Fade to Black - Proof

by Jeffrey Wilson

  Chapter

  5

  He lay in the dark and felt the ground begin to tilt. In the distance he heard the sound of gunfire—or maybe it was close and the distance was an illusion. Battle could do that, he knew. He felt nauseated and tasted bile mixed with blood in the back of his throat. A burning pain spread out backwards over his neck, and a tightness extended into his chest. With each struggling breath he heard a high‐pitched whistling followed by a gurgling sound. He realized that it was dark because his eyes were closed and, with great difficulty, he opened them. He looked up into a hazy, purplish sky, heavy with dust. A shadow passed over him and he heard the familiar thump, thump of a UH-60 Blackhawk as the fast helicopter passed overhead. A darker shadow enveloped him and someone bent over his face. He tried to force his eyes to focus on the features of the man looking down on him, but couldn’t.

  “Hang in there, Sergeant. You’re gonna be ok!”

  “How is he, Doc?”

  “I don’t know. He’s lost a shitload of blood. The left side of his neck is swollen tight. I think he might have gotten his carotid artery.” There was a pause and more light as the featureless face disappeared from view. “We got to get him the fuck out of here, Mac, or he ain’t gonna make it. He needs to be in an OR, like, five mikes ago.”

  Doc. That would be Doc White, the young Navy corpsman from New Orleans, now with his platoon. They must have joined up with the rest of the guys. And Mac? Who was Mac? …Wait, Mac! That was McIver from Virginia—wanted to be a high‐school baseball coach.

  “What is that in his neck? Shrapnel?”

  “It’s a tracheotomy, dipshit. I had to put it in so he could breathe. The bullet tore his windpipe nearly in half. He was drowning in his own blood.”

  There was movement around him and then another shadow, another featureless face. Casey felt desperately short of breath. He struggled to suck air into his lungs, and the burning grew to an unbearable pitch. He tried to raise an arm, to reach out for Mac, but his arms were dead weight by his sides. He felt a panic grow inside of him and struggled to stay calm.

  Why the fuck can’t I move?

  Casey forced his mind away from his burning pain, from the feeling that tight bands were wrapped around his chest, keeping him from getting air into his oxygen-starved body. He forced his mind to Pam, to thoughts of her body moving against his. He thought of Claire, lying peaceful on his bare chest, rocking in the glider beside her crib. His big girl. With all his might he willed himself away from the nightmare he was living and back home to them, to a place where he could breathe. A place where he wasn’t so terrified. A place where he didn’t need to be afraid of death.

  He sensed more movement beside him and he blinked his eyes to clear them. He managed to turn his head ever so slightly to the left, pain now exploding in his neck to join the burning in his chest, and he forced his eyes to focus on the dark shape beside him in the dirt. Slowly the image sharpened, like someone fine-tuned a pair of binoculars—back and forth, back and forth—and then he focused on the horror only a foot or so from his face.

  He opened his mouth to scream, but of course no sound came, just that horrible whistling and bubbling. Then something warm and sticky poured out from the center of his neck. He felt the blood trickle down both sides of his neck and drip off into the dirt.

  Beside him in the filthy street, he saw the face of Rich Simmons, the young kid from Albany. Only it wasn’t really him. Not anymore. The one remaining eye looked off at an unnatural angle, unfocused, staring out at oblivion. The other eye was gone, as was half of his face and most of the top of his head. The short strands of blondish hair stuck to what was left of his forehead, matted with grey mush, and bits of bone. Casey wanted to turn his head away, but couldn’t. Instead he squeezed his eyes shut and, in his mind, screamed again.

  * * *

  He sat up in bed, tears streaming down his face, gasped for air, and then screamed. His hands clawed desperately at his neck, but found nothing but sweat and smooth skin. Above him, a hazy purple sky was cut periodically with tracers and orange light from distant explosions. The light wind swirled dust around him. It filled his lungs with each heavy breath and burned his eyes. Again, he heard the familiar thumping as the Blackhawk’s rotors beat the air into submission. He heard men scream and call out for covering fire. The sounds faded into the distance, as if he was in a silent rail car pulling rapidly away from the battle. As he watched in horrified fascination, the purple sky began to swirl above him like a blackening cyclone. It twisted into tighter and smaller circles, which spun faster and faster, and the edges filled in with familiar white stucco, lit yellow from a pale light behind him. Then, when the swirling black and purple looked no more than the size of a basketball, and the sounds had faded to nothing but memory, the purple circle exploded with a flash of red light and was gone, replaced by a slowly turning ceiling fan.

  Jack sat bolt upright, his breathing raspy and fast. Sweat poured off his face and chest. He heard footsteps approaching rapidly, and then a voice which soothed him.

  “Jack? Jack, baby, are you ok?”

  Pam came in from the hall, the source of the pale, yellow light. She held Claire in her arms, their little girl’s eyes heavy and her lip set in a pout.

  “Pam?” He felt disoriented and confused. Terrified in fact.

  “Jack, what is it? What happened?” Pam sat on the edge of the bed, Claire balanced on her thigh. His little girl started sobbing. “Jack, my God, you’re covered in sweat! Are you sick? Do you have a fever?”

  Jack took his wife’s hand in both of his and kissed it, then held it against his chest, still panting. He tried to speak but found no words.

  “Jack, what made you scream?” She started to cry. ”Please, say something!”

  Jack continued to hold her hand against his chest and cleared his throat, which felt incredibly dry and sore. His heart beat nearly out of his chest.

  “I…I, uh…” Jack coughed and tasted the coppery taste of blood in his throat. His tongue burned and he realized he must have bitten it. He could feel his chest tighten and thought he might burst into tears himself.

  “N…n…nightmare,” he stammered. Then he laid his head over on his wife’s leg and the tears came.

  “Oh, Jack, oh, baby…” Pam cried harder now, her tears dripping off her chin and into his hair, but he had no energy to comfort or reassure her. “Oh, baby, what can I do?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack choked out. “I don’t know… I don’t know… What is wrong with me?” He cried hard now. He closed his eyes tightly, trying to force away the image of young Simmons, his face blown off, lying in the dirt beside him. It didn’t help. He could still taste the dust in his mouth, still smell the gunpowder and blood.

  Pam rubbed his shoulder and kissed his hair. “It’s ok, baby… Everything’s ok.” Claire sniffled more softly, her head on her mother’s shoulder. “It’s ok, Jack. I’m here. I’ve got you, baby. We’re gonna get you better.”

  Jack stayed for a long while like that, holding his wife and daughter and crying in the night.

  Chapter

  6

  Sunday morning started off quiet and awkward. Jack tried pointlessly to pretend that everything was okay—because, he supposed, he desperately wanted it to be. He felt terrified by the nagging thought that he must be going crazy, but was more frightened by thoughts of what Pam must be thinking about him. A big part of him had lost all doubt that he was losing his mind. The nightmare seemed so vivid again, so real. In some ways more real than sipping coffee (vanilla creamer and one sugar) quietly at the kitchen table, wincing as it stung his bitten tongue.

  So it was Simmons—the third death in the firefight—twenty-year-old Simmons from Albany, with his dirty blond hair, always a little longer than the rest of the guys (and a source of constant hazing from his squad leader, Sergeant Casey Stillman). He could see him in his mind’s eye in better times, sitting back against a sand berm before the assault on Fallujah, shoveling
cold MREs into his mouth with a plastic spoon (Jambalaya, dry crackers with a packet of jalapeno cheese, and water from a canteen). He was talking about a girl, Beth maybe, from home. A girl he wanted to marry at the NCO club when they got back to Pendleton.

  Well, Rich wouldn’t be marrying Beth now, would he? Not in Pendleton or any other goddamn place. Rich from Upstate was leaving half his grey matter in a dusty street in Fallujah, thanks-just-the-same, and the other half would be planted in a hole near the VA in Albany. There would be taps, and flowers, and crying parents.

  But he couldn’t really know that could he? He couldn’t possibly. Any more than he could know that he, or, no, Sergeant Stillman, was the mortally wounded man in that same firefight. And then a more terrifying thought occurred to him. What if he continued to have these nightmares? And what if, as they continued to unfold the horrible story, he—the Sergeant Casey Stillman “he”—died from the horrible wounds to his throat? What would that mean for Jack? He remembered as a kid, turning around with his friends the myth (or was it?) that in those frightening dreams where you fell and fell, that if you dreamed the part where your body splattered onto the pavement, instead of waking up with a start, that you would die in real life. How would that old wives’ tale apply to him now? The answer felt, for a fleeting moment, to be terribly important for him and his family.

  Jack shuddered uncontrollably at the kitchen table, an uneaten English muffin cooling on the paper towel in front of him. He wasn’t sure which frightened him more, the idea of going crazy or the thought that he wasn’t. That both realities, his and Casey Stillman’s, could both be true seemed so insane that he couldn’t even begin to get his head around it. But neither could he shake the feeling that the answer to all of this lay somewhere in that notion, as inconceivable as it seemed.

  Pam had rented a movie once. They had sat on the very sofa where they had just a day ago made love, and watched it together (some of it—she had slept in his lap by halfway through, of course). It was about a woman who saw things through a killer’s eyes in her dreams. He couldn’t really remember the story, but as he sat there now, he vividly remembered its premise. The woman had believed, as he did at that moment, that she was losing her mind—until stories in the paper (it was never in the TV news in these stories) started to tell of the murders she had seen. He thought it ended with her teaming up with the cops and catching the killer. How could Jack’s story end, if indeed he was able to see a battle in Fallujah through the eyes of a real Marine sergeant there? How could he make this mean something, be something other than a personal terror?

  Jack picked up his cup and freshened and diluted away some of the sweetness with coffee from the pot. Then he walked into the living room, listening as he did for his wife and daughter. He heard them upstairs, where Pam was changing Claire’s pull-up from the night into big girl underwear and a pair of farmer’s overalls with Minnie Mouse on the front pocket (he knew this for sure, for some reason). He sat on the couch and picked up the remote, clicked it and brought the idiot box to life. He sat and sipped his coffee (much better now) and flipped through the channels, looking for the talking heads who might help him sort out what was going on in his mind. He settled on Fox News when he saw the red banner with Update in Iraq, printed in boldface across it, along the bottom of the screen. A retired army general critiqued the offensive in Fallujah, rattling off statistics and military acronyms, as he talked about the battle as if he himself had led the charge. Jack snickered and shook his head.

  You don’t know shit.

  Jack listened to the arrogant general praise the troops and in the same breath detail how he would have done things just a bit differently. Fallujah was a tough battle, the general told him, against an enemy determined to fight to the death against the great Devils of the American Marines. He listened to a story, which angered the shit out of him, about insurgents who had shot from behind a white flag, wounding a Marine on a rooftop and killing another soldier acting as an interpreter. Then the anchor cut to a live feed from the streets of Fallujah in Iraq, and asked the correspondent embedded with the Marines there, for his impressions of the battle.

  Jack leaned forward, straining to see the scene behind the reporter, wearing a green flak jacket and a Marine desert cammie Kevlar helmet. Jack paid little attention to his droning monologue on the fierce firefight that had occurred there. He instead shifted his head back and forth, as if that would help him see the street behind the reporter on the two-dimensional television screen. Jack’s pulse quickened and he could feel his heart beat in his temples and arms as the reporter shifted left and looked behind him.

  …where Marines engaged a fierce contingent of insurgent combatants recently. The Marines here were hopelessly outnumbered, and suffered multiple casualties. Three Marines were killed here yesterday, and several others were wounded…

  The street looked so fucking familiar. A different angle from that which he had appreciated in his mind’s eye, but it was definitely the street, wasn’t it? Something wasn’t right, but he felt sure that this was the street. The reporter turned forward and blocked his view again.

  Goddamnit!

  “Move your ass, dickhead!” Jack hollered at the TV. His coffee sloshed in his mug (I Love My Daddy) and dribbled down his hand onto the carpet.

  “Jack!” Pam’s voice rang harsh, and a little frightened, from behind the couch. She leaned over, Claire clinging to her arm from her right hip, and viciously snatched the remote from his hand. She clicked the TV power off, and then dropped the remote to the floor.

  He could see tears in her eyes, and he stood up and came around the couch.

  “Hey,” he said and smoothed the hair out of her eyes and then kissed Claire on the cheek. “It’s ok, baby. Just a little editorial for the news.” He struggled to sound more together than he felt. Pam pulled away.

  “No more news, Jack. That idiot box is the fucking problem!”

  He had only heard her use that word once since he had known her.

  “Baby,” he began and she turned to face him, her face more scared than angry.

  “No, Jack. I’m serious. You are obsessed with this goddamn war. You have to stop thinking about it!” She moved closer and looked at him pleadingly. “It’s not healthy Jack. It’s an obsession with you. It’s giving you horrible nightmares. You’ve been so absorbed with it!”

  “Honey,” he began again, but didn’t know what to say next. How could he explain? He didn’t understand himself what was going on. He needed the information from the news to help make sense of all this, didn’t he? And he hadn’t been obsessed with all this before the first nightmare the other night. At least he didn’t remember that he had been. In truth, everything seemed kind of hazy before two days ago. He looked again at his wife. He had to tell her. To make her understand that he was losing touch with who he was—that the lines between his dream and reality were becoming blurred. He had to explain it to her.

  “Ok,” he said instead and squeezed her hand. “You’re right, Pam. We’ll both take a break from all this for a while.” Pam smiled and hugged him tightly.

  “I’m sorry Jack. I am just so worried about you.”

  “I know, honey. It’s ok. I’m fine.” Jack hoped his wife believed the words more that he did.

  They dressed for church while Claire played on the bed with her talking Elmo doll. Jack made an attempt at senseless conversation while they dressed. Pam chatted about Claire’s playgroup, but her voice sounded tense and nervous. Jack struggled to keep his mind from wandering to the street scene on the TV.

  It was the street, wasn’t it—the street where Casey took a bullet to the throat?

  The angle seemed all wrong, like maybe the footage had been shot from the corner down and to the left, so that left and right looked reversed. If the reporter had just moved his fucking head Jack felt sure he would have seen a low, tan wall with a hole ripped in it from an RPG round. In front of it would be a pool of dark blood where Kindrich had taken a bullet in
to his head and collapsed in a heap beside him.

  “Jack?” Pam’s voice sounded worried.

  “Yeah?” he said and shook the vivid image of Kindrich, his helmet in the dirt and the back of his head an empty black hole, from his mind.

  “I said do you know where my black shoes are? The ones with the little bows?”

  “Bathroom,” he answered fondly.

  “Oh, here they are,” Pam said from behind him as he tied his tie in the mirror behind the door.

  “Elmo!” Claire said.

  Pam’s hands wrapped around him from behind, and she smiled at him over his shoulder in the mirror.

  “Next to the bed,” she said.

  “Hmmmm?”

  “The shoes, Jack,” she said and kissed him on the neck. “Beside the bed, not in the bathroom.”

  Jack chuckled. “Sorry.”

  He saw a hint of worry in Pam’s eyes.

  “Watcha’ thinkin’ about, Jack?”

  Jack turned around and kissed her cheek.

  “Where to go for brunch,” he answered easily. Then he picked Claire up from the bed. “How about Drake’s? They make those cool Mickey Mouse pancakes for Claire.”

  “Which you always finish, piggy boy,” Pam laughed. Her voice seemed like hers again and she grabbed his arm tightly. “Sounds yummy.”

  The three of them walked together down the stairs, Claire pulling on Jack’s ear. They piled into the green Volvo and headed off to church.

  Jack did a fair job of following along with the service, holding Pam’s hand lightly throughout. He mouthed the words to all the hymns. Jack hated the sound of his voice and was sure that others around him would, too. So he did everyone the courtesy of keeping his singing voice to himself, and enjoyed instead the soft sound of Pam’s voice as she sang along with the congregation. It felt strange when they were all asked to say a special prayer for the troops in Iraq. Pam squeezed his hand tightly, and he sensed that she looked at him, though he kept his own eyes closed. He tried to think about school, unable to believe that at this moment God could possibly understand his prayers.