve.”

  As I turn for the espresso machine—which in this case is a long diagonal from where they sit, threading through the careful spaces between each table—I hear Avi say to my back, “How many hemidemisemiquavers in a breve?”

  I turn back and look at him across the space, across the wood and the linen and the hot faces. I look at him and Jennifer, from here just another couple, smartly dressed and out for brunch. I look him straight in the eye and say, “One hundred and twenty-eight.”

  His eyes go to my hands again, where taut ropes have been built beneath my skin from playing: a suspension bridge under construction, holding a pen. He says nothing.

  I tighten my ponytail. “Half the world has taken music appreciation at college. Haven’t you taken music appreciation?” I turn on Jennifer, who looks at me and blinks.

  “Well, good for you. It’s a throwaway credit anyway.”

  I go to the kitchen. Serve another table, an elderly couple I recognize, too familiar with each other for conversation, the husband scrutinizing the food as it lands in front of him, the wife watching the husband. Happily ever after. I make Jennifer’s iced tea with a sprig of mint and five ice cubes, and return to the back table. Avi is alone but it appears to be temporary. A purse over the chair and a crumpled napkin on the table. I say, “I don’t get the cocktail today. Gwyneth Paltrow on your arm and a pop quiz on music theory.”

  “Not to oversimplify,” Avi puts his hands on the table, facedown, “but are you jealous?”

  “Of what, being able to read music?”

  I got him. He pushes his back against the wood of the bench seat, trying to tip his chair. Like a bull in a stall. “Of having a life that happens out the windshield instead of the rearview mirror. Of being able to look myself in the face and say here I am.”

  I watch Jennifer emerge from the bathroom and begin to weave between tables. “You mean like doing things straightforward. No backhanded games.”

  I pass by Jennifer and make my way to the espresso machine to poison Avi’s breve. With what? I’m jealous as hell and he knows it. The table he usually sits at, the one he stalked me from this whole spring just for the chance to make me feel this way, is inhabited by another man, this one standard local fare, his polo shirt too well-pressed to cause an accelerated heartbeat. As I’m making the breve I take his order, four-egg omelet, simple and clean, make him an extra coffee, and head back into the war zone. After I have delivered the breve with the straightest face I can muster, I pull out my pen and my order book. “What would the lady like? May I suggest our hot beef smothered in white bread? And for the gentleman, perhaps something expensive but bland. Chanterelle mushrooms sautéed in pure spring water?”

  Jennifer holds her napkin partway above her lap as I speak, a white flag. She looks at me with those albino-blue deer eyes, the expression only a hunter will see. Remorse hits me in the chest, a ricochet bullet. All she knew was that some hot guy asked her out for brunch. But it’s too late. She chooses to place her napkin on the table, to gather her purse with absolute dignity, and to excuse herself.

  As soon as she’s out of earshot Avi lashes. “For God’s sake. One date, and now my favorite restaurant has a bouncer.”

  Nothing special. Just a date. “Would you like your check, sir?”

  “I have to pay for this experience?”

  “Only a little.” I walk away. Into the kitchen, ignoring the exasperated stare of the man at table four whose french toast is on the counter, cooler than he is. I crouch on the kitchen floor, my back to the cupboards, and try to catch my breath. He’s right. The music I mailed him wasn’t anything special, wasn’t a gift at all—it was something beautiful with my own petty fear packed inside it like gunpowder. Can I give him something real now that I’ve already hidden myself and been found out?

  I always keep a book of score sheets with me. Rip out the last one, unfinished and raw in the middle, oozing like a cake when you stick the toothpick in too soon. The others I sent were all show-off pieces, but this one is no more than a patchwork of feelings tied loosely together with glissandos: grief, serenity, longing, frustration, rage. I scrawl on top of the first page: Love Song #5, Incomplete, and fold it up with the jagged edges of the spiral binding hanging off the side.

  It goes between his receipt and the two mints that hold it down like a paperweight. Avi looks at his phone. The paper begins to buckle, to push the mints off the top. I watch them slide down the side onto the table and land cockeyed next to one another. The score continues unfolding itself. I want to fold it up tight again, force it into place, and replace the mints. But he hasn’t looked up, so I turn away.

  After I deliver the cold french toast I peer over at Avi’s table again. I can see a twenty-five-cent tip on top of the bill; the song has walked out.

  August 14, 2004

  It’s almost not worth writing.

  Who am I writing to and why and why am I so goddamn motherfucking full of shit?

  Isra’s door was broken. The house was full of blood and women wailing.

  They won’t tell me more. They won’t say who is dead or alive.

  I know why they won’t say. Because it’s my fault.

  Goddamn fuck. God, why am I such a shitbag? Why did you make me? Was it to hurt everything I know how to love?

  The war started here umpteen thousand years ago when some inse
cure shitbag of a king decided to make himself a god who condones this kind of behavior, a god who attacks what’s closest to its heart. The war has never stopped. Not once, from then to now. Here I am, trying to make peace, and the ugly red of that war stains my hands for trying. It’s impossible. The war lives inside me, it annexes my cells.

  The Euphrates’s banks are made of bones and bodies and dried-up blood. No one can see with that dust in their eyes.

  August 15

  Now I know why the only bug books for Iraq are about desert locusts and crop pests.

  BAGHDAD—AUGUST 2005

  The room I sit in has a couch with brocaded trim, a kind of poopy brown and gold, with tassels on the corners to match. I don’t know why I sit on the folding metal chair but I do, and my interviewees choose either the couch or a slightly saggy La-Z-Boy. No one has come close to reclining it. They all sit perched on the edge as if it might detonate if they relax.

  Today I met the widow of a man who martyred himself in Fallujah. She said people would kill her if they knew she came here. She traveled here on a crazy, roundabout route, like we must do also. She’s desperate. They don’t have enough water. Her children can’t sleep at night, and her eight-year-old daughter says she wants to die.

  I write it all down. I hardly ever look up anymore. What good does it do for them to see that I’m helpless too?

  Raed waits in the doorway with his gun in his pant leg. Raed the silent. He repeats what I say in Arabic. What she says in English. He never says what’s inside him. Raed went to Dora again, without me, and this time he found whom I was looking for. I thought he hated me, but it’s so easy to interpret silence any way you want. Raed the silent hero came back with a plan.

  They will come to me. Later today, they will come to this door. Will she choose the couch or the chair? Or will she just stand there, as some of them do?

  I tell the woman that I have written down her story. I wish her blessings and we say good-bye. When she leaves, I stand up and begin to pace the room, trying to quell the panicked feeling that later today is too late. The clock on the wall makes a loud crack as it passes the hour, and I jump.

  This is why I came. And it’s just like Kris said: the bomb has already gone off. Now silence makes room for what I can hardly bear.

  But it’s also the silence that talks to me. I pace, then stop. I listen into the blank place where a story could be. The silence is the gap between stories. The place where the possible reigns.

  Then I know. I know the way the woman I interviewed knows she has to help her daughter. I know the way Kris knew another bomb would go off. What did Mrs. Bird say? We will tell the same story over and over until we can hear ourselves saying it.

  I have to tell it. I have to listen to her story. My story. If I make room for her story, then I will make room for something new to walk in the door.

  FRANCE—1943–44

  Horses. Muscled to pull, the shoulder and the pastern perfectly in line. Soft at the nostrils. Hot air. Brother says do you see how the one leaves a track with the back foot overlapping the front when it walks? That’s good. You want that when you buy a horse. Brother runs beside the horses, coated with dust and smiling. The sway of the wagon on the ruts. Hot sun. This is what we live for: the days when the air flows through the wagon and kisses our faces and at the campsite, clean flowing water on our hands.

  At night under the fresh air and the weight of the quilt, just enough to be held snug and safe, at night when the horses sleep standing with one back foot tucked under and their heads bobbing in the shadowy air, sometimes the memory of my mother comes back, not a dream but almost. It comes in another language and another landscape, and before that there are enfolding arms, breath on the top of the head, a little warm wind, the sensation of soft breasts and belly. Sometimes it seems best that she’d still be here in the morning, but she’s not, and this life is a good one.

  They say maybe I’ll have a wedding next summer, away from Brother and the kumpania to a young man glimpsed just once, at Patshiv, a boy with an eager dirty face and strong legs and hands. Father says this one will work hard and be wealthy always; but he doesn’t come to my mind while I’m idly washing dishes. It’s the other man, the gadjo at the edge of camp that other day, wearing a white shirt and carrying a parcel under his arm, and the children came running to tease him and beg. The look in his eyes—pale blue eyes and hair like ripe wheat stalks—the look spoke of something other than this life; it beckoned me away from the rhythm of the caravan and into a separate kind of movement, inside the belly, an invisible tugging string. The other children pulled back against it. Finally, it was he who broke the gaze, just long enough for me to turn away and dash back to camp, blue eyes burning like ice against my retreating back. Mahrime. Beautiful. Now Father says it’s time to marry soon, the men will have to begin turning away for a woman to pass by them.

  Winter. No horses sold this year, no sad city camp with dirty water, dirty clothes, closed-in smoky air. No garbage pile thawing in spring and chasing us out of town. No long stories from the tellers of other kumpanias, no laughter late into the night—just movement, ceaseless, quiet, barely time to eat snatched potatoes or a chicken hush in the night from the coop, just enough to feed us for one more day. Cold. Blankets barely cover it. Wet firewood, a blanket of snow, a fire in the snow but small and quick and hurry on. We can’t be seen. The trees loom above us, leafless branches, the specter of winter. The leather traces groan in the cold, the horses blow steam and stomp their feet to dislodge the balls that have formed in their shoes.

  Then there’s no talking at all, no sound but the swish of the wheels against the snow and the soft thump of the horses’ feet. No moon, the snow the only light. Across the border, off again through the same woods but in a different country, they say, until we reach a snowy road and a new kumpania, a cousin of a cousin only heard of around the fire.

  The husband for next summer—there’s no more talk of him now.

  BAGHDAD—AUGUST 2005

  I have tried not to touch the butterfly too much because I want it to still have sequins when I give it away. It has stayed fairly intact, the wings still the same horrific mauve despite the sun, and although many sequins droop, none have fallen today. Now my hands are sweaty on it, turning it wing over wing in a slow somersault.

  Where are they?

  The carpet has a track in it along the front of the couch. Not mine, but I follow it, the groove of someone else’s worry.

  Where are they?

  Grandma whispers in my ear. Shut up! I hiss. But as soon as she goes quiet, I wish she would come back. All the things Mrs. Bird has told me swirl in my head. She understood: Grandma’s story, mine, and this moment must be told together.

  The bit of window not covered by a curtain sends in a slice of light, the sharp midday kind, and it makes it just to the edge of the carpet and touches my feet as I walk by. They were due here an hour ago. Raed stands by the door and says nothing. No words of comfort, no fears, no accusation or apology.

  Do you think they’ll come?

  Do you think they’re alive?

  Are you worried too?

  What do you think of me?

  Do you lie awake at night?

  I start the conversations in my head and then stop each one after the first question.

  I can’t imagine they’ll come.

  They have to come.

  Raed turns. I jump and look up at him. His face is turned toward the window that looks out on the road. I see it in profile, the almond-shaped eye, the downturned mouth. Raed says nothing.

  The intercom buzzes at the door. I look at Raed. He opens his mouth, then closes it again.

  “It’s them?”

  He nods. Turns and heads to the door, to open the gate.

  NEW JERSEY—LATE JULY 2005

  When was it too late to save Kris? Was it the moment he pulled the trigger? Or was he already lost when his bullet penetrated an innocent man? Could I have hauled him out of th
e sand, away from his obsession with that orphan? Could I have loved him enough to stop the bomb from exploding? I hunt memory and his journal for some opportunity to change fate. I study the possibilities, turning them over in my hands. Maybe fate doesn’t follow tidy patterns, like a deck of Tarot cards. Maybe each moment, each choice, is a patrin hung high, leading us who knows where.

  August 18, 2004

  Connor sat behind his desk and twirled a pencil with his fingers. On the glossy surface of the desk, a frame faced him holding a picture I couldn’t see. He looked at the frame and not at the white walls or the picture of the soldier or the flag or me in the doorway. His face was exactly the same as ever, maybe more tan, but he wasn’t in it. He was somewhere behind it: it looked like a Halloween mask, and he was no longer beautiful.

  When I saluted him, he said, “What do you want, Kris?”

  I said, “You were right, and now I don’t know what to do.”

  “The orphan?”

  “I think she’s alive. But they—you were right.”

  He looked at the picture on his desk. “I would just like something, one fucking thing, to go right in this goddamn country.”

  I said, “That was all I wanted too.”

  He kept looking at the picture. “Who knows what’s right and wrong anymore? Do you?”

  I didn’t answer because he wasn’t asking me.

  Who’s asking me anything? Does anyone give a fuck about the knot in my shoulder, about the way my muscles bunch up at night in my narrow bottom bunk with the hard mattress full of the dreams and the jism of the private who came before me? About how I jerk myself awake, does anyone care that I hold my face up to the shower and try to wash it clean—that I’ve tried my best, that we all have, that we believed the stories we were told about being heroes or protecting freedom or even just getting through the day, about common decency? But the stories don’t pan out, they don’t go the way we try to make them go, they run wild like freak weather and whatever balance is restored by this storm is lost to the foot soldier, lost to me.