I ordered the airstrike because of the constant small arms fire we were taking from this village in our encampment and from the more than occasional all-out, night-time assault.
“ Fix bayonets, boys! They’re coming for us tonight!”
We’d been up inside the place once before to offer our assistance. To assure the village elders that we were friendlies and that we had come to liberate them. But the women just stared out at us with brilliant blue eyes from behind robes and burkas that covered their entire heads and bodies. The men pulled on their gray beards and reluctantly shook our hands with loose, callused fingers. The little children poked their heads around the corners of the old buildings, giggled and scattered off. Kids are the same wherever you go.
I ordered a strike on the village. But then, I had no choice.
When it was over, we climbed the hill and inspected the ruins. The dead lay very still on the gravelly floor near the well, the stone building behind them pulverized. Two of the women had been hit and their burkas were torn away from their disfigured bodies. We found a cache of arms, AK-47s, and wood boxes filled with ammo belts. We found materials for making IEDs. Empty Maxwell House coffee cans filled partially with nails and screws, plastic explosive, electronic detonators, cell phones, wires, plus land mines, and unexploded ordinance. The ordinance we found consisted mostly of RPGs, sabers, knives and pistols. Even slingshots made from tree branches and thick rubber bands.
And one more thing too.
A child.
A child of no more than two or three. One of the little kids who poked his head around the corner of the building to get a glimpse at the soldiers from far away. Soldiers from America. He lay on his back, face dusty and puffy and his thick black hair parted to one side, his blue eyes still wide open, arms extended over his head like he were laying in his crib for a mid-afternoon nap. It’s too true, kids are the same anywhere life takes you. But as for his feet…well…I might be blind at present, but I see those feet so clearly in my head like I were looking at them right now. They were no longer the feet of a toddler.
Days later, while on patrol, I suddenly became blinded. No explanation for it, other than my eyesight decided to pull an Elvis and leave the building. My sight returned a few hours later but then it left me again the next day and didn’t return for a week. That was six weeks ago when they promptly shipped me to Frankfurt and the American GI hospital there. The doctors haven’t figured out exactly what’s happened to my head since MRIs haven’t revealed anything wrong in particular. Just another case of hysterical blindness that required a little R-and-R for repairing. So said my ever-hopeful Army shrink.
They thought a nice relaxing vacation might do me some good. Of course I couldn’t do it alone. Not in my condition. That’s when they surprised me with Grace. They paid for her to make the trip from New York to Germany. From there we took the trains through Munich and the Alps to Venice, all the time my eyes going in and out of sight like light bulbs about to burn through their filament, but never quite burning out.
Lately I’ve been more blind than not and my eyes are changing. They are reacting to the near-constant darkness. I don’t have to see my eyes to know how they must appear to Grace. The irises are growing unnaturally white, the pupils drifting, seemingly separated from the rest of my body. The longer my blind periods last, the more chance my eyes have of malfunctioning for good. My condition is inoperable and sadly at the mercy of fate and God. The memory of eyes is fleeting. They are a use-it or lose-it organ. And I’m currently losing the battle.
“Close your eyes, Grace. See for yourself what your memory drags up from out of the past.”
Once more I hear the sound of her hands tap-tapping the table. She’s growing more nervous than before. She’s playing with the diamond and growing agitated. As for me, I want another beer.
“Close your eyes. Stop looking back at the man in the overcoat and tell me what you see.”
Her table tapping stops. She begins to speak slowly, softly, almost whispering, and I know she has closed her eyes. My gut speaks to me, like a good soldier’s gut should. Grace is pretending to be like me.
She says, “I still see that man standing by the fountain. I see him even with my eyes closed. It’s frightening, Nick. He’s scaring me.”
Okay, this is getting serious. I down the last of my beer, knowing that the afternoon party is over.
“Is he still looking at us, Grace?”
“Yes,” she says. “With blacker-than-black eyes.”
“Are you still scared?”
“Scared isn’t the right word. Just creeped out.”
“It’s Venice. He’s probably just a weird tourist.”
“Then why keep staring at us like that?”
I turn and try and get a look at him. But of course, all I see is darkness. Still, you can’t stop instinct.
“Maybe we should leave,” I say.
“Not yet,” she says. “We still have work to do.”
“Back to the object identity lesson,” I say. “Can it be over with yet?”
“Feel this,” Grace says yet again. Her voice is losing some of its insistence, her tone softening. Like the soft whisper I recall so well from our time together before the war. She reaches out and takes my hand into hers. This time there is no object to push into the palm of my hand. No engagement rings, no photographs, no drinking glass. Nothing. There are only her hands. Her hands are not trembling. They are the hands of a calm, secure woman. A woman secure in her love for her future husband and so very sorry for what happened when I was away. The hands are thin and soft and smell of rose petals and they beg of forgiveness. The hands are the way I remember them and in many ways I want never to let go of them again.
“What do you feel?” she repeats.
What I touch is simple and pleasant. Grace’s warm hands.
What I feel is not so simple. What I feel is what I want. I want Grace back entirely. But right now anyway, the memory of a destroyed village and a little boy who became its most precious casualty will not allow for that. I would stand up and kick this table in if I thought it would make any difference in the eyes of God.
But that’s when something happens in my head.
Something clicks and darkness becomes shrouded in a white light. Not a bright white light at first, but more like a gradual undimming while the shades that cover my eyes are slowly drawn open. Shapes begin to appear. A head and a body. Arms and hands. Tables and faceless people sitting at them. Pigeons walking along the cobbles and taking flight inside the square. I let go of Grace’s hands, shift myself in my chair, and turn towards the fountain. I make out the blurry image of a man standing there. He’s the only man standing by the fountain in the rain. He’s wearing a long overcoat.
I turn back to Grace and begin to lift myself from the table. I feel the alcohol kick in. It makes me unsteady and out of balance. I reach out with my hands, try and take hold of the table in the hope that it will steady me. But the table isn’t there. Grace catches hold of my arm as I’m about to go over.
I peer into her face. Her blurry, shapeless face. I’m beginning to see her eyes. She steadies me, holds me tight, as if to assure me, Don’t worry, I’ve got you now.
She says, “What is it, Nick? What’s happening?”
I want to tell her that I’m in the early stages of sight again. That my blindness is receding. That I can even see the man in the overcoat. But I have no idea how long this will last. How long I will escape the blindness. One minute or one day or one year. I have no idea. Telling Grace that I can see right now would be like a cruel joke if just a few seconds later I once again become as blind as a bat.
“Let’s just go,” Grace insists. She pretzels her left arm around my right arm and begins to guide me out from under the café awning, past the tables of tourists who have locked their eyes upon the blind man and his lover.
Stumbling away from the café in the direction of the studio apartment the Army rented for us above an out-of-b
usiness bookshop, I see the birds and the stone fountain inside the square. I see the overcoat man as he follows us with eyes so dark, they look like two pieces of obsidian and just as glassy. His gaze makes me feel weak and cold and vulnerable. I feel the first of the cold rain touch my face and I sense the hard, unevenly placed cobbles against the bottoms of my boot soles and I just want to be away from this place.
Away from blindness. Away from the past. And away from a creepy man with black eyes.
Chapter 4
THE LAST THING I saw was death.
I ordered an airstrike.
The last thing I’ve truly seen with these eyes is the death that came about because of that airstrike.
For a few brief moments, the blindness has gone away. But I do not see anything like I did on the morning I ordered an A-10 Thunderbolt Warthog to blow the hot village to Kingdom Come. I see that moment all the more vividly the more my eyes fill with darkness. I see brilliant colors and vivid shapes. Blue skies, brown rock, and running brooks with water so green you would swear it was liquid jade.
I see something else too.
I see the gentle layer of white dust that covers the face of a little boy. I see his little hands clutched over his head and I see his bare feet.
I am haunted by his feet.
What’s left of them.
Chapter 5
I CAN SEE THE thick wood door that will gain us entry into our apartment above what used to be a shop that housed rare books. Grace already has the keys in her hand. She is always thinking ahead now that she has been forced into the role of seeing eye dog. She pushes the big silver key into the deadbolt lockset and twists. There’s a loud clack of metal against metal as the bolt releases and the green-painted door pops open. She takes hold of my sleeve and guides me through the opening.
“Watch your step, love,” she warns. Already, we have forgotten about the man in the overcoat. Rather, we choose not to mention him anymore.
I’m helpless without my Grace.
I lift my right foot and step over the stone saddle, enter into the long, stone interior of the building. Here’s where things begin to get tricky. My eyesight has returned for a period of a few minutes, but already I can sense it leaving me. Eyesight for me is a tease. It comes and goes when it wants to. It plagues me a like a demon. Maybe because I am a demon.
Just ask the people of that village.
But the eyesight works in cahoots with the blindness. They might be from opposite sides of the physiological tracks; they might be night and day, but they aren’t against working with one another. They aren’t against messing with me. As the blindness returns, I find myself helpless once more and reaching out for Grace.
She takes my hand with her now gloved hand, and leads me through the dark interior of the building. Like every building in Venice, the place smells of must and mold and decaying mortar. If Venice doesn’t sink into the ocean one day, it will simply disintegrate.
We come to the staircase that leads to our top floor studio apartment above the bookshop. How do I know this? When you can’t see you learn to count footsteps. Ten steps to the staircase. Twenty steps up to the apartment. Another two steps to get inside the door, another four to reach the toilet inside the bathroom. Eleven steps to the kitchenette refrigerator and beer! Twelve steps across the living area to the place Grace and I refer to as “the bedroom.”
At the top of the stairs, Grace unlocks the door and opens it for me.
“I’ll get something going on the stove,” she says, but I know what she really wants to do.
“Paint, Grace,” I tell her, as I remove my leather coat, feeling for the hook on the back of the door, then hanging the coat up. “You’ve hardly touched your work since we got here. It’s Venice for God’s sakes. Artists kill to come here. So do blind soldiers.”
“Not funny,” she says.
In the small apartment, I picture her easel and paints set up at the far end of the room directly in front of a French window, its shutters opened wide. There’s a work-in-progress canvas set out on the easel and it’s covered over with a drop cloth.
Grace is here for me. But she is also here as an artist. The small college she teaches at in Albany keeps her pretty well tied down for most of the week. When she doesn’t have to teach art, she wants to be making it. It’s one of the things I promised her when we first met. I would write and she would make art and write beautiful poems and together we’d conquer the world.
Then came those airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center Buildings. Then came the war in Afghan country. There went my literary hopes and dreams, and my hopes for Grace.
“I can paint after dinner,” Grace says, as she takes hold of my hand.
We’re both still a little drunk so I know full well what’s coming.
She pulls me into her, like I used to do to her when I could see her face and her green eyes veiled in shoulder-length black hair. But she’s my guide now. We’re standing together near the kitchenette, and as she pulls me hand-in-hand towards the bedroom, I count the steps.
One through twelve.
She leads me to the bed.
I sit down.
She reaches down, takes both my hands in hers. My sight has not completely disappeared yet. Like the old fashioned television tubes I recall from my childhood, it can take a few minutes for the light to fade away once the switch is turned off. All I see now is a blurry, dark silhouette of a woman. Her animated figure is surrounded by a halo of glowing but fading light. She is not so much a dream to me, but more like the last image I will see as I die, or perhaps the first thing I laid my eyes upon when I was born.
Grace squeezes my hands.
I squeeze them back.
It’s then I realize I am trembling. Me, the professional solider. I’m trembling on the edge of the bed, my fiancée’s hands gripped in mine.
“I want to try, Nick,” she whispers, her sweet, soft voice coming to me like a dream.
“I know,” I whisper in return.
She pulls on my hand, as if asking me to stand. I do it. She pulls my hands up towards her shirt, presses my fingertips against the top-most button. She doesn’t have to speak a word for me to know what she desires.
I undo the button.
Then I undo the one under it.
And the one under that.
Until I come to the waist of her short wool skirt. Gently running the edges of my fingertips up against the smooth skin of her belly, up towards the space between her breasts, I bring both my hands around her back and unclasp her bra. I remove her shirt and the bra comes away with it.
She moves in closer to me then, kisses me on the mouth. Our tongues dance and I gently bite her bottom lip. When we release, I place my hand on her bare breast. I kiss her neck in the sweet smelling place below her ear and hairline. She’s breathing harder now, and I can feel my heart pounding against hers.
She pushes me onto the bed and we proceed to undress one another. We crawl in under the covers and hold one another tightly. So tightly I can hardly breathe or swallow. Outside the open window I can make out the sound of the water gently lapping up against the stone walls. I move in time with the motion of the never-still water, my face pressed inside the nape of her neck, my teeth biting her skin and flesh. She moves with me, to the sound of the water lapping against wall, and I feel myself coming to that place and we both breathe harder. She begins to moan and sigh and whisper to me, “Please, Nick. Please, oh please, Nick. Please don’t stop.”
When I release so does she and together we tremble for what seems forever, her whispered voice exhaling above the never still water of the canals. I feel the sweat on my chest and forehead and the good tight pain in my arms. I kiss her mouth hard and tightly and settle my face into the soft nape of her neck and I listen to her heart beating.
“I love you,” I breathe. “I. Love. You.”
Rolling over, I begin to cry. And so does my Grace.
Chapter 6
FOR A WHILE WE
lie on our backs and listen to the water and the boats that paddle gently by. I listen to the sound of the gondoliers singing and in my head I see the tearful, wonder-filled smiles of the couples who never imagined they would be floating on a canal in Venice, Italy. The sweat that coats my skin is quickly drying in the cool air and soon Grace’s hand searches for mine. When she finds it, she squeezes it.
“Was it good for you, tiger?” she poses, and together we start to laugh. Suddenly, I am no longer the tough guy prankster I was playing at the outdoor café. I am no longer the man who knows what happened between Grace and her ex-husband on a single lonely night when I was away at war. And even though my eyes see only darkness, my dark mood has fled the scene along with the concern over that overcoated, black-eyed man who couldn’t stop staring at us.
I roll over and kiss Grace’s mouth.
“You’ll have to forgive me for this afternoon. I’m not sure I know who the hell I am anymore.”
“Do we ever?” she says.
“But I can tell you this. Now. Just now. I knew exactly who I was. Who. I. Am. And why we are together and how we must love one another unconditionally.”
She squeezes my hand harder.
“I believe all the things that are ever meant to be, will be,” she says.
I am completely blinded now, my sight rendered to complete darkness. But somehow, I see the light.
Then the telephone rings.
I feel a start in my heart.
Apparently so does Grace, because although I can’t see her, I know she has shot up.
“Who could be calling here in this apartment?” she begs.
“I can’t imagine. I don’t even know the phone number to this place.”
The Disappearance of Grace Page 2