The Running War

by E. L. Carter

  Finally he spoke again. “You should at least help them get to a hospital.”

  But the team didn’t want to stop. They didn’t want to get shot by a sniper or burned in the street or cut in half by an IED like wood in the mill, for what, to save some fucking Iraqi family that was probably cousins with someone who had killed one of us? Why should they want people to have safe streets or new bridges or good phone lines? Why should they want anything but the feeling of stepping off a plane in North America under the flag of their own good luck?

  Benja, as team leader, wanted to know what the fuck I didn’t get. “Are you stupid, professor? Did you think you signed on with UNICEF?”

  “And if I don’t stop, if we don’t help, then what?”

  He didn’t have an answer to that, just turned away and looked out the window until we got to the one house we knew with the blue tarps hanging off the side, and he said, “Stop the truck, Kareem.”

  The house was quiet. A man who I’d never talked with met us at the door. He didn’t offer us tea. He stared at the box of food. When I asked if anyone on the premises needed medical help, he shook his head, no. Is Abdul Adl here? No, went to Dora. Raheem? Shakes his head. Azhar? Shakes his head.

  “Oh fuck,” I said.

  Our old interpreter got fired for reasons unknown. This terp was a stocky guy, stockier still in body armor, with a pockmarked face and a slightly stubborn look, like he wasn’t signed up all the way. He said, “They’re packed up to go, but they don’t know where.”

  I asked if I could see Isra. A long discussion followed. Voices raised and then quieted. The terp lifted his arms in what looked like exasperation and then the strange uncle threw his arms up too. No translation. The man walked to the back. I looked at the terp. He was blank as a rubber bullet.

  And then she came out, pushed from behind by a strange woman. Her striped leggings inside out, long hair tied back hastily and tangled in a ponytail. She didn’t cry. She didn’t turn and bury her face in the strange aunt’s dress. She looked straight at me without a smile.

  The shadow was in her eyes. I wanted to run. I wanted to scoop her up and run. But it was too late. The shadow was already in her eyes.

  She was holding a little bag and a torn piece of blanket. She gestured toward the door, so I turned and began to move that way with her. The woman who had brought her out started to cry. I turned and stopped. She shooed me like a stray chicken while the tears streamed down her cheeks. So I began to walk toward the door again. Isra followed, walking next to me. She was mechanical, a little wind-up doll, her eyes blinking but expressionless. She didn’t watch the woman weep.

  I walked halfway out the door toward the blinding sun and my team on the threshold with their guns on semi. Then I turned back toward the shaded entrance. I was leaving and I wanted to say good-bye. Isra was right on my heels, her little sack and her blanket in her hands, so close I almost tripped on her when I turned around.

  “No,” I said, and blocked her movement with my arms, pushing her back over the threshold, into the shadows. She looked at the woman, the woman shooed again, and she turned back my way.

  “No,” I said. I could hear my voice rising. I wanted Isra to care. I wanted to say yes. Instead I said, “I can’t,” and turned toward the terp. “They don’t understand.”

  He looked straight at me and said nothing.

  I went on in English. “You don’t understand. I am an American soldier. I can’t take her. I can’t take her home. There’s authority, orders, racism, paperwork. I can’t.”

  The terp was goddamn useless. The woman shook her head at me. Isra was quiet and still, breathing in and out. I could feel the heat of her body on my legs. My words, my excuses, echoed around us.

  I don’t know what I can or can’t do what is possible in this impossible place with its painful sunshine and snipers down the street I know absolutely nothing except the one thing I said because there was nothing else. “I’ll get you money. I’ll keep her safe.”

  Isra, you are my patrin. I’ll go wherever you point.

  September 1

  A little blue and a cosmopolitan cabbage white flutter in the ditch on the roadside. Some asshole walked over part of my milkweed patch. No circles in the leaf. I turn them over to see if it’s cut into the membrane. Nothing.

  Do you know what, Maddy? I built another net. This time it was definitely military issue. Definitely surplus. Some gauze stitched together with suture thread, attached to an old broomstick with a wire hanger. I can see myself in another life, slinking across a milkweed field, the smell of summer almost obscene as I brush against the tall stalks. I call myself a hunter, out of breath as if I was after a woolly mammoth. I stay behind the butterfly, my net poised, so slowly that I hope to seem like just another piece of vegetation. Finally I swing, brick it, and the butterfly soars up, becoming a speck against the sun. They always disappear so quickly. That day I was in luck and there were more in the field, busy fanning their wings above the leaves, finding the perfect place to reproduce. I stalked again, and swung, and felt my way along the net until the beautiful fragile body was in my hands.

  I thought I was a warrior back then. I thought to stalk was romantic and instinctual; I had an image of myself from outside that I can’t find anymore, like a photograph I dropped somewhere in the Humvee. Now the hunter in me, the person who can slink and kill, is the shadow I can’t sneak away from in the glare of the halogens.

  Maybe it’s a blessing that no butterflies will come to my milkweed. What would I do if they came?

  The hay is getting tall and the summer insects buzz like little thumb harps with only one note. In the shade under the hardwood trees I skirt Japanese grass and the little spots of poison ivy hidden among them, glossy against the matte green. Where the woods meet the hayfield, by an old wooden wagon left to rot, I see the familiar wide leaves of the milkweed. The seeds I planted in the spring are tall plants now, pink-flowered.

  One morning, Kris walked this same wooded trail, to the edge of the shadow where it met the light. He could see nothing left, no butterfly dreams—only a head full of damaged nerves and medicine and sadness. Until that moment, or even afterward, nothing about the hayfield spoke of tragedy, a gunshot, of a dead man or police tape or the sudden vanishing of everything I have ever thought was true or real or permanent.

  When I look at the milkweed flowers I imagine Kris, sunk on the floor of his chairless apartment, talking to me on the phone. I can barely follow him. He says, “Life is shit. I’ll never believe butterflies again.”

  I replied, “Life just goes on. Maybe you decide if it’s shit or butterflies.” I was in Florida, leaning against a cement wall between shifts, life at its most mundane going on all around me.

  “You don’t understand. Life—life back here. A lie. A great experiment. The control is death. Your first breath—the trigger.”

  “But Kris, you can’t go through your life waiting for a bomb to detonate. Yeah, we’re all going to die. But what’s your life about?”

  Kris sighed into the phone. “The bomb went off. And again. Now silence kills me.”

  He was so good at that, circling back to his original point as if nothing else had been said. A barnacle barricaded inside his sharp shell. That was how he ended up in the war in the first place, and how he had gotten to count butterflies inside grids, and why he wouldn’t get his butt off the floor now that he was wounded. I jabbed: “This is why I hate talking to you. Because you already know before the question has a chance to ask itself. What about the scientific method?”

  You did know. You knew the whole thing. Or maybe you thought you did, and told yourself the story so far ahead that the only option was to live it. I can still see you slinking through the milkweed like a panther. Your intensity would have been funny if it weren’t so beautiful, if each step in the dirt weren’t so precise, if you hadn’t noticed every leaf rustle against your thighs. Your butterfly net was a long appendage. A frog tongue. Before either I or th
e monarch knew you were ready to pounce, the orange wings were fluttering inside. Then you held the net close to the butterfly, leaving it only a tiny space. You carefully flattened it so that the butterfly’s wings were closed over its back. You pinched through the net onto the folded wings with your left hand, and gently reached inside with your right, holding the butterfly by its thorax. Out it came, an unexpected grace.

  I can see you in that field, in your moment, but I have no idea what you looked like on the other end of the phone that day. I pushed myself up along the rough wall of the restaurant and looked around at the rush-hour bustle, the matching polo shirts, this year’s color, and the inane belief that this moment constitutes something everlasting.

  Kris said, “What will you do if I leave you?”

  I said, “Nothing. You already have. I don’t know you at all.”

  He was quiet, and I thought maybe he had hung up. Then he said, “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For letting me go.”

  What could I say to that? I left him there, his basketball player legs withered to stalks like milkweed in the fall. I left because I didn’t understand. And it’s easier to ignore what you don’t understand. You spend your whole life dodging shots against some raw part of you, and then you turn on your loved one because you know just where it hurts.

  I’ve been mad since he left me for school, for the war, and even madder since he hung up the phone that day and left me alone in these woods, in our kingdom of trees that means nothing without a brother. I stare out at the pink milkweed flowers, Kris’s dreams and my grief blended together. My anger flares, then goes limp before their beauty. A thought pops into my head: maybe Kris tried to save me too. From starvation, from grief. I let my gaze drop. I couldn’t deliver him from his fate, any more than he could me from mine. Time doesn’t stop for anger, ignorance, mistakes, not even for a man begging to be redeemed. I suddenly want to be out of the shadows, in the bright sunshine.

  I head into the sticky sauna air of the field, walk toward the milkweed, and duck down, scanning the underside for caterpillars. I see one, and then another as my eyes begin to adjust to the movement of the tiny larvae. Kris’s journal comes to mind. How many times have I read those words, passages burned in like the odd line from a movie or song. We accept the wrong occupying force and then fight the wind. A welcome to Danaus Chrysippus or better yet, one stray Plexippus on a westerly windstorm.

  Just yesterday I sat in Mom and Dad’s study with my hands in my lap, posed and steady before the painting Papa made of my grandma’s same hands. Papa was no genius but he illustrated the future. He carried a secret forward through waves of history, waves of resistance, and brought it right here to the mantel. He showed me that there is no place on this round planet where I can run that will be any farther than the next place—any place will eventually spin on its axis until it reaches the point of departure.

  Here beneath my feet, below this outgrowth of dreaming, pain, and beauty, inside a rusted metal can—maybe that is the grave of the gift.

  The smooth answers I want have disintegrated too, have scattered and fallen until I reach out my hand and find nothing at all.

  A butterfly comes my way over the hay, coasting toward the pink flowers, perhaps looking for a place to lay eggs. I sit completely still, partially hidden. Its wings are ragged at the edges and the orange has faded toward grey. She hovers over one plant and then another, lands, takes off again. Weighing her choices. And then—just as the monarch descends on a small plant, as she curls her abdomen under the leaf and presses it there—suddenly it breaks through. Isra is a patrin.

  I almost jump but hold myself still until she has fluttered up again, her egg laid. And then I burst out of the weeds like a charging bear, sending the butterfly spiraling up, and run toward the nearest cell signal.

  It’s Isra, isn’t it? He gave me Isra?

  Benja messages me back right away. For shit’s sake Maddy you don’t have to do it

  HAVE TO DO WHAT? I reply. Even though I know exactly what he means.

  I RUN up Mrs. Bird’s walkway like I have a ghost on my heels, and pound on the door. She reaches out and steers me into the house by the elbow, and holds me until I am seated on the couch.

  “Kris is such a jerk,” I say.

  Mrs. Bird inclines her head slightly to the side.

  “He knew! He was the only one who knew. And he used it against me.”

  “Can you explain?”

  “I mean my daughter. He knew how much it would hurt.”

  “What!?”

  “Kris wants me to adopt her. Isra. That little dusty Iraqi girl.”

  “Oh, dear.” She sits back now. “Maybe he was thinking about her, not you.”

  The words stop me short. I put my hands on my knees. Push up until I’m sitting straight again. Shake my head.

  “Madeline, what was it like to give up your daughter?”

  I don’t know where my anger at Kris went. Why does she always twist things around? I brush my hair away from my face with my fingers.

  “Tell me about it, Madeline.” Her voice is firm.

  The apartment in California had bars on the windows. I looked at the stripes of dusty street, at the cars cut into exact slices. My baby was scared too some nights, and I wished I could put steel bars across my belly. Or maybe it was just me that was afraid and while I lay listening to distant sirens and the sound of footsteps outside the door, she cavorted in her pink princess room, did somersaults just for fun, an acrobat swinging from wall to wall on the umbilical cord.

  In the beginning I felt her as a flutter, an aquatic insect growing its wings. Later it was more like a hopping rabbit. Then at the end, when she was bunched in too tight to kick and the decisions were all made, she became human, a young artist tracing lines across my skin.

  At the diner where I was hired for my first waitressing job—out of pity, I guess—I ate people’s leftover food from their plates after I cleared them. The owner, an elderly Indian woman, clucked over me and fed me some soupy lentil thing every day at the end of my shift. “You need to be fat, little girl, for your baby, you understand?” she would say, wagging a finger at me.

  She didn’t understand that I was as fat as I’d ever been: I wanted to eat my way past all the starvation I’d inflicted on myself. But my body couldn’t seem to get it; it wouldn’t absorb the bounty I offered. Maybe my taste buds couldn’t recognize bounty anymore. I was so tired. I forgot orders and served cold food to my glaring customers. My mind was drawn to my belly, to the life there, relentlessly, against my will, as if she were growing everywhere inside me. I just wanted to sit, rest my hands on the bump, and feel a little nudge, a curious hand on the inside reaching toward me.

  The easiest thing would have been to have no life of my own, no rent to earn, no heating bill to pay, not a single errand or wish or thought except what circled back toward her, what held me fast in the enormous space that opened inside me, a place far bigger than any castle or kingdom Kris and I had ever dreamed up.

  It would have been easy to surrender to the enormity of myself as a mother, but I didn’t.

  I built a cover story for the feeling, which went something like, “I can’t be a famous harpist and a single mom sitting around on a falling-apart metal chair with her hands on her belly. The two can’t coexist. My hands belong to the strings.” It was a story composed by some undifferentiated mix of ambitions, layers of others’ expectations.

  I blamed the harp, but that story was in service of something else, the real elephant under the blanket, the urge to drop the baby and run because if I didn’t some unknown force would rise up and wrench her from me against my will. And so, in a preemptive strike, I surrendered her, gave her up even though there were in fact no weapons of mass destruction pointed my way.

  The couple at the adoption agency seemed to have no ambivalence at all. The look in the woman’s eyes—if she could, she would have ripped my skin off, and stuffed the baby
inside her own belly like a shoplifter. The man held her hand with an air of habitual affection. A biology professor at Berkeley. She taught chemistry but planned a sabbatical for when the baby came along. She spoke without grammatical flaws and her fingernails looked smooth and rounded: the hands of a woman for whom manual labor is writing grades on papers.

  She said, “We have so much love in our hearts already, and it will grow and grow.”

  “What if she’s retarded? An asshole? An addict?”

  “We will love her for who she is.”

  “Bullshit,” I spat. “This is a sales pitch. I want the truth.”

  She rubbed her smooth hands on her knees. “I’m telling you the truth. We want to nurture your baby.”

  I told them I needed to sleep on it, because at seven months along I would sleep on anything, a bed, a floor, a balcony, an argument. I would play the harp. My baby would be wanted by her new parents, would be the precious center point of their successful lives. No one would starve. Even the hungry professor would be full.

  The parents-to-be paid for me to give birth in a private hospital with clean tile floors, pink walls, and the kind of neutral pastel print you find in hotels hanging above the bed. I couldn’t see the art anymore, only the strange-armed metal machine next to me and the relentless ticking of the heart monitor making public the inner core of my baby, a core which until now had belonged entirely to me.

  A nurse leaned over the bed periodically and smiled the way people do when someone has instructed them to, and told me I was doing great. At what? I wasn’t sure, but I was glad she kept saying it. She told me to breathe. I screamed instead.

  “Breathe slowly in.” Scream. “Breathe slowly out.” Scream. I wasn’t in the same room as before. The pink walls bulged out like they were made of rubber. The doctor came in and out like a phantom, sticking her fingers inside me, measuring out my pain in centimeters. She’d call it out, like a sportscaster, into the room. Six centimeters. Eight centimeters. She didn’t talk to me.