by Jay Fox
Forty-eight down is ENSE. That means this here is probably ASONE. How would a Jenny Craig testimonial begin? Losing weight obviously has something to do with it. What about ILOST? Well it fits with the one letter I have. What about this? Blank-E-T-Blank for “Coat Hanger.” Abortion. Why does abortion come to mind? Am I really that perverse? Wait…it's “Court Hangers.” Okay, it has to be plural. Court hanger. Flags hang in courts. Juries sometimes hang. What does that mean anyway? Hung jury. Is there another word for flag that could fit? Banner? Tapestry? What about another court? Tennis. Basketball. Hoops. NETS.
I've been assigned the duty of making sure Tomas doesn't die. True, the fear seems a bit melodramatic, but I guess it's better to be safe in situations such as these. He hasn't been lucid since we got him in the tub about three hours ago. The sight of him is rather pathetic: a boxer-clad and pallid lump of flesh coated in sweat and small fragments of partially digested food. He smells like feet and grain alcohol. The rest of the bathroom is redolent with either vomit or disinfectant, though the potency of either one of these components depends upon your location in the room.
Tomas managed to empty just about all of the contents of his stomach before we even got out of the cab. I didn't notice any of this because I had fallen asleep before we even got to Bedford. Luckily, none of it got in the cab, but the exterior of the door was caked with a pink mixture of stomach contents and compunction. The driver was understandably pissed about it. Aberdeen and I did our best to clean it off with hot water and Murphy's oil soap, both of which were fetched from the duo's loft. I did most of the cleaning. Aberdeen shelled out a pretty substantial tip. Tomas, meanwhile, remained fetal on the sidewalk amidst small, glittering shards of glass and derelict pieces of garbage, much to the amusement of a small crew of Dominican guys, who, Aberdeen later relayed, probably have something to do with the tire-slashing epidemics that occasionally erupt on the block. The biggest of the clan had a certain criminality about him, but the other members of the quintet seemed harmless.
Oxygen's atomic number is eight. How would you abbreviate that to fit in four spaces? ATNO? Thirty-one down is probably HEALS, so that's got to be right. That gives me an N-A-Blank-Blank-Blank for the tennis star. It's a Russian surname…don't they call the surnames something different…patronymic or something like that? Regardless, the other name is Russian, so it's probably NADIA. Yeah, let's go with that. What type of product has a rotating ball? Guinness and a few other English beers have those widgets in them. I doubt that's what the clue is supposed to refer to. Blank-O-L-Blank-Blank-Blank. I'll come back to it.
I have been to the terrestrial hell in which Tomas is trapped, that existence of cold sweats and porcelain worship. The torment encroaches upon the infinite. Every muscle in the body strains as it violently strives to reject the poison, but nothing is exhumed except a cocktail of enzymes that coat the tongue in a residue of bitter-citrus that no amount of brushing or mouthwash can remove. You enter into a fugue state—slightly responsive, borderline schizophrenic. (You apologize to your mother and can't figure out whey she looks like your girlfriend. Former girlfriend. She pats you on the head, arousing nerves that you didn't know existed. Topanga, from the television series Boy Meets World, takes over for her every now and again. Giant tacos engage you in profound conversations based on excerpts from Derek Parfitt's Reasons and Persons. They are erudite, but lack the condescension that one typically associates with the scholarly. It is mentioned in passing that Parfitt claims to not have what is know colloquially as a mind's eye—his memories are constructed out of information and data that he cannot visualize. Joey Ramone interrupts the conversation to let you know that Perry Buick-Pontiac is the best place to buy or lease a new Pontiac G6; the voice of the Micro Machines Guy (though he looks like Rachel Ray in drag) adds “On East Virginia Beach Boulevard, just two blocks west of Newton Road” so quickly that you only understand what has been said a few moments later. Rufio and a few of the Lost Boys are reenacting Sade's wedding scene of Narcisse and Hébé (otherwise known as the Shit-Storm) with the cast of Friends on stage left. Stage right is occupied by the janitor from Scrubs, who is busy mopping up some of the melted props used to recreate The Persistence of Memory. He has a minatory look in his eyes, and he keeps calling everyone with whom he speaks “Buttercup.”) You accept everything that takes place in this delirium, but deny whatever is in front of your face. Conspiracy. Everyone is against you.
There's that G that begins twenty-nine across. “Proceeding.” The G could be for Go or GOES or GOING. I've got an AH. How about GOINGAHEAD? It fits. Okay. HEALS and ATNO are definitely right.
The state of the bathroom surprises me. Its cleanliness would be expected if it was not the case that Lindsay shared the other bathroom with Barazov—then again, after living with Connie for just under a month last summer, I do know that women are not immune to certain proclivities that are as disgusting as those of men (though men at least know how to use a fucking plunger!). I can imagine that Aberdeen's frustration with Ichycoo probably stems from his lack of bathroom etiquette, as it is a well-known fact that hippies always let yellow mellow. Furthermore, I have learned that Ichycoo is a wookie (a term that essentially describes a straight bear (if you don't know this term, please consult the next available gay man) with a love of boomers (psychedelic mushrooms), pharmies (pharmaceuticals), and herb (marijuana); the wookie is also known to have a taste for the more southern-inspired improvisation that the jam band scene has to offer (Allmans, Widespread, Mule, etc.), to wear their hair long, often in dreadlocks, and to inhabit parking lots adjacent to venues in the mountainous regions of the U.S.; migration patterns depend upon tour dates, but they are known to travel in cars and vans comprised of people they have only known for a few hours, even if they are familiar with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people within the scene). The bathroom itself is typical in the context of renovated Brooklyn apartments. The walls are of a calico tile—perhaps some kind of marble—that is predominately coral in color. The floors are an off-white, the type of color one is bound to encounter when reading a book printed in the seventies or early-eighties. It is still too close a relative to white to be like one of those paperbacks from the fifties or sixties, the type that has the binding with that horribly brittle glue—so the cover goes missing within a day, the spine snaps shortly thereafter, and by the time you're done reading you end up with seven small books that are all missing pages. There is no counter space. One has the option of storing things either on the toilet, beneath the sink, or in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror. The bathtub is new and small. Tomas barely fits in it.
That has to be OBOE. There's always an OBOE. That has to be TIDE next to it. Don't write it in, though. Wait on it. What do flight passengers work on? There's definitely an S at the end. Forty-two down is MALAWI, right? Yeah, because flight passengers work on LAPTOPS. So it is TIDE. Fifty-six down is PBS. That makes fifty-six across…PLAUSIBLE. Sixty-one is SOITSEEMS. That makes this PLUM, this SETS, and this APSES. This is BAWLEDOUT. Wow, I just got that entire corner in, like, thirty seconds.
A part of me never wants to drink again. Not seriously anyhow. Tomas has proven that Hegelian dialectics can rear its pompous head anywhere. The action of drinking is social, but also inherently anti-social: when taken to its logical conclusion, alcohol is a poison that can kill you—and there's nothing more anti-social than death, especially suicide. There's certainly more to this, but it's rather recondite (perhaps the only English word, with the notable exception of sesquipedalian, that both is and means the same thing—i.e. obscure). I pop off the cap of a beer with a lighter, light one of the cigarettes that Aberdeen left me, and examine Tomas' chest for signs of life. Bob Dylan sings of his “girl from the north country” courtesy of a shuffling iPod. I try to think of the girl for whom he sings, but no photo is available. Tomas lets out a troubled groan.
Who was the sportsman of the year in 1998? Co-winner. Four letters. Tiger had a good year. Probably. He's had good years
for the past decade. I remember he was a really big deal right around the time Biggie died. That was '96. I think. Football. Who won the Super Bowl that year? Was it Tampa? No, it was the Broncos. They won those two years in a row. SHARP doesn't fit. Or is it Sharpe? Not that matters. DAVIS doesn't fit. Who was the quarterback on that team? Elway. Of course. How could I forget about John Elway? What about baseball? That was during the home run craze. It obviously isn't Bonds because he didn't hit seventy-three until later—maybe '01. Yeah, I remember that. It was the only news that didn't concern 9-11, bin Laden, Afghanistan. Jesus, was that really almost six years ago? That doesn't even seem real anymore. Everything that day was so fucking unreal. I still remember the principal's announcement. Well, most of it. (Our class was discussing Hemingway's Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Michelle Cooper was passionately criticizing the blatant misogyny of Hemingway when the announcement began, so I don't remember just how it started; Michelle, for whom discussion was a matter of waiting for the other person to concede that she was right, finished her point, realized no one was listening, and then finished with a surly, “Whatever.” After a moment, though, she grasped the dire gravity in the tenor of the principal, Mrs. McGullen; she understood it, could acknowledge that this was not some insipid notification, and immediately conveyed her remorse and humility with a set of downcast eyes. Yes, she apprehended it. Immediately. I did not. In hindsight, the principal’s voice now shoots ripples of goosebumps throughout my body; at the time, however, I thought it an operatic performance. Yes, a performance. Because that's how I thought of high school: a series of performances by students and teachers, by an authority figure with a job title that finds its root in the honorific bestowed upon Caesar and Octavian. So nothing was serious; it could not be anything more than a scene in the jejune melodrama of suburbia. And I was wrong. The bell rang shortly after the principal had everyone's attention, and most of the students in the classroom lost interest. She continued, though. At the time I was more concerned with making a Something About Mary reference, as Frankie, one of two friends in the class, had managed to get one of his folders stuck in the zipper of his bag. The two of us were met by Allison, the other person in the class I would have considered a friend at the time. I continued to make light of the situation as the three of us made our way toward the door. “Why does it matter? The World Trade Center's been hit by plane. It's a tragedy, sure, but it was just a fucking accident.” A severe look from the teacher. “Sorry, Mr. Heth.” “Accident? Why do you think it was an accident?” “It happens. I mean, the Empire State Building was hit by plane in the thirties…maybe forties.” “You're such a fucking know-it-all.” “Whatever Allie; I just don't see the point of playing Chicken Little.” “But this has gotta be pretty serious, man: The Gooch isn't going to—” “Frankie, don't call her that.” “Sorry, Allie. McGullen isn't going to interrupt class to tell us about some little accident.” “I just got a message from my mom; she's coming to pick me up.” “Why?” “Because it was a big plane. She said it was a seven-forty-seven. She's…” The four us, Katie Lynch, Allison, Frankie, and I walked into a silent hallway filled with cold, tile floors and purple lockers. The gravelly soprano of the principal echoed from the nearby rooms. The students were standing in subdued chaos, choking down mild epiphanies and revelations, attempting to grasp emotions and thoughts that were without signifiers or symbols. No, they were new, frightening. It was a moment in which nearly everyone appeared as though they were on pause, tableaux of confusion and deep, deep fear—without answers, without guidance—nested beneath speakers surrounded by wood paneling and a cottony shawl both the color and texture of a black dress sock. We would all later say that the experience was like a dream or a movie because we were not used to dealing with tragedies in waking, moving, unscripted life. “I'm going to remember this, aren't I?” “Dude, shut the fuck up.” The four of us took a few more steps into the hallway. Katie vanished. A few televisions became audible before receding into silence (the sound was not truncated, as the teachers, in their haste, did not bother looking for the mute button, just the little arrow pointing down). And then there was a huge gasp that resonated throughout the building, the sound that remains indelible upon my memory more so than anything else (like the smell of the Manhattan air that morning, as many people who experienced the event will attest). A few people could be heard taking the Lord's name in vain. Oh my…Can I please have everyone's attention: A second plane has just crashed into the other tower of the World Trade Center. Frankie turned to me. “Accident, huh?” And the aftermath: Looks of complete bewilderment, girls wailing, guys trying to look as though they are in control, arms around shoulders, heads buried in shoulders, dramatics that weren't feigned, profusions of sympathy and fear everywhere, manifested in several guises and poses. And as the shock waves began to reverberate around the world—those waves that would begin as fear and sorrow, but would eventually turn to vengeance and hatred—the three of us stood in that hallway without a semblance of direction. “We're getting out of here, Allie,” Frankie said. With everything in chaos, I figured there was no way we'd be caught, so I asked if I could come along. They were planning to head back to Allison's house. I knew this. Her mother was out of town for the week conducting business in Vegas, and the two of them had been dating for roughly three months. I knew they were not going there to simply watch television, but I didn't want to come back to play the part of the third wheel so much as I just wanted to get the hell out of school. In exchange for a seat in Frankie's car, I offered to smoke him up with a dime bag of what I thought to be decent grass, even if it was a little less than a gram of shake broken off from a chunk of Mexican brick weed. I can't remember if I bought it off of Stevens or that little wigger (or is it whigger?) kid who worker at the gas station. He called himself B-Rock. His real name was Bernard. He lived in the rich part of town, and was hated by most of the black people in the area, as his understanding of black culture rarely went beyond vulgar stereotypes. The white people didn't really care for him, either, although he always had drugs, which is why most of us were on cordial terms with him. As the three of us began making our way through the corridors of the building, the principal continued to address the school with a great deal of emotion, her words profoundly terrifying in their context. This is not an accident. Dave Wesson and some of the guys from the J.V. football team were cracking jokes about the Gooch's attempt at depth until one of the varsity linebackers, the only one to go on to play at a Division 1 school, picked him up about a foot off the ground, and pressed him against a locker. I don't remember the linebacker's name; I only remember that he was known for being one of those gentle giants. He had some legal trouble later that year because he assaulted some guy who thought G.H.B. was nothing more than the world's most potent aphrodisiac. Some of the rich, underclass girls looked as though they were about to engage in a photo-shoot. Most of the older girls tried their best to look composed, their tears both reluctant and earnest. Most of the young men didn't really have any idea how they were supposed to act, so they reverted to stoicism, rarely with success. It's important we stay calm in times such as these. Gurtz smoked a cigarette in the hallway in plain sight of about eight teachers. Being a sixth-year and all, no one really felt the need to reprimand him. He looked to Frankie with the expression one might expect upon a mechanic confronted with a blown transmission. “Fucked up, huh.” Once we got through the heavy-traffic of the main concourse, we cut through hallways completely devoid of people—labyrinthine paths of Cold War architecture, complete with dusty, maybe even disconnected, speakers that had been installed in order to harbinger in nuclear annihilation. I had never been down those hallways, and I'm fairly certain that I never stepped foot in them again. Teachers stood like beheaded totems vapidly staring at radios in the comfort of their classrooms. In some cases, there were no students there with them. When I peaked through the open door to the A/V room, I saw black smoke rising—plumeless and like the wings of a bat—from that pale-gray mono
lith. The Brooklyn skyline was rubescently hazed; above it, the skies became amber, and then the color of oxidized copper. My intestines felt as though they were caving into an abyss. I stood motionless until Frankie grabbed me by the arm, but then he, too, was struck by the sight. He shook it off quickly, however, so as to not let Allison know the extent of the damage. And then we were off again: chasing exit signs and the light of day. In those dimly lit corridors our footfalls cascaded above the din of the news programs coming from the classrooms and the Gooch's continued efforts to quell any potential panic. And I could see her in there, in her little office with that bulbous microphone on her desk, which looked like the love child of a sprinkler and an egg. I could see her there with her droopy face and those gullied wrinkles that brought to mind Maori tattoos or, to be less respectful and (moreover) honest, the grim face of Thantos. She wanted so much to maintain both her humanity and her authority, but she knew that it was only a matter of time before one of the two had to abandoned. Frankie led us through the long hall by the computer labs with his hand clutched tightly around Allison's. Allison kept looking to me with what appeared to be guilt. I still can't understand why. The Gooch was beginning to stumble upon her words as we ducked out through the east wing. We took that route because the guard at the door went way back with Frankie's dad. The guy, P.J., as he was known, told Frankie that a lot of kids were already being taken out of school. Indeed they were. The parking lot was a wasp’s nest of crying parents and praetorian older brothers; cars blasted voices broadcasting their ignorance. The reporters were so bewildered that they could only repeat about twenty seconds of information. This was no accident. We were almost hit by several cars as they tried to back out of their spots. Fenders were bended; information was exchanged; some freshman kid named Dudzinski got his foot run over. Frankie refused to listen to the news once we were safely in his Olds. I don't remember what he put on instead. Getting out of the lot took us about fifteen minutes. During that time, I crushed up my entire bag, and rolled it into one relatively large spliff (the tobacco portion coming from about a third of one of Frankie's cigarettes). Allison and Frankie took this time to argue about the radio. “I need to see this shit for myself, Allie. I don't want some numb-nutted liberal in New York telling me what the fuck's going on, okay.” He looked back to me. “No offense or nothing.” We got stoned as we sat in a Savage Park parking lot. No one was there, not even the typical mother-child pairs or the drifters cutting through on their bikes. We came into Allison's house laughing, saturated with oblivion once again, and then turned on the television. There was just a big cloud of smoke where one of the towers had been only a few minutes previously. We stood staring in disbelief for what seemed like a lifetime. No one said anything. Reporters spoke of the Pentagon over footage of tar-black smoke spewing from the Napoleonic building. Terrorist organizations were being listed indiscriminately, but no serious allegations were being made. The Mall in D.C. was on fire; the tower falling; there was something wrong in L.A.; the tower falling; government buildings were being evacuated in obscure cities; the tower falling; the citizens of Chicago were beginning to compose panegyrics for the Sears Tower; the tower falling; the tower falling (From a new angle that we have just received); the previous vantage. And we just stood there, the buzz of the grass vibrating the world, making our skin feel like the sand beneath a millipede, unable to move the few feet to the couch, unable to take our eyes off the blinking images of carnage revealing an event so utterly shocking and real that we thought of it as surreal, as something that we couldn't handle, that we shouldn't have to handle, as something that stood antipodal to our boring existence, one without the great obstacles and tribulations of generations past. Yes, we had been taught that history ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the IMF-ication of Asia and South America, and, consequently, that generational differences would ultimately rely on little more than consumption preferences. Our mouths hanging open, our shoes probably coated in copious amounts of drool, we could do nothing but watch. Fait accompli. And then—Good Lord; there are no words…—the second tower crumbled before our eyes, the smoke spraying upwards like the sea crashing into a bluff, the debris cascading onto the streets below, the Asbestos-laden cumuli drowning all vantages of lower Manhattan in what appeared to be a gray mudslide. That was not a replay. The second tower has fallen. And then it was just a pile of rubble—a work of art more harrowing and painful than any sculpture devoted to exposing institutionalized resentment and nihilism ever could be (because only a nihilist can be a terrorist: and he may be brave in the sense that he is willing to relinquish his future, but his bravery is disingenuous, as he rejects the future on an ideological level. So his abnegation is one without courage; he surrenders nothing of value (a life without integrity) because he rejects real liberty and, consequently, the future. His future. He may not be a coward, but he is far worse: he martyrs himself in the name of a cause that hemorrhages every semblance of virtue because it puts more sanctity in death than in life.) We watched television for hours. “No Rain” played on MTV at one point. As a nation, we were morbidly chagrined by the lack of a Zapruder in Pennsylvania. Allison cried until well after twelve. Luckily, she did not have to fear for her mother, who had safely landed a few days before, and would not be flying back until the weekend. They talked on the phone for an hour. I had called my mother prior to this. I told her that I had left school. She told me that she'd call in to excuse me later. When I told her that I loved her, the potency of those simple words choked both of us up. Frankie said he was going to enlist in the Marines. I thought it almost maudlin, but, then again, I felt a similar sentiment. I didn't take him seriously, probably because I didn't take myself seriously. But a few years later I found myself back in Allison's house, didn't I? Yes, but now a nation did not mourn. We were a nation who had grown tired of mourning, grown tired of etiologies on the hatred of America, grown tired of thinking, Perhaps we did something to piss off a rather sizable portion of the world. America had once again become the city upon the hill, and anyone who questioned either policy or the inherent virtue of the interests of this peerless nation was nothing more than a kook, a marginal figure with whom good, upstanding and rational people could not reason. The America of December 2004 was no longer searching for its soul or questioning its direction; it was now just a matter of simple syllogism: If it is American, then it is good. It is American. Therefore, it is good. And since the war is American, it is good. So the story on page one was not “Another Soldier Dies in Unjustified and Horribly Mismanaged War”; the story on page one had the word “Hero” in it, and the rest was filler. So the nation did not feel our pain; they valued our loss, but the grief was ours alone. It was just us, back in that old familiar house after strolling around the funeral home eschewing the knowledge that Frankie lay in the coffin nearby both stone-faced and pale. Killed in Fallujah. A death. A statistic about how well the mop-up of the city was going. I was taking my last exam for the semester when it happened. Compare and contrast x and y. I remember the call that came later that night. The semester was officially over for everyone by that point, and I was in Ilkay's room in the 26th Street dorm. There were about eight or nine people there. We had just finished off a bottle of Johnny Walker, and people were starting to get their coats on, even if it was rather warm for the season. We were going downtown to meet up with what was something of a super group of friends, as the party was to include several clusters of people, many of them mere acquaintances. But then I got the call. I was going to ignore it, as the number was not stored in my phone, but I saw that it was from my old area code. A premonition washed over me as I ducked out of the dorm room and into the hallway. Even before the voice at the other end of the line began to speak, I felt myself falling into a fugue state, my abdomen a theater of acrobats. It was Allison—hysterical, inconsolable. All she wanted was someone with whom she could feel normal, with whom she could retreat into the past, with whom she could feel safe. And I re
member feeling so estranged from her, so alienated that I could not even commiserate or mourn with full sincerity. Maryland was an ancillary life at that time, even if I was set to return in only a few hours. And yet we had been separated by so much more. True, we had shared a past, but I had divorced myself from it, not because I was looking to escape it, but because I had egressed from it—from the circles that went to state schools, the army buddies, those who stayed back in the suburbs to work menial jobs and embrace ersatz versions of Yuppidom, those who would tease me when I went home because they said I didn't understand what it was like to work for a living. They were on their own, living in parts of the city that I had been taught to fear. They were regulars at neighborhood bars, even if they hadn't hit twenty-one. Some of them had wives. Some of them had husbands. Or did. And so it was with Allison, the girl who had lived just down the block from me for the majority of my life. And she was such a large part of my life for so long, even if that life now seems to be a precursor to the life I was, am, will be, living. We were in second grade when we met. You wore a red velour dress over a white, ribbed long-sleeve shirt. There were pink and yellow things on it. I don't recall what they were—bunnies or birds or something so nauseatingly cute that we still talked about it the last time I saw you. Even then they were eyesores, weren't they? Even to someone who thought a Magic Eye constituted the most brilliant marriage of technology and art, I knew they were hideous and kitschy and yet so grossly endearing that it was almost painful. You had come from Connecticut—the move a consequence of a disease of the widowing variety. Your hair was almost translucent it was so blond. Your skin was so fair it was almost transparent. I remember being able to see the veins in your face. And I remember being fascinated by it, even if this fascination now seems to be tinged by a certain type of disgust. But it wasn't disgust, was it? It couldn't have been. No, it was something more. And that something more materialized when we were fourteen. Yes, that was you in the dark as Tigermilk, the album to which your older brother could not stop listening, played. It was then that you introduced me to just how beautiful a moment could be, even if I had been taught to think of all sex as pornography, of love as the type of thing that has to be either eternal or a burden or something that can only be felt after decades of trial and error. But love can exist in the moment, can't it? Didn't it? Didn't it exist that night, not as something as profound as eternity, but as something that required nothing more than a shared experience between two people ready to shed things far more substantial than their clothing? Even in the second grade I think I understood this. Because I loved you, even if I did not understand it as love then, even if I don't think of it as the love one speaks of when discussing wives or fiancées or girlfriends; nor was it the love a father or brother or relative feels for the corresponding relative. No, it was its own state of love, a variation upon the Form, which I suppose every instance of love is, as each contains its own history by which its proclivities and idiosyncracies are fashioned. And at the time I could not help but feel as though it all gravitated around your innocence, one that was never truly lost, but eventually obfuscated by the opaque cynicism that all too often clouds the desire to be earnest, which is perhaps the kernel of love. Yes, the desire to be earnest, sincere. And so maybe your innocence was just how I experienced that kernel of truth that united the two of us. And for all I know maybe you see the same thing in me; maybe you cannot help but perceive my innocence. And now you have a child that was born in your likeness, an extension of your innocence. And now she has a husband who will rear his daughter from the confines of a photograph or a candid moment on a video. His only testimonial will come in the form of a one-page letter that he never thought he'd have to share; and yet she will read it like scripture—Frankie's Epistle. The letter was discovered on his body—badly burned, as he had been murdered by a form of blindness that had manifested itself in an I.E.D. He had been murdered because he wanted to protect us, because he thought enlisting was the noble thing to do. He was going to fight on the side of freedom, the quiet American surrounded by other quiet Americans and led by an ugly American. But it was not a battle of valor; it is not a battle of valor over there. It is just a series of murders—some justified, most not. I know that he probably had to commit murder. I know that collateral damage is not miscalculated self-defense; it is a form of murder. He knew it, too. And it was a cumbersome and agonizing epiphany that he came to recognize rather quickly. And then the guilt sank in. He was suffering over there, the suffering fueled by indignation, as so many were incapable of seeing him as defender; rather, he was the oppressor, the aggressor, another belligerent for whom conquest and imperialism were his sole motives. He was profoundly shocked, outraged by the role he had been asked to fill. I knew that he was. War may change even the most intractable, but it cannot eradicate the virtue of integrity unless that person capitulates to hatred. And this is something that he never did, something that he was not capable of. And while a more pessimistic spectator of humanity may claim to know that the world spins upon axes of avarice and wrath, that civilizations evince their advances by measuring the carnage in their wake, there is a wealth of stubbornness that one must attribute to this spectator, for whom all probity is but a lie, for whom heroism is but vanity's most cunning pretense. Yes, there is a stubbornness that will not admit the grace that seeks not to reveal itself. And Frankie was one who maintained his grace, his desire to simply protect, but not destroy, even if he was ordered to do so. He was there for reasons that were his own. And while he probably regretted the decision from time to time, he knew that he had done what he believed was right. He did not enlist to either perpetuate hatred or fulfill an atavistic duty. (He was not a military kid. His father had served in Vietnam, and his grandfather had served in the Pacific, and his great grandfather had fought in the gruesome trenches that continue to scar the European landscape (though perhaps not physically), but his family did not want to be the American Cornellii Scipiones. Perhaps they were each more akin to the ideals set forth by Cincinnatus). He was there because he believed it was the right thing to do. And he understood it as a corollary following from beliefs that he held, not as something that was categorical. He knew that I was against the war, and that others were against the war. And he understood that we believed it was wrong for reasons that stemmed from primary beliefs he did not share. But he respected them. That is why he was always calm as he argued the necessity of a liberated Iraq. He never regurgitated Bushisms, and he never questioned my patriotism. He felt sick because of the ignorance and arrogance of so many of his fellow soldiers, as well as those who shared many of his political views. They talked about shooting ragheads; one guy said he wanted to “Round up every sona'bitch named Mohammad, put'm in a camp, and drop a fuckin' nuke on'm.” I believe the words, “Git'r done” were then added—though it may have been a bit early for that. On leave in Switzerland, a young G.I. tried to baptize him. Frankie was so ashamed of all of this, so ashamed that he fought to uphold freedom and democracy, whereas others were there to participate in holy war and blind vengeance. They were there to destroy, just like the Thanatists of Flights 11 and 77 and 93 and 175, like the people who celebrate and communicate by firing automatic weapons into the air, apparently ignorant or perhaps dismissive of the Western proverb, “What goes up, must come down.” While on leave prior to his deployment, he seemed more like a man than anyone probably should be at so young an age. He had always been intelligent, disciplined; but he was more so when I saw him last. He was so calm and thoughtful for someone who would soon be asked to sacrifice both his life and the lives of others for an idealism in which so long ago I began to lose faith. And now I have—completely and absolutely. That faith's swan song accompanied the firing of seven armed men who stood within yards of his grave. Quiet outrage flowed through so many of the people there during the service. Many of his friends were twisting their programs, their eyes swollen and concentrated in resentment. Whispered sentiments of “This is fucking bullshit” and “Fu
ck Bush” erupted at sporadic intervals. There was rage against death, rage against war, rage against Mission Accomplished. I was enraged by the fact that his pallbearers were denied the privilege of laying him to rest; instead they had to surrender even his corpse to four Marines, four children, who stood stoic in the wet snow, who didn't know him, who would later attempt to console us by expressing regret for having never known him, who…. But it's not their fault, is it? How can I be angry with men who have been ordered to do these things? How can I hold a grudge against someone who has been commanded to provide something as benign as consolation?). It's so lucid, as is Frankie's wake, as well as the aftermath, when I told Allison that I would always be there for her. And yet I haven't: Allison, who has endured so much death and difficulty. Allison, I have forgotten about you; I have not always been there. And I could lie to myself, and say that it's distance. But it's not distance. It's never distance. But I can't think of all of this now; I can't let myself get caught up in a past that I abandoned so many years ago.