by Brooke King
Some people wouldn’t call my childhood conventional, but then again none of my life has been conventional. What bothered me now at the age of twenty-one was how I would move past this point in my life. It had taken me years to come to terms with my childhood, to accept that my father had done the best he could; that my mother, with all her massive faults, didn’t want me and still doesn’t; that my grandparents tried as best they could to help me, my brother, and my dad; but the truth was, the three of us were the outcasts of the family, seen as failures in part because of my dad. Now I had come back from war changed even more. How was I going to resolve this part of my life? How can anyone come back from war and walk through the rest of their life without feeling as though they haven’t really left the war behind?
When I came back from Iraq, I asked Dad if he remembered that night at the Grateful Dead concert. He told me no with a smile. He asked me if I remembered what Iraq was really like, and I told him that it was like when you crack your back and a drop of spinal fluid pops out a dose of leftover acid and you trip for days, forgetting time and space, the reality molded together with the past, a blend of symphonic melodies merging into pastel watercolors that drip from a painting on the wall that is in reality just another memory of a mangled corpse that you forgot you put into a body bag. Dad looked at me, not with sympathy but with horror as he leaned back in his chair, trying to hold back the tears as he said, “What have they done to you, Brooke?”
At a Glance
At nights when I was awake, the war followed me around the sleeping house, making victims of the darkness. I paced the floors of the kitchen, and living room, and around the rim of the pool while thinking about the stillness of the palm trees, the fog that was seeping in from the beaches inland and up the canyon. The hedgerow was tall enough now that I couldn’t see over it. I stood on the diving board, my feet barely lingering over the edge, and looked out past the canyon, past I-8 toward San Diego State University. Several of the dorm lights were on. I imagined what they were doing. Some studying. Others drinking their faces off, trying to make memories of a time when there wasn’t trouble or any bills to pay, just the promise of a good time and a bad hangover. I zoomed out. Looked at the rest of the world around me. Americans going about their lives, but I let my mind trickle off until my imagination took over and I stood there at that very moment, wondering if there wasn’t somewhere in Iraq a young man preparing for the afternoon.
He looks out through his bedroom window, at the vast wasteland that has become his home, and tries to remember what his life used to be before the war, before violence knocked at his door begging him to take notice of the landscape, of what his country had become. And maybe he does this because there is a deep need to understand that the world around him has changed, has grown accustomed to hatred and the promise of bullets. And as he stands there looking out past his car, beyond where the horizon melts into the land, maybe he does this to breach the meaning of war, to emerge fully from the cocooned existence of his home to the street where he will drive his car a few moments later, where he descends into a maddening state of rage that he must feel in order to commit himself fully to steering toward the tank that awaits him by the overpass. Maybe he must do this to gain what little destiny he can control. But as he drives down the road, does he think about the roads lined with bombs, or the mother who will soon be left childless, both her children taken by this war? Does he wonder what life would be like in America, what a young man his age would be doing if his life did not revolve around chaos and the uncertainty of living through to the next day? Does he wish for just another night’s rest? Will he think of the finality of it all when the bullets come piercing through the grille and into the radiator, penetrating the cab of the car? Will he think of the certainty of his death just before his car crashes into the ditch, a flying piece of metal made shrapnel splitting the side of his skull open, exposing his brain tissue to the tan interior of the headrest? Will he contemplate the end as his breathing labors and gives way to a deepening of his eyelids as soldiers rush toward the car, a medic trying to work on his injury as he slowly closes his mind to the violence of it all?
I thought of all these things and more as I stood hovering above the covered pool, forcing back the urge to step off and let the waves of blue plastic take me under.
*
What happens when the war follows you home? How do you break apart those moments, divide them into categories of living, and continue with your life as though those moments never happened at all?
*
I got a phone call the other day, the voice on the end of the line barely recognizable. James. He told me he was leaving Mannheim soon, that he was getting out early for good behavior, that soon he would be in San Diego. He must have heard the panic in my voice when I told him to hurry because he cut the conversation short, with an I love you and a see you soon.
Household Goods
My stuff from Germany arrived on an unmarked truck, the boxes stacked halfway up to the ceiling in my room. I opened the first box. Nana was there to help. Grandpa stood off to the side, waiting for it. Inside on the top were uniforms; one by one Nana pulled them out and set them aside until she got to the last one. It was mangled, charred, and blood-splotched stains covered it in patches. I could hear Nana gasp as she looked up at me. The tears were already spilling over my cheeks as she got up and left the room. I got up too, walked past Gramps, and went into the living room, where Nana was sitting in her blue chair, her hands covering her face. I sat on the armrest, put my arms around her, and told her that it was okay, that I was fine, that I had made it back alive and in one piece. I told her lies.
*
James made it to San Diego a few weeks later, and when he arrived at the airport, I stood there and held him in my arms and cried. I still don’t remember why I did it. Perhaps out of grief, or longing, or time spent apart, or maybe because now I finally had someone in the house who understood what had happened to me or at least had a vague inkling of the aftermath.
The checkups at the doctor were going fine. The boys were getting bigger. I was getting bigger, but there was not enough of me to contain the war inside.
*
I was standing in the car seat aisle of Babies R Us staring at a dark blue- and tan-covered matching car seat and stroller combo. The pattern looked checkered or maybe digital. James walked up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. When I jumped from his touch, he wrapped his arms around me and held my stomach, putting one hand on each side of the boys. I told him that I couldn’t decide which car seat combo I liked the best, which pattern I wanted to buy. He laughed at me and said that if this was the least of my worries now, then I should be fine with everything else that was going on. I knew what he was talking about, but my indecision on car seats infuriated me, and soon I turned to practicality. I tried to pull the stroller out, but it was stuck. James lent a hand, pulled it out, and pushed it toward me, telling me that the tandem style was a bit big, that it might not fit in the Camry. I held on to the handle, pushing it back and forth along the tile floor. James was smiling. I asked him about it and he replied that I had changed. His comment made me nervous. I let go of the stroller and walked away, telling him that this one will work, to get a sales guy to help him, and that I’d be in the car.
*
I could no longer sleep. Between the heartburn, acid reflux, and too much baby, I could barely lie down. I tried to sleep sitting up, but most nights I sat awake, looking at James as he slept.
*
I remembered him asking me once if I had gone to the VA yet. I told him yes. And then he asked it: “So did they tell you you’re crazy because of the war?”
Part 6
In shaa Allah
Just before You Die
It was November 25, 2007. A few days after my birthday. Almost Thanksgiving. We were sitting in the living room watching the news when a story about a bombing in Baghdad came on. Grandpa turned to James and asked if it was anywhere near wh
ere we were stationed. I tried to get up from the couch, but I fell back down into the pillow-entrenched seat cushion. James answered him with a polite yes, that it was about four minutes away from where our base was. My heart started to race. I had to get up. I had to get out of the room, but I couldn’t get out of the couch. I tried harder and harder to rise up from the cushions, but the panic was pushing me back down into place. Nana told Grandpa to shut up, and everyone looked at me. I couldn’t breathe. I sucked in air as fast as I could, but it felt as though my esophagus was closing in on itself. James got up and lifted me from the couch, but I stumbled and fell to the carpet. On all fours, I knelt, panicked, unable to breathe. Was it anyone I knew? If I had been there, could it have been me? The thoughts raced and raced until the panic was overwhelming. Tears spilled onto the carpet and I could not catch my breath. The place, the timing, the people, the waves and waves of grief and shame crest over, bashing my body against the pain of remembering. An ocean of survivor’s guilt built up into a hurricane, the waves breaking too high over my head, swallowing me up into the carpet. My body drifting swiftly out to sea, the rip current too much pull for my body to handle. And then it came, a pain in my stomach, the churning of a sharp ache like shrapnel ripping through your flesh, searing the skin as it passed. I screamed in pain. James did not know what to do. Nana said the boys were coming, but I could not bring myself to my feet. It was too early. They were too early. It was only thirty-five weeks.
At the hospital, my doctor came in, told me that they had to give me a series of injections to make the babies’ lungs develop enough to give them a chance at survival after the birth. I was in tears. James was upset. Nana and Grandpa sat in the wings. Nana was asking questions. They said I could go home in the morning, that they had stopped the labor; the contractions had subsided, but I didn’t feel any different. I knew something was wrong still, but I didn’t know anything about giving birth, let alone doctorly things like lung development or contractions. I had skipped those mommy-to-be classes, and now I was kicking myself because I wished I knew what the hell they were talking about. I wish I had asked more questions.
Even though it was the next day and they said that I might be released, I had not left the hospital. There was pain, sharp and unrelenting, that went on for minutes, but sometimes only seconds. The night before, I had asked one of the nurses what contractions were and what they felt like. She laughed at me. She must have thought I was joking, but I wasn’t. She stopped laughing and said, “Honey, when you start getting contractions before birth, you’ll know what they are.” This had to be what a contraction was, because it hurt like hell, like one big “fuck you” from the inside of my body to me, compliments of the two little babies who were about to come pouring out of me at any minute. What I hadn’t known at the time was that during the night one of the boys had turned sideways, pushing the other baby toward my cervix, but as the anesthesiologist gave me my first epidural the next morning and laid me back down onto the bed, the baby that was shoved down near my cervix began to go into distress. At some point after the first epidural, he pinched my foot and asked if I felt that, to which I replied, “Ya,” and “Aren’t I not supposed to feel anything below the waist?” He looked perplexed and told me that he would be back again in a few minutes to check and see if the epidural had kicked in yet. But before the anesthesiologist had made it back to my room, the needle on the fetal monitor that I was hooked up to began spiking all over the place; one baby’s heart rate was too high. At the sound of the fetal monitor chiming loudly, a nurse came running in. She asked me if I could feel my legs. I told her yes. The anesthesiologist was paged, but when my doctor walked in and looked at the fetal monitor, he told the nurse that there was no time for another epidural. The anesthesiologist would have to try again once I was inside the operating room. Once in the operating room, the anesthesiologist gave me another epidural, about ten minutes after the first one, but it did not work either. Apparently, I had too high a tolerance for pain. It was too late to try anything else; they would have to give me local anesthetic. If they waited any longer, we might lose one of the boys. They took James away to scrub down. A curtain was put up so I couldn’t see what they were doing. The doctor told me that he was giving me local anesthesia. He began cutting me open. It didn’t work. I felt the scalpel tearing into my flesh. I screamed loudly. James could hear it from the other room. The doctor asked me if I could feel it, and when I screamed yes, they decided to wait a second to see if it would kick in, but I was bleeding too much. As James came in, he rushed to me and asked what was wrong. I told him in half shouted screams that I could feel them cutting me open, that the pain was too much. The anesthesiologist came in, upped my dosage of pain killers, but it still was not enough. They couldn’t wait any longer. They had to deliver the babies, so I lied and told the doctor I couldn’t feel any pain, but the truth was, I could feel the scalpel cut into my skin again. James was there, and because he was scared, I bit my lip and held back the screams and the scared look from my face. I could feel them digging into my abdomen and then I saw him—the first baby came out. Bowen. Then a minute later another tug and pull into my abdomen and Zachary came in to the world. I have a picture of all four of us right after they were born, but I don’t remember the moment the picture depicts. By the time the boys were cleaned up and the doctor was sewing me shut, I had lost consciousness, the pain too much for me to bear any longer.
Battle Fatigue
They said I died.
He stood above me with both newborns in his hands. The blood still fresh on the surgical tools. My eyes still open as he looked at me.
They said I died when my heart gave out.
The reflex to keep fighting waned from my body. Each boy’s face pulled up, shown over the curtain, and taken away. Seduced by the feeling of completion, the utterance of some deathly man’s voice breaking open the creases of my lips, beckoning me to take one last breath, taunting me with glimpses of that hero’s death, as he traced the outline of his finger around the serrated flesh resting on my abdomen and drew up the line toward my heart until the tip of relief pressed firmly on my heart and then released.
A tear drew down my cheek in a translucent stream, as I realized the consequence of my submitting to open abdominal surgery with no muscle paralysis to calm the pain of the metal meeting flesh, the burrowing sensation of steel splaying open my insides, the warm blood seeping down from all sides as the doctors perform magic with carefully placed hands inside what was once a sacred vessel. Here, death was no longer a dream or a hope. There was only the agony of real pain with no hushed words of comfort, no hands held tight. There were scared faces that drew back from the curtain and looked at you as though this, this was the last of you. This was the measure of your sacrifice. For those who were left in the room, this would’ve been their last memory of me.
They said I died when my heart gave out right after the boys were born.
And after he left the OR to take both newborn boys to the NICU, after they sewed the abdomen back together with sutures and staples, after working on my body with paddles for three minutes, after two shots of epinephrine and chest compressions, after they called time of death, 7:32 a.m., my body refused to die. Hours later in the recovery room when the doctor told me that in all his years of being an OB/GYN, he’d never seen someone come back to life, I replied back through morphine gurgles, “Can’t kill me. I’m already dead. Did it in Iraq. Six bullets in a fifteen-year-old boy’s chest.”
They said I died when my heart gave out.
The Boys Come into the House
I set it aside. The war. I pushed it away. Locked out the memories as best I could. When I came out of the hospital five days later, America was still there. Each person walked around, blinders on, their head down toward brightly lit screen texting coded messages to friends, and family, and lovers. Cars drive past down the freeways toward their houses, apartments, jobs, or malls. Consumers swipe credit cards, paying for material things like clo
thes, shoes, cookie-cutter furniture from Ikea that they couldn’t hope to assemble even with well-written instructions. They borrowed money they didn’t have. Drove cars they couldn’t possibly afford. Went to college they knew someday they’d have to pay for once they got a job that barely paid enough to cover all the other things they couldn’t afford. Americans being Americans, shielded from the violence in the streets in Iraq, the hate that rolled off lips in foreign languages indecipherable to those pointing the weapons, the anger made out in vests that exploded the truth behind the rage, the misunderstanding of the Qur’an and what it meant to be Muslim, and fists balled up in protest for their country, the one we invaded, destroyed, disassembled on false pretenses. And still, America sat there at Starbucks and drank hypocrisy in a cup while shaking their heads at the headlines in the New York Times as they said, “What a shame it is for those poor people in Iraq, what a shame it is to be a country at war.”