by Gary Glass
“No. Not about that.”
“What did you tell him about?”
“Nothing important.”
“What unimportant things did you tell him?”
He was in no mood to be interrogated. “Oh, let’s see.… I miss my wife. He misses his. Ally and I have no children. He has three. There’s no mountains where I live. The mountains here are very beautiful. Americans have great equipment. The Kashmiris are very poor. War is hell. And so on. The usual stuff you talk to your kidnapper about, with an AK-47 on his lap.”
Benford put her colonel voice back on: “I just want to know what information you had to give to get all the information you got, Dr. Marley.”
“All right.”
“And you got a lot,” she said, more sympathetically. “Anything else?”
“No,” he said. He was getting sleepy. Then he remembered something and pulled himself awake again. “Yes,” he said. “I found out what they plan to do with us.”
“Shoot us?” Estrada said.
“No, they’d have done that already,” Benford said.
“They need docs,” Marley said. “They’re going to split us up and move us out to different units as medics.”
An hour later they still had not seen Vikas’s replacement or anyone else.
Benford decided to venture out and try to talk to the guards. She woke Marley, then got up and moved cautiously toward the blob of pale light that marked the entrance. But just as she reached the lip of their little chamber, one of the enemy soldiers suddenly materialized in front of her. She jumped back.
For a moment the narrow form of the soldier stood silently silhouetted in the entrance. The doctors could see from her figure it was a woman. Suddenly she crouched down low and darted forward into the chamber. Benford backed away from her as she came on.
The soldier continued forward till she was right up close to them. Marley was the nearest. He felt her hand reach out for him. She gripped his shoulder, and, turning, pulled him after her.
Marley started after her, whispering back to the others: “She wants us to go with her.”
“What’s happening?” Benford whispered back.
“I think it’s one of their IDDs.”
They followed her back to the lip of the entrance. She stepped out cautiously into the main chamber, and they crept after her. The guards were gone. One of the stools was upset.
She turned to the left, toward the narrowing darkness deeper back in the long chamber. They followed after her. Something was happening — but what? Glancing back, they caught glimpses of men moving away from them — down toward the mouth of the cave.
All at once the whole cave filled with a brilliant pink light. For an instant there was nothing but this painful, unaccountable flash.
But in the next instant, came the realization that something had exploded. At the far end of the long gallery, something burst from the narrow mouth of the tunnel, a great concussive belch that shook the whole cavern. The whole mountain seemed to shudder violently around them. They saw human-shaped figures tossed back like dolls from the explosion.
“Sweet Jesus!” Estrada said.
Then they all turned as one and fled. Blinded by the flash, their bare feet and hands slipping on the slick wet rocks, they scrambled after their guide deeper and deeper into the cavern, crawling and falling and pulling each other up again — while behind them the main chamber was exploding with gunfire.
The shadowless amber glow of the striplights winked out. Everything plunged into a mad darkness flashing with the light of automatic weapons fire. The doctors flung themselves forward after their guide up the narrowing channel.
A flare was fired into the cave — followed by torrents of gunfire. Crazy shadows jumped across the walls around them. Rifle fire ricocheted past them. The rocks all around them pinged and splintered.
Marley winced and shrank together, clawing forward after the strange guide, trying not to feel the bullet coming. Someone ahead of him was hit and yelped in pain. But no one went down.
The deepening chamber narrowed around them. The floor shrank to the width of the cold stream coming down from the heart of the mountain. They splashed forward, cracking their heads on the lowering roof.
Finally, they could go no further. There they found all the enemy saints sitting in a row, very still and calm, in the flashing darkness of the channel.
It was the night in the tomb all over again.
The three doctors sat down with them. There was nothing else to do. They sat down in the cold water of the narrow tunnel, and listened to the ferocious firefight below them — the blat of automatic weapons, the wump and thunder of grenades, the pathetic screaming of the wounded.
Marley sat thinking of Ally. Not thinking any particular thing, just her name. That was all he could manage amid the terrifying uproar of the battle. Just Ally, Ally, Ally.
All at once, the fight was over. Like someone had yelled “cut,” it just stopped — the gunfire stopped — but the yelling continued. So much yelling and so distorted by the reverberations of the cave that they couldn’t tell at first who had won — what language was being shouted.
Benford asked in a whisper: “Anyone hit?”
“Yes,” Estrada said. “But—”
“How bad?”
“It’s nothing.”
“All right. Let’s move down.”
There was still a little light filtering through to them from the flares in the main chamber. The doctors crept forward quietly, back toward the main chamber, walking gingerly in the cold shallow water, hands running along the sloping rock walls either side.
The saints did not follow them, did not even stir.
As they came down into the main chamber they were able to make out which language was being shouted. English.
They moved forward more quickly, Benford leading the way, calling ahead to make contact.
The units below called back and started toward them, the beams of their helmet lights dancing through the passage ahead.
“Are you Colonel Benford?” one of them said, invisible behind his head beam.
“Yes.”
“Lieutenant Reed, sir. Glad to see you made it.”
“You have wounded?” Estrada said.
“Not too bad, sir. The enemy is pretty shot up though.”
“Let’s go.”
Estrada started down into the gallery, then turned back to the lieutenant. Marley saw that Estrada was bleeding from the shoulder, but not profusely.
“And get us some boots, would you please?”
“Yes, sir.”
Estrada moved on down quickly.
“Any more of you back here?” said the lieutenant to Benford.
“Yes. There are some sick enemy personnel back there. They’re probably contagious, and they could be a valuable intelligence resource. I want to talk to you about how we’re going to get them out of here.”
Marley interupted: “Let me babysit them, colonel. You’ll be more help to Estrada. They don’t seem in much hurry to come down anyway.”
Benford gave him a hard look, but, as always, it was gone in a second. “All right, that works. Give him your light,” she said to the lieutenant. “Give me a shout if they try to move out.”
She moved off after Estrada, limping on her bare injured feet. The lieutenant followed her.
When Marley got back to the narrow chamber where they had left the “saints,” he found them sitting huddled close together in a few inches of water at a wider spot in the chamber. They were huddled around a man lying on his back in the pool. They were all touching him. One supported his head, keeping it out of the water; others held his hands, or had their hands lying lightly on his chest, stomach, or thighs. He had an exit wound in his upper abdomen. Marley pushed his way in and checked his carotid pulse and pupil response with his flashlight. He was dead — but only just. His skin was still warm. He had been hit in the firefight and sat there with them in the darkness and bled out. And never
uttered a sound.
Marley passed his light over the faces around him, looking down at the dead man. They were each silently crying — and slightly smiling.
Flanked by gunships, a stream of transport helicopters ferried friend and foe out of the valley all day long. Wounded friendlies went first. Then wounded enemy. Then enemy combatants — what was left of them. Able-bodied personnel went last, civilians before military. It was near nightfall by the time Benford and Marley got out, Estrada with them.
Exhausted in a way he had never known before, Marley sat staring out his window watching the folds of the valley glide by. His body ached, and his guts churned. He had spent the day, once the enemy IDDs were bottled up, between mad stints of sewing human bodies back together before they died, running to the latrine to puke and defecate until there’d been nothing left in his body to purge. Now here he sat, hunched up on a thinly padded bench in a fat helicopter, watching the mountains unroll around him. They looked unreal, those sloping forests and meadows, rocky barrens and cascading streams. They made him feel unreal somehow. Perhaps he wasn’t really there. Perhaps he was really just a camera, a viewing machine, seeing whatever happened to pass in whatever direction he happened to be pointed. But between his eyes and what they saw, there stood a screen painted with the frightening memories of the day:
—A pair of sneakers, standing empty in their bloody prints, as if the person wearing them had been liquefied.
—A severed hand, palm down on the floor, as if crawling away, still wearing a cheap pewter ring.
—The metallic fecal smell of death, of spilled bowels and blood.
—Young Vikas, lying dead on the floor, sprawled like a discarded rag, his clothes and skin and muscles all in shreds.
—Even worse than the dead and the nearly dead had been the living wounded, writhing in agonies of pain.
The helicopter sailed without pausing past the brow of the ridge where just the day before the base camp had stood above an ancient mountain village and its crumbling stone temple. But now the whole area was a smoking black cinder.
Benford saw it too. “Firebombed,” she said.
“The whole village?”
“Enemy village.”
He looked away. “Not anymore.”
“We’re pulling out of this sector,” she explained. “We can’t leave anything behind.”
“Not even what was there before?”
“You don’t need me to tell you war is hell, Carl.”
He wondered when she’d started calling him by his first name. He couldn’t remember. In the midst of all that had happened, what did it matter?
Chapter 21
Karen woke early.
She’d taken to sleeping on a pallet in front of the door so Roger couldn’t slip out at night. She sat up, shedding layers of blankets. Her back ached and her head swam. A dim predawn twilight seeped in through the open window. There were no lights on.
“Roger?”
“Yes.”
He was back in his chair — sans the cushion she used for her pallet. The cat was stretched out on the back of the chair. Without the cushion, he sat deeper in the chair than normal. He looked too small for it, like a child.
“Roger, have you been sitting there all night long?”
“Mm,” he said. “I went to the bathroom twice, and—”
“Jesus, it’s cold in here. Is the power off?”
“I put some more blankets on you.”
“You did? That was nice — Why didn’t you close the damn window?”
“I like the air.”
There was a sweet, fresh smell in the air — even with the window open.
“You like—” She stopped, wondering what seemed so strange about this conversation.
“The power is off,” he said.
“Didn’t you sleep?”
“Mm, I don’t think so.”
“Aren’t you cold?”
“Yes.”
She got up and crossed the room to the window. The floor under her feet was icy. She leaned out and looked up. The sky looked fair. Down the street a bright square of sky was opening toward the coming sun. She closed the window and came back to his chair, feeling uneasy.
“Still sketching?” she said.
In the dim light she could see that the white sheet of paper on his lap was quite grey — densely covered with intricate figures.
“Too dark,” he said. “I’m waiting for the light to come back on.”
She tried the table lamp beside him automatically. Nothing.
“How long have you been waiting?”
He looked up at her and shrugged.
Startled, she froze where she stood. Her hand returning from the lamp switch stopped and hung in the air. He looked at me.
“What did you say?” she said.
He shrugged again, looking back down at his pad. “I didn’t say anything.”
She realized what was so queer about this conversation. He was saying “I”! She thought back over their exchange. Almost everything he’d said to her in the last two minutes had begun with “I”. Her hand slowly slid down out of the air.
She was afraid to speak, to break the spell.
“Roger?” she said softly.
He looked up at her again and smiled that odd half-smile. “Don’t worry.”
She came round to the other chair and sat down in it, also too low without its cushion. She looked at him closely. “How are you?” she said.
He considered the question seriously for a long beat. “Mm. I don’t know,” he said slowly, as if he didn’t understand the question.
“Are you feeling better?”
“Better than what?”
“You seem — different.”
He looked at her curiously. “Different than what?”
Behind him, the cat was awake now, of course, and purring noisily.
“What were you drawing?” she said.
“Ideas.”
“You were drawing ideas?”
“Yes.”
“What ideas were you drawing?”
He looked at his pad thoughtfully. Because of the cast he could only hold the pencil with his fingertips. It was poised over the pad, ready for light to break out.
“The ones which occur here.”
“Here? On the paper?”
He looked up at her again.
“Yes, here altogether.”
He made a gesture that seemed meant to include both himself and the sketchpad.
“The pencil draws together,” he said.
“May I see it?”
“Yes,” he said, holding out the pad, “but it’s dark.”
She didn’t know whether he meant the room or the page was dark, or both.
She stood and took the pad to the kitchen.
“Why didn’t you light a candle?” she said.
There was one standing on the counter. Everyone kept candles on hand. Lightsticks were too expensive.
“Mm. What does why mean?”
She felt the moment of lucidity slipping away. She wanted to keep him engaged for a little while longer. Please, just a little more!
“Did you forget about the candle?” she said.
“Forget? Mm. I don’t know. It didn’t occur to me.”
She fumbled with the trigger of the lighter till it finally caught, and lit the white candle. The little kitchen lit up with a yellow glow. She sat on a stool at the counter and looked at his drawing through the mist of her exhalations.
The sheet was a riot of tiny figures, patterns, words, and numbers, all meticulously rendered with his mechanical pencil. She turned it round and round. There was no right way up to it; the figures were oriented every which way. There was a little cat, and lots of little faces and eyes and hands, and a foot, and circles within circles like a solar system or a Bohr atom, and cubes and spheres and pyramids, and grids drawn in perspective like gravity wells, and molecular formulas. And the word “this” appeared many times with all sorts of v
ariations:
this THIS tHIS thIs thiS siht sith
sith it is
it is this?
?
ist this it is? Tis!
I. It. Hit. Sit. Tsi. I. I is it. It is I. I is I. It is it.
Tis it tis it?
“So what are these ideas?” she said.
“The ideas which occurred.”
“Come over here. Look at it with me.”
He got up and came over. The cat jumped down and followed him. He sat down on the other stool, on the living room side of the bar.
She pointed at one of the thisses. “What this?”
“This.”
“Yes. This. What idea is this?”
“Yes.”
She smiled. Who’s on first? “But what idea is it, this this?”
“This is a word.”
“Yes.”
“Word is a word.”
“Yes.”
“But all these words,” he said, “have come unstuck from all these ideas.”
“Unstuck,” she said. What a great word that was! Unstuck. That was just how she felt.
“Me too,” he said.
And a chill ran through her. An eerie, delightful chill, for she knew that he had felt her feeling. They were coming just a little less un-stuck from each other.
“But those ideas do not occur,” he continued, “but I remember them. I remember those ideas, but they do not occur now. A remembering idea is not the same kind of idea as an occurring idea. Mm.”
“Like the difference between a sound and its echo?”
He smiled. “Yes. That is an analogy.”
She laughed. “Yup, that’s what it is!”
“But now these ideas are not stuck to any words,” he said. “These sounds aren’t echoes of any other sound.”
“Very postmodern,” she said with mock sobriety.
This was not the same style of gibberish he usually muttered to her about or, at other times, roared at her. It was organized. She didn’t quite get the organization, but she sensed it was there. She studied the drawing while he talked. The more she looked at it, the more coherent the drawing felt, even though she couldn’t actually see the order in it.
He talked and talked. She saw that he really wanted her to get it. And he knew she wasn’t getting it.