“Why, Brian? Why do you have to do that?”
“I’ve got to stop this war and save my guys. And the best way I can do that is to do it up in heaven. I’m going to meet the angels at the Cumberland Park. I’m going to put my hands out and they’re going to walk me out of this body. The angels explained that I have to have a cause of death. So you see, it will only look like I shot myself. Really, I won’t feel a thing.”
A vision of April bent over his corpse, in a casket, partially decapitated, and her running hysterically out of the funeral home.
“You’re not going to end up in a casket,” April said.
“I’ll come visit you when I’m a ghost,” he said. “You’ll know because I’ll smell like musky cologne, like Old Spice.”
April is allergic to cologne. “It gives me a headache. How about peppermint candy cane?”
They agreed and Brian said he’d return on the Fourth of July.
• • •
April finds a framed photograph of Brian cooking his barbecued chicken in Iraq. She sets it on the counter and says, “I hope you like chicken because we’re having chicken for dinner.” Her pale hands pull lucent breasts from green styrofoam. “I never freeze my meat. I like it fresh.”
A teenage boy appears from the back room, looks at me, and turns around.
“How many kids do you have?” I say.
“Oh, that’s my son. My third child was born still. That counts, though. I got four kids. I went through it all, so it still counts. It does.” Her eldest daughter, Emily, has her stomach pressed to the taupe carpet, face lit by the computer screen. She carries with her the smell of electronics burning too long.
“What are you doing on that computer all the time?”
“Talking to my friends.”
“Who’re your friends? They live around here?”
“They don’t live around here.”
One of them lives in Europe but she can’t say which country. She’s never met any of them and she’s known them in the virtual realm for five years.
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“We’re homeschooled,” Khaia says. “Some girl kicked my sister.”
“Some black girl punched me in the bathroom,” Emily says.
Khaia chants, “Bad kitty. Bad kitty. Kitty, kitty, kitty. Hi kitty.”
“I hope Brian is wrong that she’s going to die next year. I’m so scared it’s going to happen,” April says. She wipes her eyes. She speaks with an unlit cigarette caught on her bottom lip. “Sometimes I get mad at him. He left me. I get so mad at him, you know, and then I’m like, man, that asshole, he probably just told me that my poor little girl is going to die just to fuck with my head!”
“Who was driving the car?”
“Brian said it was Khaia’s daughter from a past life who asked God for permission to be the one with the privilege to kill her.”
Khaia turns to me, her glasses bright with light. “Mama says I’m never moving out.”
April sticks her head in the fridge. “Shit. We’re out of butter.” She moves aimlessly. Khaia rolls chicken parts in bread crumbs.
“Brian said she wouldn’t feel a thing. She just got bumped a bit. I asked Brian, ‘Where am I? If I know my kid’s crossing the street I will be out there to help.’ He said, ‘I know, April, but you will be too angry to leave. You’ll see it happen. You will be right by the window when the car goes by but your brain won’t process it. You will never remember that it happens because your brain will block it for you.’ ”
April has a knife in her hand. It hovers over a pile of chopped chicken glistening on a wooden board.
“If it weren’t for my kids,” April says, “and me trying to build holidays and memories for them, I wouldn’t even celebrate the holidays. They’re my chance to do life over. I’m creating childhood memories. I’m creating their childhood. That’s what I’ve chosen to do with my life.”
“Don’t tell the chickens we’re eating chicken,” Khaia says.
“Once we had a chicken,” April says, “who looked just like a box of KFC. His name was KFC.”
Khaia leans over the counter. Her pink flowered shirt soaks warm sink water. “Mama was in the yard running around, saying, ‘I’m gonna kill you, chicken.’ He ran away. We never saw him again.”
“Sometimes we hear him,” April says. “He’s out there still—high up in a tree, thinking we’re gonna kill him.”
Khaia points to the woods and she says, “We like to go out there with chain saws and look.”
We get the machetes from the shack, put on boots and heavy packs, and take our legs high to press and pass the forest’s soft-bodied vines. “Okay,” Khaia says, “we just survived a plane crash. Got it?” She raises her knife high but it catches no sun. “This way,” she says.
The machete is a dark bird fluttering ahead. The earth takes our feet, rises over them.
“KFC is out here, I know it. Did you hear what Mama said? She said, We’re gonna eat you, chicken. He’s been hiding out here. Looks just like a box of KFC with legs.” She stops in the brush, pulls a white mushroom from the ground. “Here, chicken, chicken, chicken.”
The machete rises, finds itself in the skin of a tree. Khaia hacks and wiggles until the bark parts and the tree’s white insides gape and its smell is released into the world. “So we know how to get back,” she says.
The air is old, heavy, trapped there.
In the forest’s center, a tree is felled and in its light we rest. Khaia takes her hand and lets it swim through the green light.
“He’ll come,” she says. And we wait.
• • •
Brian didn’t return on the Fourth of July. No lingering smells of peppermint candy. April smelled cologne one time over by the couch but she couldn’t be sure it was Brian.
When I find her spinning and stretching and doing yoga moves on the floor, she says she’s training to dance for Brian.
“If I dance in a way that displays the suffering,” she says, “then maybe he will understand. If he can see me, then maybe he can energetically pick up on the feeling.”
When she dances she’s kept company by a sound track Brian mailed from Iraq. She won’t show me the dance. “I need to practice.”
After Brian died, April drove his truck into the woods. First she drove it into a tree and then into a river. She got sand in the injectors. Sand in the fuel box. “How are you going to save me now, Brian? Look what you’ve done to me.”
We drove to the places Brian drove. We searched for his ghost. The roads that wound through cotton fields, harvested for Walmart socks, which, on that night, absorbed the pinks and violets of the sky. We parked at a water tower Brian once climbed to see what existed beyond. What are they hiding up there? Brian had once asked April. What is the world hiding?
“The wanting of childhood,” April called it.
Ten yards away, there’s an old Coke machine and an abandoned shack. April tells me a story about the day Brian’s truck broke down on this road and he slipped a quarter in the slot. A warm, dusty Coke rolled out. As ritual, each of us put a quarter in the slot.
“If a Coke comes out,” Khaia says, “Brian’s with us.” Khaia pushes the button. She looks at me. She pushes again.
• • •
The day the police discovered Brian’s body at the Cumberland Center Pavilion, April’s mother called to tell her the news.
“Oh, Mom,” April said, “it’s okay. I just talked to him actually. I should go because he might be trying to call. I told him to call me in the morning.”
“What time did you talk to him?”
April said around one in the morning. Her mother said they found the body around seven.
“April, we knew this was going to happen. I have the suicide note.” She carried it around in her purse. She wouldn’t let April read it.
“I didn’t know,” April said.
“You knew.”
“I was talking him out of it.”
“I did everything I could.”
“You knew.”
The night before, Brian called at twelve forty-six in the morning. April was already in bed with her husband, Dane. Ever since Brian left for Iraq she’d slept with her cell phone underneath her pillow. Just in case.
April said, “Hello?”
Brian said, “Good-bye.”
April said, “Hello?”
Brian said, “April, I’m telling you good-bye. I knew you’d be mad if I didn’t say good-bye. Good-bye, April. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye.”
April asked where he was going.
Brian wouldn’t stop saying good-bye. He said it over and over again, dozens of good-byes. April remembers about thirty good-byes, all in different voices, as if he were saying good-byes for the others too.
April just sat there on the phone while the voices roared in her ear: Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye.
“Brian,” April said. “Please stop.”
“Good-bye,” he said again. “Good-bye.”
“Where you going?”
“Going away,” he said. His wife was getting an abortion and the last reason for him to be here was gone. “You told me I would enjoy being a dad.”
“She can’t get an abortion because she’s in her third trimester. Go to bed, baby boy. Sleep in your jeep. No one will bother you there. Call me in the morning.”
That’s when Brian shot himself.
“Hello? Brian, you dropped your phone.” She waited. “Okay, I’ll just wait a second.”
Dane rolled over. “Is everything okay?”
April turned to him. “Brian’s okay. He said he’d call me in the morning.”
“Good-bye, Brian,” April said. “Good-bye.”
• • •
April chain-smokes in running shorts and a cotton tank, sometimes lighting a new cigarette before finishing the old. Her fingers spread on the window, making it wet with her heat. April puts her tongue in her cheek as if to store it there. A cat with a blue blanket over its head stares from the doorway like a tiny Mother Teresa.
Pit Pat licks my calves, sticks her butt in the air. “That means she likes you,” April says.
We walk out onto the porch. The air is cool but the wood is warm with yesterday’s sun. “I remembered that he said not to talk about the pact.” She gathers her feet beneath her thighs. “I tried to bring it up a second time and he said he wasn’t going to talk about the pact.” She drags her eyes from her feet to my face. “Brian said there were a bunch of guys who’d get together and they were meeting in rooms in their houses and talking about all dying for a purpose. Brian boasted about how they had about six guys in Germany on board. He was excited about how many people he could get into the secret suicide group at Fort Campbell. I asked him, ‘What are you doing? Are you starting this? Did you start this?’ He said somebody over at Fort Campbell started it.”
February. He died on the twentieth of February. That’s when he told April. He said his friends were suffering because he was suffering. They were the ones who had to gather around him while he cried his eyes out. He put his buddy Chris on the phone. Chris was mad at April. She told Chris he wasn’t doing the right thing by saying that if you commit suicide you should join some secret pact. “I wish I would have gotten along with him better. I think he was a different Chris from the one in Iraq.”
Brian took the phone. April said, some friends you have. This upset him. He thought he had good friends because they told him that if he was going to die then they’d die with him. “We’ll die together,” he said. “One by one, until every bit of the war stopped and everyone was brought home.”
April stretches, reaches all the way to her toes, and rubs them until they wiggle. “I remember he said they’d die staggered. They wouldn’t all die at the same time, but that they would pick dates. That way no one would forget. That way everyone would always be remembering the war.”
April thinks Brian was scheduled to die after Jeffrey Lucey, who died on the sixteenth of January. The twenty-three-year-old hanged himself with an electric cord six days after the VA put him on a wait list in St. Cloud Hospital in Minnesota.
April imitates the soldiers: We should all do it together! Do it! Do it! Do it together!
“But, you know,” she says, “Brian recognized that he was traumatized. That he was damaged. Others recognized that they had some damage. That’s why they decided to form this suicide pact. Which actually makes sense. Before Brian died he was incredibly calm. He was almost happy. That must be why.”
Khaia sets a finger on her mother’s leg. “Mama, you want a pear?” She cocks her head and holds the green fruit out to her mother, using two hands. “They’re full of goodness.”
April grips her daughter’s hand. “I don’t want a pear, honey.” April pulls her legs to her chest and sucks on her cigarette.
“Do you want a pear?” she says to me. “They’re full of goodness.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I’m okay.”
April has theories about how a woman from the military tried to break into her computer system and steal recordings of the soldiers’ voices. When the woman called, April kept repeating, “I did everything I could to stop him. I did everything I could to stop him.”
“I can’t put names to the voices,” she says. “I wish I could find them.”
April’s body keeps unraveling. First she leans back, and then spreads her arms and then her legs.
“You know, I think he was afraid of dying. I don’t think he was afraid of the stupid shit he was talking about. I don’t think he was scared of fucking bombs landing on my fourteen acres or Iraqis coming in and slaughtering us. I think that might have been just a made-up fantasy along the way. A story to entertain me.” April raises her head toward the sky and grips her hair. She swallows, holds in her words. “Oh, my God, it was, it was. He made it up. I just remembered a couple little words that he said right before he explained doomsday to me. He said, ‘I don’t care what you tell America, April. Tell America that I thought the world was going to blow up. Tell America I thought this and that.’ He didn’t really think that. If he did he would have phrased it in a way that showed that he was really thinking it. He wouldn’t have said: ‘Tell them the truth.’ ”
“Tell who?”
April releases her hair. “Whoever asked how he died in Iraq after he was gone.”
“He didn’t die in Iraq.”
“He did,” she says. “He killed himself here, but he died in Iraq.”
A Harrier jet flying northeast from Camp Lejeune grows big in the distance, flying low over the house, showing its metaled stomach. We lay our bodies flat on the porch and let the vibrations run up through our skin and out our mouths.
“You know what the soldiers said at night? ‘April, you’ve been great. Thank you for staying with us and being the voice in the night.’ ”
April rolls her head to me but it’s too dark to see each other’s faces.
She says, “I am the voice in the night.”
• • •
After a week at April’s, sleeping on her couch, hearing her stories, I drive out and stay at a hotel. The night desk clerk is a Pakistani woman asleep in an open window. “Excuse me.” I touch her on the shoulder and she shakes to life.
“Fifty-five dollars.”
I point to the sign. “Twenty-nine.”
“That’s if you stay for a week.” She has banana in her cheeks. A plate of cut bananas at her side, browning
on the edges. Their centers still bright.
“Does anyone stay for a week?”
She shakes her head and swallows.
Coke machine glow lights the cement hallways. When I go to my room, I set my things down and then walk outside. The sky is blue before black. A man is standing on the second-floor balcony, bathing in moonlight, wearing camo and combat boots and sucking a cigarette. I recognize him from Portal. It’s Walter. I wonder if he’s been staying here for weeks looking out at the middle distance. I say nothing. What to say?
I’m sorry you had Lucifer.
While I sleep, the polyester curtain thumps over the air conditioner, expanding and contracting like lungs. My eyes feel dug around in, sore to the touch. My mouth burns with dehydration. Sleep comes fast. The room darkens. My eyes open. In my dream there’s a bat the size of a man standing in the corner of the room. He’s the texture of an old date. With one pump of its wings he flies to me. Lands on me. Finger-sized claws explore my neck. I stay limp. It does its thing. Its warm, velveteen squeeze. The bat trembles.
• • •
In the book The Secret Lives of Puppets, Victoria Nelson writes a story about a woman at the peak of her depression. She’s sitting at home one day, collapsed on the couch, when a giant black bird flies into the room. It is a demon, she knows. The bird speaks to her in a strange language. The woman recognizes that if she speaks back she will be consorting with the gods. She refuses and it’s because of this refusal that the black bird flies away and she is at peace.
I think about this story when, months later, a bat—a real bat—flies into my room and sits on my neck. Caleb’s stories linger like a contagion.
When a real bat comes into your room at night, it’s advised, the doctors at Mercy Hospital in Iowa City say, that you receive a vaccination for rabies. When one enters the second stage of the rabies virus, it’s called the furious stage and the body enters violent fits: the body arcs, the stomach lifts, the head falls back. The voice is raucous and crowing. Face twitching means you can’t close your eyes. That means you have to watch your death.
Dim lights burn in every hall of the hospital. Prayers chant on repeat from loudspeakers. I brace myself before the swab’s cold lick, the chemical burn, the cratering of deltoid skin at the injection point.
Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism Page 17