by Martyn Burke
The Canadians seemed to have no institutional memory of war; the last one they’d been in was fought by their grandfathers, so they mostly made it up as they went along. This Princess Patricia outfit that Danny was a part of was given to fits of egalitarian goofiness and Celtic mayhem that our Big Army would generally have regarded as mutiny. One of their quainter rituals was the so-called field days, which would have had our generals calling for the military police. In these things the lower ranks would challenge their officers to wrestling matches, which, once you got past the thin veneer of civilization, occasionally turned into caste system vendettas.
On that day when Danny was telling me about Constance, someone came in the tent and tugged at him, trying to draw him into what was billed as a tag team wrestling match. Danny shrugged him off; all he wanted to do was talk about Constance. “She knows. I can feel it.” You have missed something of importance. “That psychic knows how to get to Ariana.”
I hadn’t told Danny about the message I’d gotten from Constance. The one that might as well have been branded onto some part of my mind: She hurts. She needs you. Be kind.
“What the hell are we doing here?” Danny was stuck somewhere between confusion and irritation.
Someone else grabbed his arm again. This time he didn’t resist and he was pushed out of the tent into the center of the massive cluster of soldiers, which had all the military discipline of a mosh pit.
In the center was the alpha male, the battalion commander who didn’t need the insignias to prove it. Actually, there’d be no place for any insignia since he wore only cutoff jeans, the muscles of his shoulders and arms rippling, not in that body builder condom-stuffed-with-walnuts way but more like one of those construction guys whose hand swallows yours when you shake it. Like I said, our Big Army would be reaching for the rulebook on this kind of thing—a colonel putting himself up as a possible punching bag for some grunt.
But this Canadian colonel had already wrestled a couple of guys into roadkill. And you just knew that somewhere behind that buccaneer’s grin, the battalion commander was listening to some malt whiskey chorus of ghostly highlanders demanding genetic continuity. When Danny was pushed in there like Big Bird, it definitely looked like a continuation of some clan battle. The colonel, with sweat pouring down from that mowed wheat sheaf of red hair going gray, just grinned. “Okay, last one. Two minutes, max.”
But Danny had a different chorus in his head. “Sir, I must warn you,” he said to the battalion commander. Remember, this is Big Bird talking here, so the words got pretty much drained of any menace.
“Duly noted, son.” There was almost an imaginary knife between the teeth in that buccaneer’s grin. The battalion commander moved his arms in flowing motions, like waves of muscle, beckoning.
“Sir, I must inform you: I really don’t want to fight. I am thinking about the woman I love,” Danny announced.
The battalion commander was covered in that moon dust, the powdery coating that covered us all in Afghanistan like we were in some talcum powder factory. Danny looked like he was his own ghost. His sweat was running into the moon dust, giving him a kind of war paint in reverse.
“Excuse me?”
“I am in love, Sir. You really don’t want to fight me. Not while I am thinking of the woman I love.”
The battalion commander did a kind of double-take. He looked from his men to Danny and back again. Then he started laughing, a full-diaphragm, bellowing laugh that as much as commanded laughter from those around him.
Which he got. The whole circle bellowed back in laughter as the battalion commander whipped his hands around the back of Danny’s neck in a full wrestler’s maneuver. They were bent at the waist and joined at the head in a tangle of arms. In all that dust and commotion, they looked like Siamese twins feverishly arguing over which way to go. Danny was whipped and pulled all over the circle, even though he was a lot taller than the battalion commander. He was like prey in the jaws of one of those predators you see on the Nature Channel in some show that Darwin might have produced. The circle fell almost silent out of respect for the about-to-be-dead.
But then something happened, something pure Danny. He slithered away from the battalion commander’s grip and flung himself off to one side, spinning through the dust, staggering to his feet and lurching through the cloud of moon dust as if different parts of him were going off in their own directions. “Sir,” he announced, wafting away the dust, “I am being forced to fight in the name of the woman I love.”
“Huh?” said the battalion commander. He was at the intersection of irritation and control, that moment for someone of power who suddenly has to cope with someone who does not care about power. “Sure. Whatever.” With that same knife-between-the-teeth grin. He lunged toward Danny, who sidestepped him like a bullfighter swirling a cape of pure naiveté.
“Sir, she is out there in those mountains. We were supposed to be married.”
The battalion commander was now beyond theatrics; the narrowing of his eyes could be read as either anger or panic. In a crouching stance, he circled Danny, who was still staggering until that one instant it took for him to make a lunging strike, catapulting the battalion commander back into the dust. Danny was on him like he’d been spring-loaded. The prey became the predator in a blur of arms, legs, and frenzied eyes.
Danny wasn’t only fighting the battalion commander; he was battling everything that stood between him and Ariana. And no one else knew it, especially not the battalion commander, who was pinned into the dust, flashing desperate, angry glances as he tried to find a major, a captain, anyone who could do what he could not do, which was pull rank and end this debacle. There was no way he could assert the full withering power of his position in the hierarchy, not now when he had so grandly cast it aside to show that he did not need it. Not now when he was being wrestled into flattened crab-walk submission by this puny beanpole.
The air around that human circle suddenly screeched, like something was being shredded inside your eardrum, a shock-wave effect that jarred the whole writhing, bellowing, moon-dusted collection of unleashed testosterone. The screeching ripped away the moment; it came from the bagpipes played by a knobby-faced regimental sergeant major, whose years in the army officially rendered him wiser than anyone else.
That wisdom included the knowledge that none of the two hundred men forming this circle could ever fight to the death for a man humiliated as badly as their battalion commander was now about to be.
I couldn’t tell what this bagpiper was playing, but it was something that obviously stirred the circle into mumbling things that made no sense true patriot love in all thy sons command and except for the crab in the center that was still flipping onto its back and then slapping itself into the dust with glowing hearts we see thee rise the whole throng was singing along.
The bagpiper was playing their national anthem.
Pretty soon they were all standing at attention, eyes straight ahead, bellowing out we stand on guard for thee until even the crab disengaged, becoming once again Danny and the battalion commander, both staggering into an exhausted facsimile of protocol, each of them realizing that national honor was now at stake. Side by side, they stood trying not to fall over as they joined the circle belting out O Can-a-da, we stand on guard for thee.
And when it was over and the circle was desperately looking for ways to pretend none of it had happened, Danny walked past the colonel and said, “Good job, Sir.”
“See,” Danny said, lurching over to me, “he doesn’t have any hard feelings.”
“Oh yeah? His face was like a cat’s when you catch it taking a dump.”
But Danny didn’t get it. He simply couldn’t absorb the reality around him. Which was that a battalion commander, with his depleted reserves of hierarchical power, was staggering away, trying to make jokes about it all with desperate-eyed captains who laughed too easily.
That was the moment when I knew that, in some karmic workshop where spirits write
destiny, I was being assigned the role of Danny’s protector.
• • •
Danny was one of those among us who have not been given the codes. Or maybe it’s just some inner fount of optimism which erases judgment that does not fit what they have decided to believe. Danny was one of them. Some kind of guile had been bred out of him. For someone roaming the seething Afghan mountains with an awesome instrument of destruction in his hands, he was an innocent when it came to anything that did not conform to his belief that nothing could prevent him from finding Ariana. Who was out there. Waiting for him.
And I confess to a moment of envy. I wanted that kind of belief too. So I could find Annie Boo.
12
Those stars again. I just couldn’t stop looking at them. Or thinking about them and what they said about us.
Almost everywhere in Afghanistan the stars are terrifyingly bright. Whatever your preferences for all the light-polluted places we live in, you just understand things way better by going back into places still waiting to update the oxen. The Afghan nights are blacker than any shade we’ve dreamed up on our civilized color chart. They yield more rawness and awful truth about the human condition in one bandit-ridden, Taliban-filled night than a decade of nights in places where the darkness is blown out by the local mall lights. You stand there in that Afghan blackness where the closest light bulb is at least two tribes away; you stare up at those stars blasting out photons with an intensity you’ve never known, and you just have trouble getting seriously ecumenical. No matter what the body count is that day in the eternal Bad Guys versus Us struggle, you just have to wonder how all those stars out there can be created by more than one God.
But if God is on our side, and the Ninjas are claiming the same thing, where exactly are we? I always wondered about that.
• • •
When your mother tries to tell you how to fight the war you’re in, the generals are in trouble. My mother’s theory of war was simple: Be nice to them. And then when they see you’re being nice they won’t want to fight. Of course! That’s it! God, if only! If only we’d seen it before—The Strategic Thoughts of Annabelle—niceness as a geopolitical strategy. Hitler, so utterly undone by a box of chocolates from the nice Jewish people that he races to have the gas in Auschwitz shut off. The Taliban, weed whackers in the human petunia bed, blubbering with gratitude over the free tickets to Disneyland. Osama bin Laden sighing with remorse because he got comped in that nice Las Vegas . . . See?
Annabelle’s Theory of War caught up to me in the mountains when one of the support soldiers reached into the big yellow mail sack and pulled out a bulky padded envelope with Annabelle’s grand handwriting that had grown more florid as she got older. In it were the obligatory updates on the Boo Two as told by the tabloids—Twins in the Playboy Mansion!—that pretty much drove needles into my eyes reading them. Boo and Hugh—an item? with photos of Hugh Hefner looking about as leathery as the average eighty-something, draped around four gorgeous blondes who were probably still in diapers when he started collecting his pension. The photographs in those magazine articles were like cluster bombs, detonating multiple images of Annie lying under the sagging folds of that leather as he—
Oh, the carnage of it all.
My mother knew exactly what she was doing. She had never forgiven me for “letting that girl get away.” That girl had represented Annabelle’s chance to recreate herself; her one last shot at redemption and social rebirth, sweeping herself back onto the A list by trailing the beauty that was Annie behind her. The beauty of that girl would absolutely, certainly, be a reflection of Annabelle herself—everyone who was anyone would see the similarity in an instant, a few years removed perhaps, but who was counting?
I crumpled the articles into a ball and fired them into a pile of trash. But the padded envelope was the oracle that wouldn’t stop. All sorts of stuff kept tumbling out of it. There were two versions of my horoscope with Leo outlined in yellow highlighter: Risk should be avoided this month; an article on the importance of taking herbal remedies for the prostate; another article about syphilis; in other words, the usual Annabelle package.
But this one had something different. Besides the usual letter, it had two homemade CDs on which she’d written Music to Make Love or and War. The and had been rubbed out, written in again, and then finally crossed out.
The letter was pure Annabelle. Each of her letters had a theme that was practically megaphoned off the pages. The last one was about how fashion models today don’t have the class that they did in her day. Reading it in the midst of a rocket attack on a dust-blown plain in Zabul Province somehow didn’t do the subject justice. Scrambling for cover from what turned out to be Chinese-made 107mm rockets fired by the Taliban into our forlorn Forward Operating Base tends to interrupt one’s train of thought.
This latest letter was about Albert. It was even more unreal. Suddenly, Albert was a good guy again. No more shithead, ruined-my-life stuff. Suddenly he was one seriously outstanding man. Upstanding, if you can believe it.
“You okay?” Danny asked. We were sitting on packing crates outside the big tent where he was trying to figure out a satellite phone he’d borrowed for ten minutes talk-time from a reporter. Danny was a master at finagling sat phone time from reporters.
“No.” I was still reading. Misunderstood? Albert? And so discerning! I read that word at least ten times, wondering if I was missing something—I mean, Albert was about as discerning as a buzzard in a dumpster. If there was a buck to be made, he was Mr. Nice Guy. Other than that, he was just another hustler in the ring, punching his shadow. . . . but you’ve always been too hasty to condemn poor Albert. Poor Albert? What happened to the never-darken-my-door-thief-swindler-con-artist Albert? Where did that Albert get to? And just to show that he has no hard feelings . . . Albert, of all people, having hard feelings? . . . he has downloaded—is that what they call it?—some wonderful music for you. Which I chose, of course. I let Albert use your computer here so he can start this wonderful new business of his, making CDs for shut-ins and widows—
I dropped the letter.
“You okay?”
“You already asked me that.” I was staring at the homemade CDs Annabelle had sent me, wondering if something about them was contagious.
“Things change.”
“This doesn’t.”
“What’s that?”
“Music for love and war.”
“Or war,” Danny said, squinting at Annabelle’s scrawl.
One of the other Rakkasans, a kid whose real name was something like Bakassaro but who was known as Battle Zero, looked over from where he was cleaning his rifle. “It’s the same thing where I come from.”
Battle Zero had a tight little face that looked like it never saw the sun, and big ears that moved when he got excited. “Cool. CDs. Ludacris? Mötley Crüe? Snoop Dog?” Battle Zero’s ears started jumping. He grabbed the CDs and studied the handwritten notes on the cover.
“Liber Ace,” he said. “Never heard of him.” He jammed one of Annabelle’s CDs onto his player and hit Play. And then his face practically melted with confusion. He strained, listening into his headset, like something was pulling that already small face down into his shoulders. Battle Zero looked as if he was listening to someone being tortured. “What the fuck is this?”
He whipped the earphones out of the CD player, hooking it up to little speakers on the edge of his cot. They poured out some other universe of bouncy piano music, sounding like something stuck between classical and white guys’ reggae. “Does the person who sent you this like you?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.”
On both CDs was one word written in Annabelle’s loopy scrawl: LIBERACE.
“Libb-er-ach-che,” I said, enunciating carefully.
“Libber—?” said Battle Zero. “Who would do a thing like this?” he said, staring into the music like it was something he should spray with Raid.
That tinkly music started driving them a
ll crazy. A kid named Rubi started yelling, “Turn it off!” and “Enough already!” from inside the tent. Rubi had been born in Cuba and everyone liked him. He and Danny had been together on a couple of short missions. After a few more bars, Rubi stuck his head out of the tent. “What the fuck is this?” he yelled. “A new interrogation technique? Audio waterboarding?” Pretty soon the whole mountain was yelling insults at Liberace’s music.
“‘Kitten on the Keys’?” said Battle Zero, reading from the handwritten list on the back of the CD cover. He hit the Forward button. “Warsaw Concerto? Who listens to this crap?”
It was the laughter that surprised me: gleeful, exuberant, almost giggling. It came from Danny. “I love it!” he said, leaping to his feet to stop Battle Zero from turning off the music. “It’s perfect.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Trust me,” said Danny. “I’m not.”
“‘Indian Love Call’?” said Battle Zero, reading the notes again.
“It’s the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard.”
It dawned on me that Danny might be serious. He was staring into something only he could see, something let loose by that tinkly, weird music.
“Man,” said Battle Zero, looking to me for help, “is this what posttraumatic stress is like?”
But Annabelle the oracle was not finished. Out fell one more of my mother’s gifts to modern warfare: a thick, shrink-wrapped, cardboard lump that landed at my feet. It was something that had to be unfolded before its full splendor was revealed—a life-sized poster of a prancing, middle-aged white guy with pompadour hair and wearing tighty-whitey little short pants, diamond-patterned knee socks with diamond-patterned shoes to match, and a spectacularly fringed Star-and-Stripes shirt.