* * *
—
“Wake up,” said a voice, and Coop blinked, shivering. He wasn’t burning, but cold fire still licked at his face. Now here was one of the cavemen.
“You awake?” it said.
Coop groaned from deep in his seared throat. He opened his mouth to speak and just ended up sputtering and drooling down the front of his shirt. Another caveman came forward, clucking its tongue, and lifted up Coop’s shirt, using it to wipe the puke and alcohol and blood off his face.
A small device was placed in his field of vision, a rectangle of pale blue light. Coop heard beeping noises, and then, weirdly, the sound of his own voice.
“Sean,” said the voice. “Listen to me very carefully, I know what happened, and you better call me back in the next twenty-four hours or I will tell the police. I will tell everyone, do you fucking hear me, I will make your life hell, you fucking junkie, I will end you finally and forever. Call this number, Sean. Call this fucking number.”
Then came the phone number at Coop’s hotel. It was the message he’d left on Sean’s phone the previous night.
“Now we’re going to have some conversations,” said the caveman. “Do you hear me?”
Coop blinked sleepily. His face rang like a bell, someone had slapped him. He heard the sound, but the pain was distant. Then he began throwing up again.
* * *
—
This was going nowhere, Kosta decided. If anything, Zameer and his vodka had made things worse. In the process of trying to administer the liquor, Zameer had upended the bottle all over the soldier, making him scream and thrash like a man being burned alive. Finally he calmed down, but the vodka had only made him less intelligible. Perhaps the damage of the formula had already been done. If so, Kosta had to admit Luzhim was right about the formula’s potency. He wondered how much worse it would get when they administered the second and third doses.
Kosta flinched as a sudden electric buzzing sound cut through the basement air. Moving catlike, Buqa jumped up on the radiator, her shaggy Bigfoot mask pressed up to the slit window.
“Someone at the door,” she said in Albanian.
“Ssshhh,” said Kosta, holding his fingers to the lips of his mask. “Who is it?”
Buqa shook her head. Kosta considered the situation for a second. He pointed to the soldier. “Keep him quiet.”
The buzzer rang again as he traveled up the stairwell. Someone impatient. Probably the neighbors, Kosta thought. Was it possible they had heard the commotion? Then, in the hallway, he heard a noise and froze: the unmistakable hiss of a walkie-talkie. Now he knew exactly who was waiting behind the door.
Kosta closed the basement door behind him, making sure he heard the lock click shut. Then he pried off his sneakers and slid carefully down the carpeted hallway. Still eyeing the front door, he reached into a broom closet and with his fingers located the small shelf over the doorframe, where he kept his favorite gun: a snub-nosed Colt Sheriff with a cow skull engraved in the grips.
The door buzzed again. Kosta slipped the revolver into the back of his jeans. It was a hollow precaution. After all, he had two men imprisoned within his duplex; if the police had a warrant, firearm possession would be the least of his worries. Kosta tightened his belt and continued down the hallway for the door.
* * *
—
Something shifted in the darkness, a hidden immensity, greater even than the pain. Coop had noted a stifling to the proceedings, a sudden hush, before all lucidity fled again, his awareness now zeroed in on this new thing, the great presence breathing in the dark. Something clopping toward him from beyond the lamp’s glow. He could feel the heat of its eyes, studying him. Judging him. “Please,” Coop whimpered. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”
Someone kicked his chair. The basement wobbled for a moment, then Coop crashed backward onto the floor. Now one of the cavemen was straddling him, pressing its hands over his face, suffocating him. Coop remembered with sudden clarity that he had been abducted, beaten up, possibly poisoned. It was a person on him, a person pressing a rag into his mouth. From this revelation came an outfanning of solutions. Coop twisted his neck, got several of the fingers in his mouth, and bit down as hard as he could.
* * *
—
Zameer had intended to quiet the soldier with an old hand towel, but now it was his own scream he had to muffle as he pried away his mangled fingers. He scuttled backward and held his bleeding hand against his chest, humming hysterically. He had seen deep, toothy punctures, knew it was bad, and he cursed fuck fuck fuck while overhead the door buzzed again. Where was Kosta? Buqa came over to help, but in his fury Zameer pushed her aside. He staggered toward the basement wall, where laid out on a counter were the remaining glass syringes.
* * *
—
Upstairs Kosta was combat-crouched against the door, one hand angled at his back. Slowly he raised himself to peer through the keyhole. Then he saw the figures on the porch and laughed with relief. He untucked his shirt to hide the pistol before whipping open the door, where two teenage girls were standing on his stoop. Daughters of the Homeland, both of them carrying clipboards, walkie-talkies, and messenger bags. Across the street Kosta saw another pair of them, the girls sticking together for safety while they canvassed the block. Volunteers for Luzhim’s charitable organization, which organized monthly fundraising crusades through the neighborhood, drumming up funds for Kosovar independence.
Kosta folded his arms and grinned at them, waiting for the pitch—he was momentarily unhinged with a frenzy of manic relief—but instead they jerked back with surprise from the door.
“Um, trick or treat?” said one of the girls, finally. They exchanged between them a disbelieving look.
“What’s the joke?” said Kosta, still a little nervous. Only then did he realize that in the delirium of his anxiety he’d completely forgotten to take off the stupid Bigfoot mask. Which he now peeled away with a grin.
“Oh, too bad,” he said, scratching at the suction marks on his neck. “I was trying to scare you.”
* * *
—
Distant sensations: the cutting pain in his wrists, the greasy taste of blood in his mouth. Nearer was the world of his chair. Coop was still on his back, wrists bound to legs that were fused with the hard seat. The chair was part of him, the architecture of his suffering. And deep within, like the guilt in his bones, he felt the chair’s creaking flaws. Somewhere in the room there was an argument taking place, a muted fury of Russianish. Coop grabbed the chair’s midrail and strained, spit bubbling up from between his lips. He gasped as one foot twisted free.
Just then the thin man fell upon him. It was the one whose hand Coop had chewed, looking like a batshit Napoleon with one arm crammed under his jacket, the other gripping a fistful of needles.
Coop cocked his leg, now free, and booted the man directly in his neck. Jaw-clack. The man looked up the ceiling, tracking, Coop imagined, the uptrail of his own mouth-blood. Coop gripped the chair and kicked again, the man falling away into the darkness. There was a scuffle. And then someone started screaming.
* * *
—
Zameer backed away from Buqa, his nerves electrified by her howls.
He tore off his mask and spat blood on the floor. The soldier had kicked him in the face, he’d fallen backward. Buqa had tried to catch him.
And now she was on the ground, clawing at her neck, making that horrible wailing, the noise shooting electric through Zameer’s skull. In a panic he hissed “Sssshhhh” through his bleeding mouth.
Then he saw the broken ampules around her, the slivers of glass. He’d been holding the second two syringes when he’d fallen, when he and Buqa collided in the darkness. She’d tried to catch him. And now the needles protruded from the muscles of her neck, twitching with each spasm
like a cricket’s antennae.
* * *
—
With his freed leg Coop kicked at the chair until he was disentangled, then peeled away his hands and rose upward in a stagger through the warping blackness. He moved liquid past the two figures screaming and groping each other, one kneeling over the other, and as he approached the shape of a doorway he heard a pounding of footsteps. Coop sidestepped behind the door as it opened. He curled himself into the open doorway and pattered up the stairs.
* * *
—
Zameer was trying to help, but he wasn’t sure—should he pull out the needles? Buqa was moving too much, her face red and so full of fear. Then the lights came on. Here was Kosta standing in the doorway with a gun, and Zameer thought: Oh fuck. Then he saw the soldier sneak out from behind Kosta, slipping through the open door to the stairwell. Zameer stumbled to his feet and chased after him.
* * *
—
Coop fast-crawled up the stairs with helpless momentum. Again he felt the snarl of something at his back, fast wasn’t fast enough, but as the hallway light rushed toward him Coop stopped and spun, ready to face his pursuer.
* * *
—
Kosta made it back to the ground floor just in time to see Zameer collide with the soldier, the two figures spinning in a graceless orbit of elbows and grunts. And before he could get to them, they crashed through the storm window, toppling out into cold air. Kosta came to the broken window, panting, and saw Zameer splayed below on the snow-covered awning in a halo of shattered glass. And there was the soldier, on his feet now, gaining distance down Arthur Avenue.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Coop sprinted down the sidewalk with the exhilaration and terror of a fugitive, his bare arms pumping. He vaulted a snowbank, skidded, found himself lying in the snow and hopped immediately back to his feet. He ran down an empty corridor of cafés, delis, and seafood markets, his nerves embroidered with bright poison, and Coop knew he was fast, uncatchable, that all the city’s instruments—the ambient thumping of a radio, the crashing of dump trucks, the shrill chorus of sirens—each was orchestrated to the rapture of his stricken mind.
The glow of the city seemed to warp, streetlights narrowing into tracer fire. All around him flew streaks of killing light. Coop understood that he was outdistancing the city itself, crossing into a new, private world; a territory governed by the derangement of his senses.
Instead of running through the Bronx, he imagined he was sneaking from his father’s house. Out onto the sloping yard, past the drum barrel grill, its rusty belly layered with fish bones, then down to the iced-over marsh and its brittle maze of cattails, where pockets of mud ballooned under each crackling step. Then Coop was back on the streets of the Bronx and his nose was filled with smoke. The city was burning. No, not just the city, a whole nation on fire. And his own body glowing stove-hot, cracking with a dry fever, flakes of skin peeling off him as he ran, blowing around in a flurry like white ash from the bonfires they used to build in Maine. He and the other kids would start fires in the forts, these old concrete bunkers that had been abandoned since World War II. Originally constructed to spot submarines, now occupied by gangs of teenagers practicing the old religion of fire worship, heaping up stacks of driftwood, construction supplies, dried-out Christmas trees, whatever they could find that would burn. But the tragic thing about a bonfire was you couldn’t ever brag about it afterward, no matter how enormous you got it going. Fire left no trophies, just branch bones and craters of wet ash.
Now his hands were empty and frost-burned, trembling with blue heat. A bad sign, said his distant brain. Chilblains. Hypothermia. Prevention of cold injuries is an individual responsibility. You had to be mindful of evaporation, respiration, convection, conviction. It’s cold out and you’re bleeding, insisted a small voice. Probably killing yourself. How had he ended up here? I was taken, Coop remembered, they came for me, ambushed me in my hotel room. Ambush. The word had dangerous echoes…and there, summoned by his wayward thoughts, there was the burning boy of Afghanistan, his reflection in the dark glass of a storefront. The boy’s feet were bare, floating just inches above the street, lifted by the slightest murmur of wind, his eyes exploded…
Coop ran harder through the snow. You’re tripping, he told himself, you’re just tripping. People do this for fun. But the boy kept following him, his passage leaving a molten trail in the pavement.
Then, in the distance, Coop saw a bright red column of neon: ST. BARBARA’S HOSPITAL.
He ran toward the sign, escaping into a changing geography, where thin minarets grew like droplets of stone falling up toward the sky. Everything was melting together. He was running to the tower and he was stumbling toward the hospital through the vast dark Bronx and he was freezing to death.
He came through sliding doors into the flickering light of a weird-angled chamber, with three windows overlooking three different skies, each containing a vast constellation of stars.
And there she was, her naked skin lambent in the starlight. Saint Barbara, Mother of the Bomb. From her head fell a mane of coppery fleece, pinned by a crown of orange peacock feathers. The dips between her ribs were like the salt-polished curves of a seashell, and cradled in her lap was a long curved lamp, illuminated with Arabic script. She held the handle like a teacup, and with her other hand she stroked the lamp’s nose.
“That’s mine,” said Coop.
“My father bound me to a stake,” she replied. There was an opening in her neck, and when she spoke it gurgled blood.
“He burned me with sheaves of straw. I was put inside a barrel, studded with nails, and rolled down a hill. Then my father took my hair in his fist, dragged me up the rocky face of a mountain, and only then did he put the knife to my throat.”
“Why?” said Coop.
“He hated me for my miracles. I divined the nature of the cosmos by looking out these three windows. I reattached a knight’s head to his body so that his soul could pass into Heaven.”
“Here.” She handed Coop the lamp. “This is your Jinn.”
“I get a wish?”
She laughed: white teeth bared like lightning.
Coop opened the lid and saw red-painted rocks, coals burning in the copper recesses. And there was the boy again, fire dancing around his feet.
* * *
—
The best soldiers forget. They told you this on day one. Right off the bus, when Coop stood in a room with twenty other raw-headed recruits, their pitiful civilian things dumped on the linoleum floor of the intake center, the drill sergeant screaming: You think y’all are men, but you’re not even boys. You know what I see? Infants, a whole maternity ward of little pink babies. And not even strong babies. Y’all are like preemies with those undeveloped lungs, and I’m not thinking y’all are going to survive. See, you don’t know how to talk, you don’t know how to walk, and you sure as shit don’t know how to fight, said the drill sergeant. You think you brought skills, experiences, God forbid, ideas. You’re a hundred percent wrong, troops. One hundred. Percent. Wrong. And the faster you understand how wrong you are, the faster you forget the shit you learned back on the block, the faster you’ll be a soldier and a man. So you best start forgetting, privates. You know what we do here on Sand Hill? They been saying it since Vietnam. We kill babies, and I will kill you right back to your hometown, where you can roll around and drool and get your diaper changed by Mommy.
And here Coop remembered the drill sergeant pausing at the door of the barracks, turning his head toward Coop and the other recruits, his round-top hat tilted like that of a villain in a cowboy film, and he said: Us men have work to do in this world. And already Coop was thinking, Yes, let me forget, because he sort of loved this man.
Replacing his memories of home were weapon velocities, the correct application of field dressings, camouflage patterns, and how to corre
ctly ease an enemy into unconsciousness via rear blood-choke. He learned to iron his uniform and spit-polish his boots and march with his shoulder blades pushed straight back. He learned that hooah is a question and hooah is the only answer.
Some recruits tried holding on to something. Like faith. Coop recalled one poor kid—from Montana, maybe, one of those M states—who didn’t make it because one Sunday during barracks cleaning Drill found him curled up near his cot, nose-deep in the Psalms. Drill said: I know that’s not a book, Private. I know that’s not a book you’re reading while your battle buddies are waxing the floor and fixing their hospital corners. And the kid actually tried to reason with him. He said, no, Drill Sergeant. This is the good book. And this is the good day.
Not for you, said Drill.
Some people forgot their hometowns and their faith but couldn’t forget their bodies. If you were fat you had to get hard fat, skinny guys forgot their leanness and got real necks. You did push-ups like there was a plank on your back, sit-ups like your waist was a lever and your knees the fulcrum. There was no proper form for running, you just forgot you were ever slow. And when others didn’t make it, you forgot them, too. The dead babies ghost away and you graduate, you go to Combat Engineer training and Airborne School, and then the first day at your new unit in Fort Bragg, the 303rd Engineers, the first thing they tell you is: Listen, Private Cooper, you seem squared away, but you better forget that shit you learned in training. That shit will get you killed, and it sure as hell won’t get your ass promoted.
Then you finally go to war and nobody knows anything at all.
Which is all the more reason to remember the one thing you’re supposed to remember: the best soldiers forget.
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