The War for Gloria: A Novel

by Atticus Lish

  He heard nothing from his father and resolved to forget him.

  While Corey was forgetting him, Leonard was going to the doctor for his headaches, which were severe. He told a nurse who asked how he was doing that he wasn’t doing well at all; he hadn’t slept in weeks. She said she was very sorry. She had a white dimpled face, a ponytail, a high voice, and was wearing cherry-colored scrubs—a short, fast-moving girl in sneakers. They were standing in a black-floored hallway. He said he’d be fine, just fine, not to worry about him, he was a tough old cob. She put her hand on his black-sleeved arm. “See you next week.”

  “Not if I’m dead.”

  “Oh, stop!”

  “They’d be doing me a favor.”

  He left the hospital and drove the Mercury the five miles back to Malden. The sunlight intensified into a gold fire from heaven. The city was empty. Only the trees were alive, blooming in the spring day.

  He parked and went into his house, took his pills and tried again to sleep. At three p.m., unable to sleep, he got up and went to the kitchen and ate something and calculated the hours until he had to go to work. He walked around the house, going in different rooms, looking for a phone number to call the doctor’s office to tell them the pills didn’t do their job.

  Not long thereafter, on another day, having yet again found it impossible to sleep, he got up from his bed in the afternoon and walked from room to room, finally coming back to where he had started, the bedroom, and, as he had done countless times before, spread the blinds with his fingers and looked out the window at the house across the street. It belonged to a notorious murderer—that was what he called him to everyone who entered this room.

  Leonard had moved to Malden, to the house across the street from the murderer, before the crime he was accused of had occurred. Only later, the year he met Corey’s mother, had the murderer become a murderer—albeit an accused one, a suspected one—but never one who was officially charged, indicted, prosecuted or convicted.

  The murderer had never gone to prison. He had lived his life in Malden and now was most likely dead—no one ever saw him anymore.

  But Leonard had showed him—his house, that is—to Corey’s mother, and she had seen it. She had stood here in this room, in this very spot where he stood now, looking through the blinds. It had been at night. He had turned the lights out on her, perhaps as a joke. She had been quite unnerved by that—as if she’d been afraid of him and not the man across the street.

  He, Leonard, was the one who should have been afraid. She was the one who got pregnant and out popped someone else—a creature he never had foreseen.

  Gloria had been a beautiful girl. If he bothered to look, he had hundreds—maybe close to a thousand—pictures in his desk drawers of her sleeping. There had been a time when it had been of irresistible importance to him to take the photographs. The act of taking them was engaging. But his experience indicated that studying them afterwards was uninteresting. He wished he had someone lying here to take a picture of now.

  He pulled out his fingers and let the blinds spring shut and drifted through the house again and stopped at the mantel in the unused room. On the mantel, there was a framed portrait of a woman seemingly dressed in the white robes of old Palestine, hawk-nosed, beautifully bird-of-prey-like, with furrowed brows and deep-set dark brown eyes, seamed and sunken cheeks, furrowed lips clamped together, jaw raised, casting a look of longing at the sky—the image of Saint Teresa, a twisted band around her white draped head, her robes so folded, thick and white.

  It was a portrait of his mother, which she had posed for and had taken in 1971, the year his natural father died—of malnutrition and exposure somewhere out on the street in Eastie after two decades of using heroin. Leonard had been born in 1958, the year before the birth control pill had been invented and the intrauterine device.

  He put the portrait back down on the mantel and went back to the bedroom and put himself back down on the bed but couldn’t go to sleep.

  Leonard Agoglia continued working at MIT. He spent his nights reading at the checkpoint of a dorm. As in years past, the kids swiped in and out and all night long their faces appeared on the screen behind his book, shining with potential and intelligence, and then they went upstairs and eventually went to sleep.

  35

  Goodbye to the Flower Bank World

  During the last phase of the spring, as he waited to enlist, his routine was to run each day to Braintree, past the cliffs to the marina so he could see if the boats were out, then back uphill as dawn broke, seeing in the twilight, set back in the trees, a Cambodian temple in a ranch house where a statue of the Buddha rested in the yard.

  Still, from time to time, an internal voice told him that he didn’t want to be a soldier who devotes his life to the service of his country. It seemed there was a thing in him that wanted to lay down his life for something else—for someone he didn’t know yet.

  But he was going to ship out.

  Then something happened that surprised him.

  He had put five hundred miles on his sneakers since the year began. One afternoon, he bought a new pair at South Shore Plaza. To break them in, he decided to run north. He thought he’d make it to Dorchester. He ended up running all the way across the city and didn’t stop until he got to Harvard Square.

  It was nighttime when he arrived, a lovely night. The air was feather-soft. Men and women swirled together in yin-yang spirals on the redbrick sidewalk of The Pit. Cars went around the square with their headlights on like torchbearers at a village festival. He stood in his new sneakers, blood humming, ears awash in traffic sounds, hearing the high notes of women’s voices.

  He saw an individual—there were people with her and he wondered, Why is she with them? He watched her. Maybe she wasn’t with them, not really. The more he watched, the more he thought she was alone. Her face was uplifted. She wasn’t speaking to anyone. She appeared to be a nun consulting a power above them in the sky.

  When he looked again, she had wandered away to the entrance of the T. He went to her and—seeing a flyer, which proclaimed an instance of social injustice—had a flash of inspiration.

  “Are you a Marxist?”

  “What?”

  “I’m just kidding.”

  “You had me with that.”

  “So, are you a Marxist?”

  She just stared.

  “I’m a capitalist. My name’s Corey.”

  She shook his hand.

  “Who are they?”

  “Guys who wanted to talk. They’re British.”

  “You know we kicked their asses in 1776.”

  She laughed. She came from Maynard—near Lexington and Concord, the cradle of the Revolution and the shot heard round the world, but not as rich.

  Corey stopped a pedestrian and borrowed a pen and wrote his number on a piece of paper and gave it to her.

  “If you ever want to have lunch with me.”

  “What’s this?” She poked his chest. His shirt was plastered to his chest.

  “I was running.”

  She turned around and looked at him as she was taking the elevator into the T.

  The next day, she called him on the phone. He went to meet her in the same spot. She arrived and gave him a bunch of purple flowers.

  He had never been in love before.

  She walked with him past a café with brass hookahs in the window. Her clothes hung off her like a good witch, trailing down. Her hair hung down, in ringlets, as if it had been drenched by rain.

  They went to the park and he carried her in his arms. She kicked her feet.

  She never answered any questions.

  They met at all the Red Line stops in Cambridge—Harvard Square, Porter Square where the commuter rail came in, Alewife station with its parking structure and open-air elevators, like successive waterfalls—tryin
g to find somewhere to be alone. She drove from Maynard in a borrowed Honda Odyssey, and they used it to be alone in the Alewife parking lot. While they were resting from making out, she turned on the car stereo and played “The Queens of Noise” by The Runaways for him.

  Something was weighing on his mind. He told her about his military commitment. He was going to have to go away. He told her a librarian had tried to make him go to college instead of join the Navy. She hadn’t understood our country needs to be prepared for war.

  The girl told him she was going away to college.

  When?

  Soon.

  But still, did she have to go away?

  She hardly spoke.

  He warned her. She was going to have to be careful. It was dangerous. He told her what had happened to Molly Hibbard.

  “It was a tragedy,” he said.

  But she was unmoved.

  He gathered that his American girl didn’t have a happy home. Someone in her family was on opioids. She was trying to engineer her own escape from Massachusetts.

  “Everyone’s got their own sob story,” she said.

  Being in love with her had made him rethink whether he wanted to ship out and go away for years. The chance that he would lose her was very high.

  They drifted apart with nothing settled between them. But he was sure he’d see her again. But there was never a goodbye. He was almost lucky that he had signed a military contract because the tug to her was so strong he might never have left Massachusetts; he would have gone to find her at her college. Because of the contract there was no going back—he was committed.

  His recruiter called him at the end of May and asked him if he was really ready to enlist. Corey said he really was.

  The day before he had to leave, he decided to go down the hill to say goodbye to the boats. He jogged from Quincy Center. When he got to the cliffs above Braintree, he saw the Cambodian temple with the golden Buddha on a rock and started weeping. He ran over and pulled up fistfuls of flowers from around the statue and put them in his backpack, roots and dirt and all.

  It was a year since they had all been lost. He went to Ian and told him he was leaving. He borrowed the skiff and took it out on the chop. Looking back at the shore of Massachusetts, he opened his backpack, took the flowers out and threw them in the water.

  What would be the legal outcome of his case? Was the prosecutor done with him?

  The brown-haired girl wondered.

  She feared she’d never know. He had said he was a witness in three homicides—this had taught him to be alert for evil people. But she wondered how he could have managed to be friends with both the victims and the killers without lying in someone’s face.

  Was he lying in hers?

  He was alive and nineteen with life ahead of him. But his life was not worth more than Molly’s or Tom’s—or anyone else’s—and they were gone—all people he had called friends.

  Their story was so tragic!

  The girl was fleeing Corey for a reason.

  Maybe he would end up serving time in prison. There had to be punishment waiting in his future. She knew we all have to pay in equal measure, for that is how we learn. Until he saw what he was missing and repented, his girl would mourn him but never trust him, and he would not be welcomed back in her embrace.

  36

  O Gloria!

  It was the promised Saturday. The recruiter was taking him to take the oath. Corey was looking at the ocean. They were driving up the Southern Artery along the marshes on the shore.

  “Not getting cold feet, are you?”

  “No,” Corey said. “Hell no.”

  They crossed the river into Dorchester.

  He thought:

  Let’s say you make it, get through Hell Week—and then the further training, where you’re tested at every evolution, facing constant attrition, the constant pressure to wash out of the most ruthless meritocracy on earth (so-called by a former member); the hazing, the never-ending eat-shit-new-guy attitude, the training evolutions that send people to the hospital, the dives that kill people, forcing gases into their tissues, sending them to the hospital in comas with bloody brain swellings; the helo crashes, the quick funerals on deck and back to training, the unit brawls, the punch-outs in the confined space of a van on the way to a range, the coat hanger brandings, blood pinnings, young-wife-gangbangs and other rites that bring warriors closer at the expense of all else that is holy; not to mention the ever-harder training, the stress positions, the seven thousand flutter kicks in boots while being hosed down with ice water, the underwater blackouts and CPR resuscitations; the deliberate, planned, seemingly sadistic capriciousness of the instructors who are conditioning you to the nature of war, inflicting frustration on you to see if you break, compelling you to stand a microscopic inspection of your person and your gear, finding one speck of lint and failing you, trashing your entire room, dumping all your uniforms and equipment in the mud, including your personal effects, and forcing you to clean everything from scratch and stand inspection again—on no sleep, never any sleep, because war is a sleepless adventure—and on the threat of being canned from the team and sent back to the fleet, all your dreams over, to serve out your enlistment stuck on a destroyer, breathing diesel fumes, getting fat with nowhere to run or swim, wearing a Dairy Queen hat and bell-bottom jeans. Then you go home from that, work as a mechanic in a shitty garage, marry a woman who doesn’t like or respect you, get even fatter, get cancer and die.

  Let’s say—and we know it’s unlikely—but let’s say he discovers he’s one of the rare men who can get through Hell Week, and he finds himself on the team, six months into advanced training, swimming with a rebreather and laying mines on the hulls of sunken training ships in the vast green sun-dappled underwater realm—the sea warm at the surface, then cooling as he sinks deeper, big black hard rubber government-issue fins on his feet, giving him unexpected propulsion every time he kicks. He has seen the weird bubble of air and been tossed by the turbulence that results when you set off a mine underwater; all the men have. They’ve swum twenty miles between islands, pushed jeeps and logs uphill for exercise, killed wild pigs and roasted them on the beach for dinner. On dares, they’ve eaten raw snakes. He’s here with them, in this strange place that no man belongs except a born soldier, and he’s arrived here to earn the respect of new fathers—such as the stocky sergeant with a short mustache, who will say, “We’re the baddest people around. I’ve killed, like, twenty people.” It’s the life of a man standing on a high wire, swinging his arms to stabilize his balance. How long can he last? Privately, secretly, he and others may ask themselves if they truly belong here. It is such a strange blue edge of the breathable atmosphere. But some men want to breathe it; they seem to show no fear of going even further, right out into space, where they know they will die.

  By now he has experienced the competition and the likes and antipathies of his comrades, and, like them, he lives with the constant pressure to perform up to expectations that are both ruthlessly, corporately professional—and primordial.

  And, today, he jumps out of an airplane. In the air, he has the extraordinary sensation of jumping after feeling that it is both impossible and expected—one fear next to the other, the fear of death next to the greater fear, the greater impossibility of not doing what is expected—as one man after another gets slapped on the shoulder and told to jump out of the plane in his helmet (essentially a skateboarder’s helmet) and goggles and black chute rig.

  And so he’s falling. It’s terrible—like so many things they do. The body wasn’t meant for this—the falling body keeps expecting land beneath it—but the body can be made to do it anyway.

  The gale tears his cheeks away from his mouth, which he clamps shut. The hurricane wind flogs his dull green jumpsuit. It reaches its fingers around his arms and legs, which have been trained to do thousands of push-
ups and lunges, and tugs them enough to remind him that he’s tiny, that he can be pulled limb from limb by the sky. He’s balanced through physical control on top of a column of air that could obliterate him.

  He cannot move the world, but he can move himself; he can, to an extent, control himself—to a greater degree than he once thought possible—but not absolutely. Accidents will happen. He and others will make mistakes—flip in the air, get caught in turbulence—and have to right themselves using techniques the jump-booted instructors taught them: “You’re gonna doggone spread-eagle your doggone selves and do a college-boy roll. Why? ’Cause college boys are smart. That’s why.”

  They are taught to keep track of their fall, to count, and how to breathe.

  For a few moments during his free fall, he’s alone and can briefly forget the unrelenting pressure of his profession. Now, he gets to see the land and the curved horizon—from the viewpoint of a demigod or a man about to die were it not for his technology. It’s much like the view from a commercial airplane. Even without the window glass between him and this bright cold world, even in the open air, the vista below looks misty and almost unreal. The miles of vapor in the air make the distant horizon look soft. The glowing sky ventures over the earth’s edge onto the sea—a fuzzy golden peach about to roll over a blue table, crushing under it minuscule fishing trawlers and tanker ships. Meanwhile, the ocean’s wave-scored surface drives out to the horizon and beyond, like an endless conveyor belt set to death metal played by Viking berserkers, whipping their hair up and down.

  He sees the blessed white line of the ocean where it meets the land; and he sees how the beach slides below the water and stretches out to sea, a downward-grading terrain, which appears turquoise until it drops away into opaque blue darkness. If you drained the sea away, you’d see the dinosaur hills and canyons of the Dakotas.