Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  Within seconds Liberace took three direct hits. All that was left of him on that cardboard poster were those tight little silk shorts and those prancing legs. The rest of him had been obliterated. Liberace had died for the cause.

  It was the muzzle flash that gave Omar away. From the shadows of the trees above us, Danny saw it repeatedly. Now utterly calm, in that altered state of his:

  He gauged the wind and elevation.

  Fine-tuned the scope.

  Slowed his breathing.

  Exhaled.

  Stopped breathing entirely for the moment.

  And gently, gently, pulled the trigger.

  And at that instant, from somewhere high up on the hillside: Ayyyyeeeeeeee!—a scream that echoed into a pinwheel of shrieks as legs and a torso tumbled, flashing through rocks and trees, crashing against a boulder with a cracking sound that could be heard down in that gully. Still shrieking and writhing, Omar pulled himself up in plain view, holding his shattered leg. The bullet had obliterated most of where his knee had been.

  From all that distance, Danny centered the laser device on Omar’s chest. A red dot bounced across it.

  “Ah my Danny, a laser dot,” rasped the voice through the Em-Biter. It was a screeching, shakier voice than the one we had heard only moments before. “We’re back to paintball, are we?”

  Danny left the laser dot on Omar, jittering all over his chest. And then on his face. Omar tried to brush it away. Then he tried to move but his shredded leg would not respond.

  Omar grabbed the radio again. “Are you going to k-kill me, Danny? Is that it, Danny?”

  “No,” said Danny.

  “Kill me.”

  Omar was thrashing on the hillside, yelling at Danny, taunting him in a jumble of Pashto and English. And then lapsing into angry cries.

  “Kill me!”

  Danny smiled. “Goodbye, Omar.” He shut the laser device off. The red dot vanished from Omar’s face. Danny turned and walked away from the screams on the hillside high above him.

  Home

  30

  “Just go,” she said.

  That tiny room at the back of Eugene’s office was the one favor he ever did for me. Or at least he claimed it was a favor. Like everything else he did.

  He had let her stay there, living in a storage room with the faint rasping sounds of Sunset Boulevard as the white noise of a world beyond the darkness. It was to be for a few days, just to keep her from being out on the streets.

  And it became her living space for the last four months that I was away from America.

  “Make it like you just dropped in to see me,” he’d said when he phoned me. “Don’t let her think I told you she was here. Or that you showed up because of her.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll see.”

  And I did. When I opened the door the flaring of her eyes said it all in shame and fury. Why was I there? Why was I intruding? Leave! This is my business. My fight. Goddamn you. Please. Oh God please.

  I waited it out. Watching her hands betray her, trembling as she fought to subdue them into enforced normalcy in whatever guise she could grasp. With the pill bottles on the floor beside her, silent informers. She held it together for as long as she could. Piecing together words coming in batches from whatever clothesline of thought she could reel in.

  And then she fell silent, shaking her head as tears flowed down her cheeks. “Oh God,” she said after a while. “Save yourself.” I sat next to her and took her hand. She did not pull it away. And after a while she squeezed my hand harder than seemed possible.

  “How can I help?”

  “You can’t. You never could. I tried to tell you that. But you wouldn’t listen.”

  “No. I wouldn’t.”

  “I have to do this myself.”

  “Do what?”

  “For once in my life I have to do something on my own.” We sat in silence for a while. “I’ll be going soon.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “You can’t.” More silence. “Don’t you feel stupid?”

  “About what?”

  “Wanting to be with me.”

  “No.”

  “Please go.”

  “No. I’m here.”

  “You can’t be.” I waited a while and then looked at her. “Ridiculous,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “No one should have to have a junkie loving them.”

  • • •

  She vanished. The storage room was empty by sunset. Except for the pill bottles left behind, half-full and with a voice all their own. I went to all the obvious places looking for her. The Playboy Mansion. The clubs. Even the ferret’s office. Everywhere but the one really obvious place that never occurred to me until the end of the second day.

  The disintegrating little house on the Venice canal seemed held together by memories. Behind the ragged exterior only stillness prevailed. There were no more addled hippies crashing for days, weeks, or months now that her father was dead and her mother circled dementia in ever-tightening anxieties over the tea she made endlessly . . . how do I know for sure that it’s organic chamomile? . . . the government puts things in tea you know . . . and then pouring it out for fear that they had put something in the tea. The little house roared with silence broken only by volleys of groans and cries from the bedroom she had once shared with her sister.

  “The dreams,” her mother murmured, making another pot of chamomile tea. “She has these dreams.”

  They were more than dreams. It was as if parts of her life were being pulled through blades. And then flayed and driven from the darkness where she had locked them away for her own protection. In the bedroom she lay writhing on a mattress, part of a strewn collage of clothes, her legs and arms thrashing wildly as she tried in vain to subdue them, curling into a shivering ball and staring blankly through raw eyes, red-rimmed stains on a hollow white face that had tightened into a mask.

  “Please,” she rasped. “Go. For my sake. Go.”

  I stayed.

  In the front part of the house, watching her mother make tea, worry about the government, and then throw it out and start over, it was as if she were unaware that I was even there, shuffling around in tattered loops and muttering to herself. She didn’t bother to look up when the angry face at the front door demanded to know what he was doing here.

  Susie Boo had lost none of the spittle and hissing with which she embellished her proclamations. Almost kicking the door open, she barged forth, glinting in a wardrobe from another world. Screaming at her mother, who merely poured the tea through the strainer, checking it for foreign substances, Susie headed straight toward the bedroom. In her hand was a pill bottle.

  Without an instant of thought, I slapped the pill bottle away from her. It skidded into the kitchen, where I got to it a moment before Susie Boo hurled herself on me in a clawing frenzy, her shrieks almost smothering the shaky voice from the hallway.

  “Stop.”

  Annie’s voice came so quietly that it was barely heard.

  She was standing, shivering and blank-eyed, holding onto the door frame for support. “Stop,” she said again softly. The maelstrom between her sister and me ended abruptly, leaving a moment of stillness before the pill bottle was plucked from my hand like talons snatching prey.

  “Open it,” Annie said. “Please.”

  Susie Boo was already holding out the pill bottle, like some kind of offering. In triumph, she snapped off the cap on the bottle. Annie shuffled toward it. “Give it to me.”

  I made not a single move.

  Annie took the bottle in one hand, turned on the kitchen faucet with the other hand, and then looked at her sister for a long time. At first I didn’t understand why she was looking at her sister in this strange and teetering silence. Then I saw that it was her eyes that were laboring, burning through some inner haze to focus into a stare as sharp as the one she now confronted, the same one she had confronted all her life.

  As she t
urned the opened bottle upside down. Holding it above the drain, and watching the pills spill out and disappear.

  31

  The official papering-over that went on among the military bureaucrats listed Danny as missing in action. I was interviewed by a couple of concerned officers from two different armies and each time I gave the same story of seeing Danny, white shirt flapping in the wind, vanish into that hillside, going after the enemy, and never seeing him again.

  Probably captured, I said to them. Actually, definitely captured. Had to be.

  But I know better. I know that we clasped hands in full view of Omar crying out in pain and crawling up the distant hill, pulling the remnants of his leg behind him. And then with only part of his equipment, Danny took off.

  The last image I have of him is of a distant figure running. As if he was trying to catch up to something.

  • • •

  Danny’s letter when it arrives is mottled and stained with long-dried mud. I wait until far into the night to read it in the only place where I can will myself into its world—in the farthest reaches of my backyard where the newly laid sod stops abruptly at the barrenness of the California desert. My coordinates would show me out behind a house that looks like all the other houses, jammed up against nameless desert hills on newly made streets with names like Tally Ho Lane. Where coyotes and mountain lions prowl unseen, wreaking revenge on all who have so recently embroidered their arid kingdom with asphalt. Family pets will pay the price for decades to come.

  Here, under the stars, the darkness is as close as I can come to those tar-black nights Danny and I peered into over there in the mountains, waiting to be attacked.

  But soon the silence is shredded by the sounds of civilization at night: The Late Show, sitcom reruns, and the death throes of a marriage sound in the darkness as I sit staring into Danny’s letter.

  Old habits live on. In other words, please send peanut butter. (Crunchy not smooth.) And by the way if you still have your usual bedraggled collection of minor gods and B-list deities hanging around, call in markers for me. I need all the help I can get. But just know that we—WE are okay.

  It is not just ink and paper in an age of Skype and texting and e-mail; it is a portal arriving in an envelope inside another larger envelope with British stamps on it. With the letter comes a note scrawled on BBC stationery from a cameraman who had survived an attack over there. He survived because someone, something, had swept down out of the mountains, cloak flapping like the wings of some great bird or fallen angel that could not take flight again.

  He had saved them, the cameraman said, by descending like a wrathful ghost, moments before the tribe—the Zadrans—were about to overrun them. They had heard stories that none of them had believed before this, stories about a human ghost stalking the mountains, living and fighting in ways no one could understand.

  And all because of a woman.

  The only thing the ghost asked in return, the cameraman wrote, was that his letter be delivered to me. Along with the explanation that she was still beautiful no matter what they had done to her.

  And that he still loved her. No amount of damage they did to her would ever change that.

  And that he would care for her. Protect her.

  And that . . .

  Danny, Danny . . .

  • • •

  Behind me in the stucco security of 42 Tally Ho Lane, Emily, three, and Josh, two, are being watched over by Annie. As am I. We are among the lucky ones, the survivors, she and I. And to one another we owe some facade of baseline sanity that allows us to function in restless contentment.

  And sitting in the darkness behind my house, miles and eons away from wherever Danny is, I know. I know in that way some people can grab one another’s thoughts out of silence. I don’t need the letter to tell me. Or even the rumors that began months ago. Ones like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” type of story of some flapping creature and his disfigured bride haunting the mountains. And with those stories come others about Zadran’s money being stolen from him by a single gunman who got away with duffel bags of cash. No one claims to really believe them, of course.

  But once in a while, one of the NGO types who bring in aid or medicine will send back stories about a soldier who deserted and a woman he bought from one of the tribes for millions of dollars in money stolen from some warlord. There are different versions of the story, but they all have more or less the same two main characters. Sometimes the man is tall with a thick thatch of hair. And other times, the woman has some problem with her face.

  The legends change: They are said to be living with aid workers in a compound near Gardez. Or maybe in a cave in Paktia, protected by local people. And then there is the music—piano music that is sometimes heard echoing through the mountains. Several reconnaissance patrols have been unable to find its source. And no one knows for sure if it is real.

  But I know. As if I was still there with Liberace.

  I can see it now. Hear it. As my children murmur in their sleep.

  And I listen to music that no one else can hear.