by Martyn Burke
He survived.
• • •
Liberace was becoming a real warrior. I mean, have you ever heard “Warsaw Concerto” being blasted through Afghan mountain passes? Echoing and re-echoing off all that zillion tons of vertical rock, zigzagging up and down, backwards and forwards until it comes back at you like needles being jammed into your brain from every angle imaginable? But that’s nothing compared to “Kitten on the Keys.” You just knew that thing could penetrate rock. It had cruel and unusual written all over it. There was no cave deep enough up there in those Taliban-riddled mountains that could ever withstand that tinkly weapon that ended up sounding like pipes falling on each other. It was the original bunker buster. Or daisy cutter. Or whatever those weapons are.
The problem was that Liberace had what they call blowback. At least for Danny. Whenever we let loose a barrage of piano music, he’d start thinking of Ariana and then get to seriously weirding out. Like that night as we lay there in the crystalline cold of three thousand meters altitude, staring up at those zillion stars firing fusillades of photons at us. Swaddled in some high-tech sleeping bags but really relying on wool military blankets—green wool, the only kind that kept out the cold—we shared a merciful silence.
“She was a virgin.”
“They all start out that way you know.”
“You’re not helping,” he said.
“Well, what do you want me to say?”
“I figured it out. It was Ariana’s way of turning herself into damaged goods. After we made love. Those tribal chest thumpers like Zadran need to deflower the bride themselves. They want virgins. It’s part of the whole Vani deal.”
“You ever thought that maybe she was just in love with you?”
He didn’t answer for a while. “You know the really terrifying thing? What cuts a hole in my nights?” Mortars sounded from far away with a distant thummmp and then it was the stillness of all those photons. “That he didn’t send her back. When he found out she wasn’t a virgin. She must have been counting on that.”
“Maybe he didn’t have an alternative.”
“He had an alternative, all right. And that’s what scares the hell out of me.”
“What?”
“He could always beat the shit out of her. For as long as he wanted. And no one would stop him.”
“What about her family?”
“Are you kidding me? She’s someone else’s property now. That’s how they all look at it. Besides . . .”
“Besides what?” Nothing. I thought he was asleep.
“Swear to God . . . I’m going to get Omar.”
Once in a while history has a nasty way of running through your head when you’re here. It unspools in some old analog loop that has played soundlessly in the widescreen crania of generations of sane people who found themselves wondering what they’re fighting for. Don’t get me wrong—we believed in all the drum-and-bugle pep rally stuff about fighting Terrorism and all that. That’s not the point. The point is that Afghanistan is littered with the bones of a dozen drum and bugle corps. One or two per century on average. The Brits, those poor Victorian bastards, left their wounded behind as the Afghan women would stalk through the battlefield when the fighting was over, deadly ghosts clutching the long scimitar knives they used to fillet nice boys from London and Bristol, handing them their entrails, their private parts, smilingly watching them die in horror. And the Russians, stoned on brake fluid, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, dying in the mountain passes like insects as their own empire collapsed.
They don’t talk about this at the pep rallies.
But if they did, Danny would be one of those lucky ones who wouldn’t even care. Danny is not here for history. It makes it so much easier. Being here for Ariana makes it all so simple. I envy him. There is a kind of purity I long for in the dark fastness of those Afghan nights when the air almost crackles around you.
I think of Annie Boo and wonder what steps are still out there for me to retrace. And if I even could.
• • •
All through the shifting darkness of that night, he whispered out his own little hymn of pain, a torrent of memories: of how her black hair swirled in shimmering waves when she turned her head, about how he almost buckled the first time she smiled at him, about how he ached every time he heard her music in his thoughts, and about the way they completed each other, and . . . It went on and on, all through another perimeter mortar barrage that was pretty much ignored, and then sometime after quiet had descended again he remembered God’s Valley, the slope from her hips down to her waist as she lay on her side. He relived running his hand gently back and forth into this Valley, the place where all life begins, the place of creation, where God resides. And from there, lapsing into the stillness that nurtured all this quiet frenzy that had turned in on him.
It was grief, plain and simple. I saw something like this only once before. Danny would try to talk you out of calling what he felt as being grief. But it was. Ripping through him, a blade with sawtooth thoughts, shredding memory and leaving shards of pain all around. Just like what I saw when I was seventeen with the father of a friend of mine. After his wife washed out to sea. They saw her go under far out there, the rip tides doing their work. And the father went more or less mad. Mostly because her body was never found. He kept expecting her to walk in the door. It got so that he’d almost fight anyone who suggested she wasn’t going to show up.
Danny would never think of it this way, but Ariana had sort of washed out to sea. And he was sure she’d be walking in the door any day now. I sat up and realized that this was a replay of the nightmare about Annie I used to have.
That night I lay there in my sleeping bag, in all that frozen stillness, and figured out something when I stared up into all those stars. Some of them had died eons ago. But their light from when they were alive was only now reaching Earth after zipping along for a billion or so years—so what I was looking at was no longer there. My memories of the great days with Annie Boo might be exactly the same.
I had stashed the National Enquirer photographs of the Boo Two next to the two grenades I carried. Thinking that maybe taping them to the grenades might be therapeutic. It didn’t really help. I was as bad as Danny.
I’d been using the latest bulky envelope from my mother as a headrest until I succumbed to the temptation to open it again, turning on a flashlight in the depths of the sleeping bag. In the midst of her letters was a phone message with the logo of a printing company in Santa Monica. On it was my mother’s loopy handwriting: Tues—2 P.M. Mr. Jones called for you. Very important you return his call. As if I was going to take time out from a firefight or something and return a phone call in America.
There were two other phone messages with orders to call this Jones. I didn’t know anyone named Jones.
Then there were my mother’s latest letters to cope with. Annabelle had outdone herself. In the first letter you could almost hear the flutey mixture of indignation and insecurity as she wrote of the unbelievable!!! deal that she and Albert had gotten on a spectacular foreclosure deal on a house on the rim of Santa Monica Canyon. She and Albert were friends again—well, actually, more than friends because he is such a genius, a true!! genius when it comes to business and money. The letter was filled with this genius of Albert’s, spotting this unbelievable deal that they went to see in the driving rain, beating out dozens of other bidders because Albert planted false information about the place being rotten with termites. Even now they were planning to fluff the house, flip it for a much higher price, and make money, more money than . . .
Then there was the second letter. Ten days later. When it had all changed.
Albert: dickweed; asshole; small man syndrome. Etc. . . . conning me into putting my retirement fund into a house on the edge of a cliff—a whole cliff!!! that gives way in the driving rain, taking the house with it sliding down that cliff into the houses below . . . I am almost destitute . . . Etc. . . . and now Albert, that little shit, is now
driving around in a brand new . . .
Etc.
• • •
That night in the depths of the Afghan darkness, we almost killed a little girl.
At 0-something, half the plateau bolted out of sleep with the clacking of rounds being chambered in some locked-and-loaded wet dream. All over the night, voices and lights snapped out of whatever fog they were in.
But it was Danny who was first in on what was happening. Way before even the perimeter guards sent up the flares, he knew something was there. He sat up like he was hinged, breathlessly fired out of whatever dream was torturing him. I was still thinking about I am almost destitute and that little shit is—when he rasped, “You awake?”
“No.”
“It’s here.”
“You’re creeping me out.” Which was true. It was almost eerie, the way he looked around.
“Constance said I would see a sign. From Ariana. That sign—it’s here. Somewhere. I know it.”
“Hey. I don’t mean to burst your balloon, but that sign stuff is bullshit. My mother used to read tea leaves. Every time some guy showed up she’d say he should watch out for a sign. They’d leave thinking a traffic light turning green was a sign.”
He wasn’t paying attention. “The sign—it’s here. I know it.” He started groping around in his sleeping bag, coming up with the night-vision goggles and then vanishing into the darkness. Only moments later, the whole plateau awoke with that paranoia that rockets through the dark when noises happen where they shouldn’t. All that chambering was clattering away when Hold fire! sounded. It was Danny—Hold your fire it’s a girl!—yelling over the din, cutting through a jumble of what the fucks? as a bizarre sight appeared before our eyes. A little Afghan girl in a turquoise headscarf was standing in the center of a suddenly floodlit plain. She had wide, dark eyes that calmly looked at the rifle barrels flashing toward her like compass needles.
They were all fixed on this little girl, maybe eight, nine years old, maybe less, holding a flashlight and covered from head to foot in a dark blue robe and that headscarf around her shining black hair. She was serene, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for her to be out on a mountain in the middle of the night. And the way the Afghans think, maybe it was. Cause and effect just aren’t linked the same way here. We’d had panic-in-the-night moments before, ones where you couldn’t begin to understand the thinking that went on. Once, a herd of goats barreled in, driven right through a battalion-strength outpost. The herd ended up as stew for a week, accompanied by payoffs to the indignant goat herders. Another time, a camel train walked through an encampment before dawn, almost scaring a squad witless and provoking curses in several different languages.
But this little girl merely acted perplexed, looking at the weapons all around her without a flicker of fear, her large, dark eyes almost demanding that we explain our presence there.
“She’s carrying something!” a voice in the darkness snapped.
Another voice—“Yeah, she’s hiding it”—unleashing a platoon’s worth of suicide bomber thoughts.
“Whoa! Back off,” yelled Danny, stepping into the light. “I can handle it. I speak some Pashto.” He walked slowly toward her.
“Don’t get too close,” one of the company commanders yelled. But he didn’t see what Danny saw: the eyes and the hair. A few feet from her, he bent down and said something in that language of theirs. She looked at him with one of those Mona Lisa smiles that aren’t really smiles. He said something else and she shook her head, this time showing the first flicker of emotion. She shook her head again, clutching whatever it was she was holding even tighter.
Danny kept talking to her, and slowly she parted one of the upper folds of her blue robe. She held her two hands toward him. In them was something, gray and rustling.
“What is it?” someone called out.
Danny looked from what was in her hands to her face. And then he smiled. The girl returned his smile as if relieved that he approved. “It’s her bird. It got free. She went looking for it.”
The girl suddenly burst into a chattering volley that Danny translated. “It’s a songbird. Her family kept it alive all during when the Taliban were running the country. They banned music. So her family raised songbirds.”
The girl said something else, and Danny was suddenly almost laughing. “It was the only way they could hear any kind of music.”
Danny’s joy shook free of its reins and took off. “You see?” he yelled.
After that, there was no way you could have pried Danny loose from that sign stuff. He practically went into free-association freefall, thinking everything was a sign: that little girl was the young Ariana coming back to him; it was Ariana’s spirit seeking him out; it was Ariana calling out to him about her music; the bird definitely the bird! was a sign for godsakes I mean a songbird? A bird that made music when it was forbidden? What more of a sign could you ask for than . . .
And the dead satellite phone got prayed over all night as if incantations could somehow bring a now-worthless piece of plastic and metal back to life. He became obsessed with it, driving the radio operators crazy, bugging them to help, to MacGyver the thing back into life so he could talk to Constance again and find out what all the signs really meant. But that particular sat phone remained worthless. Mute, gleaming, and unable to communicate with the satellites overhead. Sometime before dawn, when I was back bundled into my sleeping bag, I heard the usual rustling that always preceded the crazy-making Are you awake? whisper. I was tripwire ready for indignation but he crossed me up. “I figured it out.”
“Figured what out?’
“Our lives. Maybe just my life.”
I thought about this for about as long as it was worth. “Yeah? And?”
“We gotta get out of here. Fast.”
“Why?”
“We need help.” Silence. “I’m scared.”
“You’re scared?”
“That I’m never going to find her.” More silence. “Unless I get help. This country’s huge. I need to go and get help. Fast.”
“Go where?”
“Constance,” he said.
I sat up and looked at him.
“Hollywood,” he said.
Hollywood
17
Getting out was the easy part.
Danny convincingly pulled in the Canadian military’s disease or trauma that has detrimental and significant effect on the member’s ability to perform assigned duties clause that sprung him for fifteen days’ compassionate leave.
I started by going to the XO and babbling something like, “Sir, my mother was in a house in California that slid down a cliff and I think she’s okay but I can’t be sure and I’m pretty damn worried about her.” All true of course—except for the Timing Is Everything element—because I didn’t mention that she was in the house, or what was left of it, two days after it slid down the cliff, inspecting the rubble.
Permission granted.
From Bagram to Dallas I left a vapor trail of the Annie Boo blues. All the way into California, courtesy of nice people who donated frequent-flyer miles to the USO so distraught defenders of the Free World like me could end up lurching off a red-eye into one of those remote airports east of L.A., the ones ringed by concentric circles of tract homes, strip malls, and ragged Chamber of Commerce billboards welcoming new investors.
Already there are two voice and three text messages on my phone from Danny, who got here two days earlier. They pretty much boiled down to found us gr8 place in H’wood.
The gr8 place turned out to be the Star-Brite motel in the heart of glamorous Hollywood! whose online home page somehow forgot to include among its spectacular views! the scenic shots of ravaged tweakers on the street below us, the ones who’d been up for two meth-fueled days straight, the transvestite hookers teetering on platform heels, and a healthy sampling from the left side of the bell curve, all working the same taco stand outside our window, a block or so north of Santa Monica Bouleva
rd. And for our added enjoyment, there’s the usual serenade at three-digit-decibel levels of hip-hop from some basehead sitting in his chopped and lowered Civic, waiting for Mr. Crystal to show up. Meth and tacos are what passed for health food on this block.
• • •
For the first two sessions with Constance, we kept being drawn back to the same thing: “Why do I hear so much music?” she asked.
“Liberace,” Danny said. “I told you about him and—”
“No.” She shook her head and looked up at him. Even from where I was sitting, I felt almost drawn into wherever those big green eyes of hers were leading. “Not this Liberace. Someone else is playing.”
“A woman?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Ariana?”
“A woman who is where something is missing.”
“What’s missing?” Danny asked as Constance picked up the black mirror.
“The portal is bringing in broken music.” Quickly, she picked up that little bottle and sprayed the ripe mint potion all over.
“Why are you doing that?”
“I feel danger,” she said without any further explanation.
“How can music be broken?”
“It is. She is trying to fix it.”
Right at that moment, while we were hurtling through this musky velvet tunnel of memory and image, one of those things happened. The kind of thing that causes most people to put you in the wacko category if you talk about it. But there’s not a damn thing you can do because you’ve seen it and they haven’t. And now you’re a believer. It, in our case, was the white cat, Alpha, or Alfie, as she had instructed us to call him, which leapt up onto the big oak table. Constance shot off her chair like something had detonated underneath her. She was giving off a weird little barrage of breaths. “This has never happened before.” She looked terrified.