And standing around. The long stretches of time with no women showing up and her feet and back hurting while she and Kavanagh talked and smoked to feel busy. But always shifting her feet and body, hand never far from her pistol grip. Every day feeling like every other and she began to feel stuck, unable to keep track of the weeks turning into months. Holidays surprised her. She was shocked the day she realized she had only a couple of months left in her deployment. In those moments she fought hard to pick out something from the persistent forward blur of days, the memory of anything that stood out from the routine of her life. But all she saw was gray. Looking across the short distance to where the men shuffled one behind the other, their worn-out clothes beginning to look like the gray sky and gray sand. The men’s faces beginning to look like the gray sand, and she couldn’t discern them from the desert, from every other hajji she’d seen.
Gray surrounded the one day that stood out in sharp relief. A dense, rainy gray that pressed down close over her head, compressed her body into the sandy ground. The low clouds blocking out the sky over the base gate were the clearest part of her memories—the only part that seemed to come back to her whole. The gray clouds that winter day hung so low, and the glare made her squint and tear up.
She stood at the Entry Control Point for the main gate of the base. The ECP was a wide, sandy lane leading out from the main gate, about 100 meters long and framed on both sides by Hesco barriers, tall, canvas and wire baskets filled with sand built to stop shrapnel and small arms fire. About ten meters from the main gate, concrete barriers narrowed the lane of approach, corralling visitors into two files, all the hajjis coming in and out, going to their jobs at the chow hall, laundry building, or wherever, had to pass through the ECP. The men lined up along one side, shuffling patiently as each waited to be frisked by a pair of male Marines.
In her memory the corridor narrowed and stretched for miles and miles, the Hescos rising into the air, reminding her of the skyscrapers along the spine of Manhattan, like the entire world that day was the ECP and nothing else existed.
She stood on the other side with Kavanagh, watching for women coming through. There were never that many and almost all of them had children with them. Most came to visit their husbands or brothers or fathers who were being treated in the hospital for injuries. On that morning, as the hajjis lined up for work, Kavanagh argued with an Iraqi woman who’d brought her kids along, a boy and girl, trying to make it clear to her through an interpreter that she couldn’t come on base because she didn’t have the right documents. The woman kept insisting that the medic who took her husband said everything was in order. Kavanagh turned away from the woman and said, “Hey, get the hospital on the radio, see if we can unfuck this.”
She nodded and moved off. With each step across the sand and gravel, her M16 knocked gently against her chest, making a hollow thump against the ballistic plates in her flak jacket. She couldn’t help but feel edgy. That worry hovered all around her and in her mind until it became the standard sensation, until a day without fear was a bad day. On that particular day, with its heavy clouds and stretched-thin feeling, she glanced over at the line of hajjis queuing up for their pat down, and an alarm somewhere inside her went off, her fear screaming loud and long, leaning into her gut, making her wonder, making her think. There: a man of medium height, with a full head of shiny black hair combed and parted. He looked normal, but something wasn’t right. He wore a clean white robe and no coat despite the cold. His eyes fixed on the back of the man in front of him, his gaze focused on the stripes on the man’s jacket. She saw the man’s lips move, a slight trembling of words in a language she’d never understand. Then she saw how, for such a slight man, his belly protruded in a strange way. His torso was too big for his body. As her thoughts clicked into place, she felt her body tense up. He was only the second man in line now and wasn’t more than a few meters from the other Marines, and yet no one had noticed the hajji’s weird bulge.
Fear had made her stop that day to look back at the hajji. Fear that something wasn’t right with the man and the determined set of his face so different from the bored passivity of all the other men. Fear had spoken up in a soft voice in the back of her mind and she paused long enough to let the emotion grow into a tightness across her body that almost itched with its pull on her skin. That was the first time she felt fear come on with the tightness; it was her fear of the past and the memories of that day that first drove her to ride the train.
Fear seems to be the only thing she feels anymore. She remembers the first time the fear threatened to spill over after she returned to the city. How the fear started as only a worry. Sitting in her empty apartment in her ratty chair and trying to ignore the two-year-old in the apartment above banging her feet against the floor. She could feel worry growing somewhere inside her, deep, a tiny worm that twisted and writhed only enough to be noticed. She grew stagnant, numb against this fear until this worm grew and grew and dug into her and finally she felt compressed, constrained. She felt squeezed between the past and the present. She could feel Iraq everywhere, feel the dusty film of the desert covering every object and surface, her skin. She couldn’t wash the desert away and all she saw was gray: gray sky, gray tinted sand, gray movements of bodies rushing. Or lying still. Darker gray pools spread across the ground. She smelled flesh and sweat and bile and she couldn’t tell if these sights were solid or ghosts.
The fear consumed her until the two-year-old in the apartment above was no longer just an annoyance, a bratty child who stomped on the floor and would soon tire out, but a pounding through her skull. In that pounding her body remembered the concussive blow that threw her down, the reverberation of that day through her skeleton over and over. The fear and the pounding brought on the tightness like a hand across her face, her neck, and squeezing all her breath out until spots danced before her eyes. In a panic, she bolted, ran out the door, down the stairs, up the short hill to the subway and into the turnstile. Her hands shook so much she couldn’t swipe her card right, first too fast and then too slow, the little screen repeating “please swipe again” over and over with that shrill beep needling at her.
“If you can’t do it right, step aside and let other people go.” The voice behind her was sharp, commanding. The woman stood with her arms crossed and glared hard at her. More people drifted up with curious looks. Most of them kept their distance.
“I’m trying,” was all she could manage.
“And failing,” the woman snapped. “Now get out of the way.” The woman approached and prepared to shove through.
“Hey!” A muffled shout came out of the MTA booth through the weird microphone speaker. Everyone stopped and looked at the large black man glaring through the security glass. “You wait your turn ma’am!”
“She ain’t getting through anytime soon.”
“Yes she is,” there was a click from the turnstile. “Go on through, miss.”
She glanced back nervously. Nodded her thanks at the man and pushed through. The other woman stalked up to the booth and confronted the man, “Why the hell you let her through? You gonna give all of us a free ride?”
“You don’t concern yourself with who I let through,” she heard the man say as she took the stairs two at a time up to the platform.
She knew she had to wait for only a few minutes, but she trembled, panicked, worried she wouldn’t make it. She might stop breathing, pass out, tumble forward onto the tracks, two solid, silver shining lines below, only seven or eight feet below, carrying the train along, wheels locked in and rolling fast and heavy. The fall wouldn’t be bad, just a couple of bruises and scrapes, maybe a sprained wrist. All she had to do was pitch forward, lie across the tracks, and wait. The train would probably hurt less than the fall. All she would have to do was let her knees go slack and let her shoulders slump under the compulsion of gravity—the single most powerful law of the universe, pulling always down, down across the tracks and beneath the mass of the train. Down beneath the sweet,
loamy surface of the soil, where her body could finally rot where it belonged. Rot, just like Kavanagh’s. She felt the gentle tug of gravity, of downward force on her body, and she almost believed that she wanted to give in to this desire and be below, beneath where she belongs. And, yet . . . and yet. The silver lines swelled in her vision, glinting in the sun, and she stared, fixed, as the world shuddered and gusted in her face, steel explosions, the train. She stepped in and collapsed into a seat, her entire body clammy and cold, shaking, the train and the city and the bodies around her blurred with sweat and tears. She didn’t care which way she was headed, but only watched the large clouds float past the train, focusing on the clear baby blue behind them and the way it made her feel a little better.
She thinks about that hajji all the time now, his face and the way the wind pulled at his robe, the weird shape underneath, and tries to pick out what she could’ve seen sooner. She remembers the look in his eyes, the resolve in that flicker of a glance he gave her as she stopped and turned back under the gray clouds hanging so low in the sky. In that brief look she knew, the feeling in her gut smashed wide open and she knew exactly why the mother-fucker was there. She felt her mouth open, felt her weapon rise up in her hands, felt her voice erupt in warning as the Marines turned their heads in her direction. The last thing she felt, the last real thing she remembered feeling in her body was the constriction of her finger around the trigger, cold and firm.
The earth closes around the train. The clatter of the wheels and joints grows more persistent, closer. The lights of each station flashing past the windows then streaking and finally stopping with the alignment of the train. She is only a few stops away from her transfer downtown: Hunter’s Point, Vernon-Jackson Boulevard, Grand Central. Bryant Park came after and that’s where she should get off, walk the long tunnel beneath the city. She sees in her mind the glistening white tiles and the long-winding mosaic roots leading people, one foot in front of the other. Each step forward would take her one step into the future, should take her one more step away from Iraq, but really took her directly into the past. Circling about, retracing scuffed footprints wearing down into a track, and she witnesses again and again that clear, determined look in that hajji’s eyes, an explosion through the center of the earth, flames licking at the darkness and sending new stars whirling up into the night. Existence is circular, the world built in the round: clocks, horizons, galaxies, and always the earth swinging wide and then close, around and around the sun and always at some moment striking a point at which it has already been. At any given moment she exists in the very same place that she existed in Iraq, the exact same instant that she stood over Kavanagh bleeding out, or the moment she snatched her weapon up, or the instant before that when she should’ve already been snatching her weapon up.
No, she can’t walk through that tunnel, not today, not yet. She can’t walk beneath the words pleading telmetale of stem or stone. She could tell a tale, but one of dusty red and fear. “Tell me a tale,” she almost hears her mom’s voice in her head, in the air all around her in the same stricken voice as the day of the bird, “tell me something, please.” Questions about her being over there that already hang beneath every phone conversation. But she won’t answer those questions. Ever. She doesn’t want her mom to know the truth about her new life. Her life after Vermont. She wants her mom to hold on to that young, untainted part of her life, the one that shines through the tall fire in the picture in the front hall. She wants her mom to want to look at that picture and remember the heat on their faces and their hands while they held marshmallows to the fire, and the early spring air with the remnants of winter cooling their backs. Such a good and clean memory. She doesn’t want the way her mom looks at that picture to change. “I want to know,” her mom might say. But to know about something, to understand what happens and why, changes a person. She still doesn’t understand what her mother said that day over the bird. Her mom wouldn’t understand about the girl and her kicking leg. No, she won’t go to Vermont.
She woke against the Hescos, contorted and slumped, and took a minute to figure it out. Her head ached and her ears rang. Her sling was up around her collar, pulling against her throat, her weapon twisted awkwardly around her sling, the barrel jammed into the sand. Her face ached and she tasted blood in her mouth. Later, when she returned to the States, two of her teeth had to be replaced: her left incisor had shattered to the root and her left canine was completely knocked out when the blast threw her M16 into her jaw. She never found the missing tooth, figured she’d swallowed it.
She managed to push the sling away and sat up with a groan. She felt a sharp, knifing pain in the back of her neck and where the lower edge of her ballistic plate dug into her kidneys. She looked down at her feet. Sticky brown smears on her boots and trousers smelled faintly of hamburger. Her gut wrenched hard in the instant before she turned and vomited. She thought about wiping it off but stared helplessly at her bare hands.
A medic worked on Kavanagh, whose helmet lay a few feet from her head. She’d always complained it was too big. Next to Kavanagh lay the Iraqi girl. Her legs kicking in weird spasms, her right leg swinging slowly to the sky and back down like she was playing soccer. She could never remember how long the girl took to finally lie still. Some days it lasted only a moment, other days it lasted hours. She sat there against the Hescos and watched that thin, brown leg swing and fall and twitch and finally, shuddering, stop.
She finally pulled herself to her feet, gritting her teeth as she stumbled over to Kavanagh. Kavanagh was on her back, blood splashed all around her body. She looked only at Kavanagh’s face, somehow untouched, pale and brushed with those Irish freckles so many guys liked. She didn’t interrupt the medic’s work. She wanted to stop him but she couldn’t move, couldn’t raise her hands, the cold tingling spreading through her body and keeping her still. For several minutes, for such a long time, she could only watch. A soldier passed with an armful of body bags, and she took one from him, then found a pair of surgical gloves in the medic’s trauma bag. She lifted the young Iraqi girl in her arms—five, six years old?—cradled her and slid her awkwardly into the body bag, head and shoulders first, then her broken torso, then the legs, that leg cool and pliant in her hands. The girl must’ve shielded her mother, who sat nearby, wailing and cradling her son.
The pitch of the train air brakes matches the sound of the wailing mother in her ears and she looks up through the windows to a crowd of bodies. Above their heads she reads, 42nd St–Bryant Park. She jerks to her feet, knowing she should get off, followed quickly by the anxiousness, the need to be away from Vermont. She thinks of the tunnel, the dusty memory of Iraq a movie in her head, rolling, rolling like the earth spinning constantly into, out of the sunlight. A single scene with the girl’s kicking leg and Kavanagh’s blank stare and the pathetic urge to get drunk. She eases back into her seat, reassured by the firm plastic, and watches the flood of bodies crushing in. She is still, almost calm, her hands resting in her lap. She isn’t sure what she’ll tell her mother, but in this moment she’s not ready to exit the train.
The cleanup at the ECP lasted through nightfall. When she finally climbed into the back of a seven-ton truck to be taken to the base hospital, her body aching with pain and fatigue, she realized she was famished. She asked one of the corpsmen for food and was handed a Styrofoam box with cold, greasy fried chicken, string beans, and mashed potatoes and gravy. She took one look at the fried chicken and gravy and vomited all over the tray and her lap. “I’m sorry,” she wailed as the orderlies started cleaning her up, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.”
She was kept under observation in the hospital for three days, for head and spinal trauma: her impact against the Hescos left large bruises along her back and the doctors were concerned she might have internal rupturing. They gave her Percocet for her missing teeth and blinding headaches. She was thankful for the way the meds helped her forget Kavanagh’s brown eyes staring up at the sky, her blonde hair blowing out o
f her bun.
She spent another four days on bed rest in her quarters. On the second day, a young, skinny girl was shown into her room by a staff sergeant saying this is Warren, your new roommate. She didn’t answer the girl’s shy smile and “hello.” Instead, she replaced her headphones and tried to ignore Warren as she unpacked her things. She could see the small piles of clothes and DVDs growing on Kavanagh’s old bunk. Kavanagh, everything had the touch of her, the slack look of her face disrupting everything she did and thought. A racking wave of tightness moved through her gut and pulled her away, dragged her back to California; a quick tug from behind her navel and she was no longer in TQ but in her quarters so many months before where she lay across the width of her bed, her hands clasped behind her head and the lights off. Looking out the open window at the full moon hanging just above the ridge glowing in the light and the face of the moon looking back at her. Leaves outlined against the sky and a faint smell of smoke from a brush fire. It was a week before deployment and her room was empty of her belongings, most of them in storage. Only her toiletries on the sink, her sea bag and rucksack propped in a corner remained.
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