by Jonathan Foreman
At midday we spot a village. Dunphy tells us to wait and he trudges ahead, his boots struggling against the brown sand. We lie still on our stomachs, very still, feeling the skin on our ears bubble. We wish for our helmets.
Time passes. The sun beats high in the sky. Marcel says he’ll find Dunphy. Rodrigo nods. I stay perfectly still. I think I hear a child laughing from the town. I glance over at Rodrigo and our eyes meet. If we stay out in this sun we will die, he says. I say nothing.
He rises to his feet and slips ahead. His body is hunched over as he walks. Soon he is gone behind the closest stone house. I wait. My eyes hurt. I rarely blink.
I hear a gunshot. Then many, a constant tap. I hear yelling, shouting, screaming. I find that I am screaming too, louder, so that all I hear is my own screams and nothing else. I rise and run toward the town. My hair is soaking wet, and hangs down my back. I am still screaming. I reach the town square. I am holding my M240. I hold it tight, my gloved finger pressed up against the trigger.
At the town square I become silent. There are men everywhere. They hold weapons and they yell. They fire with their elbows back, and their heads against low parapets. They curse and spit. Some yell curses in poor English. One yells out ‘yamanyack,’ another, ‘you fuck asshole, you blowjob queen.’ One is laughing, he coughs after every loud exhale. His cheek is shot open. His black molars show, lined with blood. He’s still laughing.
They hide on rooftops, behind desert grass, behind the fallen and the living. They shout for help, for death, for mothers and God, for Allah and Jesus. I close my eyes. I feel a bullet graze my ear. My neck is boiling. I listen for voices. I open my eyes, raise the gun and start to fire. I aim at anything that moves. I keep firing. My arms shake. My heart grips my chest and squeezes.
Awake or asleep. I think awake. There’s a dripping sound, a steady drip; I don’t dream in sound. Coffee’s already made. I pour it into a stained brown mug. It burns the roof of my mouth. Definitely awake. I reach and squeeze the faucet nozzle, and run my finger underneath. Dry rust.
Outside, the air is heavy, hard to breathe. I smell stale cigarette butts. Crouching, I rub my knuckles across the pavement, over green glass shards. My knuckles bleed. Some of the smaller shards float like Egyptians in a Biblical sea, floating in endless rings.
The sound of a hollow spray snaps me back. Fuck, pissing in the trashcan. I readjust my aim and gaze off into the bathroom mirror. My gray wiry beard. Trash-bags hang under my eyes. “Coward.” The moving lips snarl, and the dark gums part and end with a grin.
Sunshine bakes my shoulders. The paper towel wrapped around my hand is a soaked crimson. I grasp a seven-dollar bottle of Noilly Prat vermouth half empty (or half full). “You get in a fight?” some passing wise-ass would say and I’d say, “yea, you should have seen the other guy.” He’d cock his head and say, “I don’t want any trouble.”
“Then why the fuck are you talking to me?”
I turn around to face the abandoned apartment building. How did I get here? The brick foundation is crumbling at the corner. I remember the sand, the heat. But mostly the sand, wondering how deep it sunk, what it concealed, and when it ended.
“Sir, are you all right?” The sound of an actual voice snaps me out of my trance.
My eyes scan the hollow face for any sign of recognition. He’s clean-shaven and his teeth jut at different angles. He keeps smiling. He smiles before-during-and-after every word.
“Do I look like a sir?” I stutter.
He grins even wider. “Sorry, I asked.” I squeeze the neck of the bottle, twisting tightly in my tensed hands. He turns away and walks down the street waving his leather briefcase with every step.
“Fucking coward,” I hear in the dead center of my brain. The words resonate louder and louder against the taut walls of skin encompassing my skull. I rise to my feet ~fucking~ noting the hole in the left knee ~coward~ of my sweatpants. I see a bald spot on the back of his head. I picture his face. He is still smiling. I squint and lift the bottle over my head. He is laughing. I heave with a grunt. For a moment I follow the projectile glass unsure of what sparked its initial motion. My arms are tingling. My blood is pumping fast. My heart grips my chest and squeezes.
The sound of a hollow spray snaps me back. Fuck, pissing in the trashcan again. I readjust my aim and gaze off into the bathroom mirror. The moving lips, the dark gums part and end with a grin. One hand is bandaged bright red. I squeeze the other into a fist and smash the glass. “You should have seen the other guy,” I say.
I’m asleep this time. I’m driving an orange school bus down a road to Tirgari. At Khuga Khey, I stop and all the passengers exit, nameless and faceless, bayonets resting on their right shoulders. I close the door. Yellow and white lined lane dividers shift left and right in unbroken motion. The bus lifts off over desert dunes. I squint through the rearview mirror and fading in the distance I think that I see fighting. A kid running away. Gun shots, and men hiding behind mailboxes, behind tricycles, behind mothers and children, waving automatic weapons. The boy drops his gun and helmet. He keeps running. He’s just a kid. He’ll run for hours. I readjust the mirror and see myself. There I lie, my legs cocked, half buried, and my unshaven face motionless in my armpit. Dirt explodes within inches of my right ear. The boy arrives. He digs through the sand underneath me. He digs until sand wedges underneath his fingernails and they hang off his fingertips like the bark of a dying maple tree. He climbs into the concave and it collapses around him. There he waits.
I call for an ambulance. “A man has been hurt.” I say.
“Where are you calling from, sir?”
“I don’t know,” and I didn’t.
“Can you give us more information? Are you there, sir? Sir?”
I don’t answer. I hang up the phone.
Outside the air is thick and muggy. The sun is escaping fast past the overgrown brick row-homes. I walk towards the body, taking note of each footstep so that the timing of each step is directly proportional to the next. I avoid every crack in the sidewalk, and when I step on one I say a ‘Hail Mary’ under my breath and walk faster. I lean down; he’s still breathing. I lift up his tan leather briefcase, and shake it a few times.
I reach inside, leaving a bloody trail against the zipper, and pull out a thick book with a black cover. There is a gold cross engraved in the center. A Bible. I turn him over. He’s balding at his right temple, and he wears a white collar, now stained. His lips are relaxed in a natural grin. Still smiling. My surroundings spin. The wood splintered fences, the brick row-homes, the green weeds in the sidewalk cracks, and the Bible. I swing my head to the side and vomit.
He wakes around dawn. Light streams over him through the apartment’s twisted Venetian blinds; over the uncovered, brown, water-stained mattress where he lies. I sit on a wooden chair.
“Where am I?” I ask him.
He stares at me blankly and tries to speak but cannot. I grab a glass from the sink, fill it with cold coffee, and hand it to him. He gratefully lifts the cup to his lips. He takes a sip and spits it back out.
“I was serving in the 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry, stationed two miles west of Bamiam, Afganistan. Our humvee rolled over a landmine. I was left alone in the middle of the desert. I was just a kid,” I tell him, “I should be dead.”
“Why do you tell me this?”
“I don’t know,” and I didn’t.
“You are looking for an answer,” he says, “Because you were unlikely to be saved, you believe it to be impossible. You confused the two.“
“It is impossible.”
His pupils focus and he begins to speak faster. He isn’t smiling anymore. “I’m a priest, before you try anything, consider your conscience.”
“If I wanted to kill you-”
“I doubt whatever you are about to say is the least bit reassuring.”
I relax my body to show him I intend no harm, “I was only a kid. I’ve aged since, significantly. I’m missing large chunks, years of my life.”
I lean in, “Where are we?”
“America,” he says and closes his eyes.
At daybreak I awake in my rigid chair, barely able to move my spine. I twist my hips gradually. My neck cracks. I arise to my feet in pure agony.
“I thought you’d ask me about God by now. If this was heaven.” The priest says, his eyes half open.
“I don’t believe in God . . . or heaven.”
The priest coughs. His left hand clutches the mattress; his right, the side of his head. “I’ve been in and out of sleep for hours. You struck me, and brought me here.”
I massage my shoulder. “That’s how it happened, I can’t change that, but seeing you here, right now I thought you’d have answers.”
“Of why you find the world confusing?”
“Only my past is confusing.”
“You convince yourself that things happened the way they happened. You survived for a reason, and you most likely know this reason. You hide, run away from the truth. Maybe you’ll find solace when you stop.” I have a strong urge to ask his name, but resist based on the likely rejection. “but why ask questions of a man of God, if you don’t believe in God?”
“I believed once.”
“Perhaps you should try to make peace with yourself. I can’t help you with your problems.”
“I wrestled with that for a while.” I rise and with my back to my chair. “I heard somewhere that what you aren’t, is what defines you, I just need an outside perspective.” I haven’t spoken to anyone in over a year I whisper.
“What are you hiding from?”
“Car doors sound like gun shots.”
“Have you ever been to confession?” He says begrudgingly.
“What kind of a priest are you?”
“Roman Catholic,” he says.
I frown. “That doesn’t help me. If I repent, I get a clean slate, isn’t that it?”
“So you believe that makes us the same?”
“No, we aren’t the same,” I say, “I’ve got nothing to repent.”
I’m waving goodbye to the priest as he walks away. I’m still waving long after he is out of sight. Eventually my arm tires and I decide to take a nap. It’s mid-afternoon and the sun is beginning to beat hard on the asphalt. I lie down on the side of the road; my legs bending back behind my body. The warmth from the street rises and blankets me in pure comfort. I wait for sleep to come.
I dream of a boy running through alleyways. It’s June 15th. He’s running through gravestones in Petersburg, Virginia. He bursts through clouds of smoke. He shields his face. It’s April 16th. He pushes through crowds in Tieneman Square. He meanders between rows of tanks. He sees faces frowning. Faces crying. It’s December 7th, he runs down the beaches of Hawaii. He dives into the water and starts to swim. His body is catapulted forward by explosions. The waves fight violently against the overlying jet engines. He thinks he can feel heat. The water is boiling. He keeps swimming. He is a dot in the middle of the ocean. He swims further until there is no land in site. He tilts his head back. The water tugs at his thick hair. There he floats on his back. The waves lap at his body. He is alone. He is a speck. He closes his eyes and wishes never to be found.