A waitress in a black skirt and a white collared shirt asked them if they needed a menu and they told her please and then ordered burgers and a pitcher of Bud Light and when she asked if Carlsberg was all right instead, they said, “Sure, sure,” and then gave Jim—who had suggested they meet here—a hard time for choosing a joint too good to serve Bud for crissakes.
At first Brian joked and laughed along with them, when they mashed through their burgers and popped fries in their mouths and licked ketchup off their fingers, but then the beer began to take hold of his mind and his thoughts dimmed along with the lights and he said less and less, simply nodding along with the conversation, rubbing the depression in his forehead.
Troy spoke constantly and had difficulty sitting still. He had always been a nervous man, but Brian noticed now his fingernails chewed down to blood. “You remember that time,” he said. “You remember? With Big Back?” He told the story of the hotel compound where they were stationed briefly. There was no running water, so to reduce the stink, the Porta-Johns were set outside. This lance corporal—a former high school football star who went by the name of Big Back—was in the john with a Hustler when the compound came under mortar and rocket attack. With the smoke whirling and the air shaking and men running in every direction, he blasted out of the john with his pants around his ankles and his dick still in his hand. “Quite possibly the funniest thing in world history.”
Brian had been looking forward to seeing them—he really had—but watching Troy tell rapid-fire stories with a mouth full of food and listening to Jim chuckle—huh-huh-huh, a kind of heavy breathing—made him feel empty, as if the hole in his forehead had opened and his fluids had drained from it and his body could blow away at any instant, a mere papery husk. He had expected the very opposite; he had expected this meeting to bring him some kind of sustenance, like the rare burger that bled on his plate. These were, after all, the men he showered and shit with, the men he bunked beside, listening to them snore and mumble in their dreams. Together they had stood rigidly in formation and played poker with nudie cards and watched burnt-orange tracer rounds hurry through the night sky like falling stars. “How sick are you, motherfuckers?” a lieutenant had asked them during their second tour. “Sick. We’re sick motherfuckers, sir,” they had said. “We bleed green. Corps to the core.” All had tattooed in black ink the eagle, globe, and anchor across their left shoulder.
When the waitress came by to ask if they wanted a third pitcher, Brian was the last one to say yes.
All his life he has lived in this house—this three-bedroom ranch with the lava-rock chimney and the red cinder driveway—located in Deschutes River Woods, a thickly forested development on the outskirts of town. There are no streetlamps here. Only the stars spiraling above him, the moon staring through the trees like a scarred eye from another world. For a moment Brian stands in his driveway, letting his eyes adjust, before loping off into the trees.
In so many ways he seems to lack some retinal nerve capable of seeing the world as others see it. He knows that most people, in the middle of the woods, in the middle of the night, would feel some level of fear. He does not. If anything, he feels comforted by the black solitude it offers him. When you have seen what he has, and when you know a world away other people are going to the mall and throwing frisbees in the park and drinking coffee in an outdoor café, you come to accept that everything you have ever known to make sense makes probably no sense.
An owl hoots. The wind hushes it. The moon appears balanced on a high remove of rimrock. The world, awash in its blue light, appears drowned in water. He scuttles through the trees, pawing aside branches, dodging roots, leaping over logs and landing on all fours and continuing a few paces as a hunched figure before righting himself. He feels a dark wind moving through him like a cold bellows.
His boots shoosh through the sandy soil and thud against the pitted basalt, keeping time with his heart as he moves north, orienting himself by the stars and the blue-hued mountains glimpsed between the trees. And the moon, always the moon, following his passage.
At the Book of Kells, in the far corner of his booth, his glass sweated in his hand and he shaved the moisture from it with his thumb. When he lifted the glass and brought it to his lips, it left behind a ring on the table, a damp eye peering up at him through the wood grain. He wondered what it saw, what they saw, as they watched him, tried to include him in their conversation. They asked him if he dreamed about the war and he said, “Some nights.” They asked him if he remembered that time Eugene shoved a paper towel up his ass and lit it on fire and did the Dance of the Burning Asshole. “Yeah,” he said after a big mouthful of beer. “I remember.” They were trying to cheer him up, to make him feel good. But he wasn’t giving them anything back, so after a time they stopped asking, glancing at him now and then with expressions made of equal parts concern and annoyance. He was ruining their night. This was supposed to be the time when they found a common medicine in their stories and their bottomless glasses.
He wondered if the war bothered them at all, if they felt damaged by it. Troy had taken some shrapnel to the leg. Jim had lost the hearing in his right ear. But otherwise, they seemed fine. They seemed like men who taught their dogs to roll over, who read the labels on jars of spaghetti sauce at the grocery store and dug dandelions from their lawns with special tools sold for that purpose. He wondered if they felt comfortable and safe, happy. He wondered if they kept their bathroom cabinets stocked with Zoloft and Trazodone. He wondered if they kept guns hidden throughout their houses—behind the silverware, next to the toothpaste, shoved between the mattress and box spring. He wondered if they ever blunted the memories with a six-pack of Bud, a chaser of Jim Beam. He wondered if they ever woke up in the middle of the night and called their wives Iraqi pigs and tried to strangle them. He wondered if they ever dropped to the ground and covered their heads after mistaking gravel popping beneath tires for machine-gun fire.
“So I pull into the parking lot across from the Foreign Ministry and park next to this tan-colored Iraqi Army truck.” Troy is speaking loudly, gesturing with his hands, his fingertips ragged and clawing the air. “I walk across the street and I hear this blam—ka-blam—so loud I can feel it inside me, in my bones. I turn and see the truck still in the air, flipping forward, with a cloud of smoke and fire surrounding it. And my Humvee is toast—all fiery and snarled up. I was that close—a minute away from seventy virgins and a thousand cheeseburgers, whatever’s waiting for me on the other side. IED rigged by magnets to the underside of the truck right next to me. Doesn’t get any closer than that. Except it does. Check this—I feel this heat, this stinging—and I look down to find a hole in my cammies, a quarter-size hole right through the groin burned by a piece of shrapnel.” He bugs open his eyes. “Holy shit.”
It was a story they had all heard before. Brian wondered if at Kinko’s, maybe in the break room, with his jaw thrust forward and his purple shirt tucked in to his khaki pants and a Sierra Mist clutched in his hand, Troy told the story to his employees. “You’re home now,” Brian wanted to tell him. “Stop pretending to be such a badass.” His mouth opened with a spackle of saliva, but the words would not come.
His face felt warm and his mind felt loose and his bladder felt ready to burst, so he excused himself and went to the bathroom and found a stall and sat down on a toilet because he didn’t have the energy to stand. He sat there long after the piss surged and dribbled from him. He rested his head in his hands and listened to the sinks sizzling and the blow driers roaring and the men talking too loudly to each other at the urinals. The bathroom door pushed open and swung closed with the passage of so many bodies sounding like the slow whapping of chopper blades. “I’m tired,” he said to no one, everyone. There was a throbbing behind his eyes. He closed them for what could have been a minute or could have been an hour.
“I’m tired.” The voice was not his. The voice came from the CSH, from the bed next to him, where a man was cocooned in gauze. H
e had worked as a combat tracker in Saqlawiyah. A sticky IED had melted away the left half of his face. The bomb had been planted in a roadside drain. There was soap powder in it, so the fire stuck to him, leaving behind what looked like chewed gum splashed with red paint. The doctors called him Two Face. He only lived three days and during that time he never spoke except to whisper, “I’m tired, I’m tired.”
His father had said the same thing. His father, who had been drinking, who had lost his wife to another man, the whistle-blowing, flat-topped gym teacher, Lonnie M. Wise, at the elementary school where she taught. It wasn’t anything Brian’s father had done. She simply fell out of love with him. It was as easy as that. She and Lonnie had moved to Eugene to begin a new life together, leaving Brian and his father to their frozen dinners and humps of rank laundry. Brian was a teenager at the time. One night he woke to the noise of glass breaking and his father yelling. He crawled from his bed and poked his head from his room to see a sliver of yellow light in the hallway. He followed it to the kitchen, where he found his father sitting on the floor, his back against the fridge. He was pinching his nose between his thumb and forefinger, trying to loosen some pain there. The room was cold and when Brian looked to the window above the sink he saw half the glass missing, a sharp-toothed hole made by the beer bottle hurled through it. Outside snow fell and the flakes carried through the window into the kitchen, where they swirled about and made the scene before Brian appear like some sad and shaken snow globe.
“Dad?”
His father’s hand dropped and his eyes—hooded, red-rimmed—regarded Brian.
“Dad? Can I do something for you?”
“No.” His father’s voice, gravelly. “There’s nothing you or anybody can—” Here he attempted to sit up, rolling forward with a groan, and then fell back into his seat at the base of the fridge. And no wonder: the kitchen counter was cluttered with bottles of Coors Light, many with their labels peeled off. When his father shook his head back and forth, he knocked aside some magnets that fell clattering to the floor. He laughed without humor. “Look at your old man,” he said. “Just look at him. And listen.” He wagged a finger at the air before him where Brian did not stand, where snowflakes fell like damp pieces of shredded paper. “Listen to him when he says if you’re not careful you can end up in a place you hadn’t expected. You got choices in life. And you can make the wrong choices that seem like the right choices—you can easily do that—and before you can remedy your error you find yourself . . .” He looked around as if to find the word he sought. He picked up a magnet—a clown with a fistful of balloons—and weighed it in his palm. “You find yourself not living the life you expected to live.”
He fell silent for a long time. He bit his lip, as if to chew back the thing he had said, which he maybe realized was not the thing to say to your son, who was only a boy and still blind to the pain of the world. Perhaps he realized that Brian would forever remember this moment, thinking of it off and on throughout his life, the memory crystallized like a snowflake that wouldn’t melt. Memory was his gift and his disability. He remembered everything. He even remembered his dreams so that they blended together lucidly with his waking life. And this moment in particular he remembered because his father had always seemed such an optimist, always smiling, whistling, saying, Look on the bright side. That he carried such sad thoughts inside him haunted Brian and helped him understood the difference between the surface and the core of things, the truth of things. So that when years later, when his father shyly inquired whether Brian might want to come work for him, when Brian said he was thinking about college instead, and his father responded, “I’ll be happy either way. I’ll be happy so long as you’re happy,” Brian recognized this as a lie. If he chose to buckle himself into the white pickup truck and peer into locks and sharpen his tools on doorsteps across Deschutes County—if he chose that life—his father could mend that broken kitchen window, could erase those words uttered from the base of the fridge. His life would be something worth pursuing and those choices he worried over so long ago, those wrong choices would have seemed like the right ones again. Brian understood this and offered up his own lie in response to his father’s, saying he would, he would, in fact he had always planned on working for Pop-a-Lock, but first he wanted adventure, he wanted to learn, so he planned to sign up with ROTC. They would pay for his college tuition and he would give the Marines four years and then he would return to Bend, to his father. He never intended to keep the promise. At the time, whenever he went to McDonald’s for a burger or whenever he saw a garbage truck rumble by on the street, he experienced a horrible kind of empathy, where he imagined his life as theirs—hunched over a grill and flipping patties and smelling like their grease or hanging from the back of a truck that chewed up waste and leaked chicken blood and sour milk, nothing to come home to except a wide-bottomed wife and three squalling children. In Bend, this was the trap that awaited him, no matter what his career. So he pushed it aside and signed the paperwork, never guessing that the towers would fall and in that fiery instant what had seemed like the right choice turned horribly wrong as it left him at this juncture of life, in this bar in Portland, among these men who reminded him of everything he wanted to forget, with a punctured skull and a scabbed brain that could not process friendship or love or any human desire except for want and not-want.
And there was his father again, sprawled out on the kitchen floor with snow drifting in the window, dusting the floor, swirling around the overhead light so that it looked like one of Van Gogh’s stars. “Just go to bed, Brian,” he was saying. “We should both go to bed. I’m very tired.” He again struggled to rise and Brian held out his hands and his father took them and squeezed them, massaged their knuckles, and said, “Don’t pay any attention to your old man. I’m drunk. You can see me, but I’m not here.”
When Brian looked at their faces, he knew this was what they thought: We can see you but you’re not here. You’re not Brian. And in a way they were right.
Troy said, “Feeling okay?”
“Fine. Tired is all.”
They sat in silence for a time, bringing their glasses to their mouths, chewing on the few cold French fries that remained on their plates. Then Troy launched into a story about how after he came home from “the theater”—that’s what he kept calling the war, the theater—he had taken to wearing his uniform. “You guys ever do that? Just put it on to remember the feel of it, the smell of it? Fill up your ruck with stones and march around your backyard and snap off salutes to a tree?” He smiled, embarrassed at what he had said. His eyes concentrated on the yellow depths of his beer, where the bubbles came from, rising up to escape the glass, as thoughts rose up his throat to escape his mouth. “Anyway. I wore it to the grocery store one time. There’s a charge you get, you know? A certain power.” His words were dank and soft, blurring together. “When you’re walking around and everybody’s smiling at you and looking at you with, like, you know, a kind of awe? It’s like you’re somebody, not just anybody. So I’m at the Safeway and this little old man comes up to me and shakes my hand and says, ‘I’m proud of you.’ That was a good feeling.” He gnawed at his thumbnail, clipping it with little bites of his teeth. A line of blood ran from it and he licked it away and then wrapped the thumb in a paper napkin.
Troy was proud of himself, of what he had done over there, whereas Brian felt nothing—not pride and not resentment—only a certain blankness, like the space on a chalkboard run over by an eraser, the words ghostly visible beneath a scrim of white. He took the pitcher and poured another pint. He had to concentrate to keep his aim steady, to keep the beer from overflowing.
Jim and Troy started in on a story about this marine they knew who guarded the U.S. embassy and who went dogshit crazy and drove his car off the edge of the Grand Canyon. “The theater,” Troy kept saying. “The theater.” Brian wondered if Troy heard the word on a news program or read about it in a book and thought it sounded important so made an effort to i
nclude it in his vocabulary, the theater. The word bothered Brian horribly—yes, the pretentiousness of it—but more so the way it made him think of Iraq as a kind of stage where they all donned costumes and spoke their lines emptily and drove cardboard tanks you could punch a fist through while blank-faced people sat in the audience and yawned and checked their watches, impatient for the performance to end.
If anything, this was the theater—this world he had inhabited since returning. Like an actor he must think about how others perceived him at any given moment, forcing a smile when a customer cracked a joke, pretending interest when asked about the Trail Blazers, feigning remorse when he accidentally backed his truck over a toy poodle. And on an even deeper level—getting up each morning, putting on clothes, swallowing food, fighting the urge to walk into the forest and find a cave to occupy—all of it a contrived facade. People faked a lot of human interactions but he specialized in a more elaborate kind of fakery. He was faking it now, sitting here, grinding his teeth, making every effort to control himself, knowing that he should feel happy, he should wear a smile, he should not slam his hand palm down on the table so heavily that their pint glasses jump and slosh, as he did now when Troy once again uttered the word theater.
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