A Hard and Heavy Thing (41 page)

“We had this big concrete T-wall that stood in front of our door so if mortars came in at just the right spot, the frag wouldn't fly through our doorway. We stole a projector, hooked a laptop and speakers to it, and we made our own outdoor theater.”

“What else?”

“It lasted a week because the bugs were so bad. And the camel spiders.”

“What else?”

“We drank liquor that girlfriends shipped over in mouthwash bottles.”

“What else?”

“At night?” he said. “After missions? We played our guitars and sang songs against the war. Our soldiers smoked shisha and sang harmonies.”

She said nothing, but remembered a night with Nick years ago.

“Don't you want to know what else?”

She took a drink, shook her head. “You don't have to.”

“We put bullets in the faces of old men who drove too close. We detained teenagers, beat them up, and put sandbags over their heads because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and they were born in the wrong country. We did it because we were terrified. We were terrified all the time.”

She said nothing for a long time, but he stared at her intensely, waiting. She was afraid to look away.

“What am I supposed to say to that?” she finally said.

“Who said you had to say anything?”

She looked away and finished her drink.

“Let's smoke,” he said.

He was sad.

She was drunk and wanted to make him happy, so they smoked in the living room. They sat on the floor with their backs against the couch. They ashed in empty beer bottles. She was glad they had changed rooms.

“You're good to me,” he said. “All you've done for me. Letting me stay here, letting me smoke here.” He swept his hand out in front of him. “I missed you.”

“Good. We missed you.”

Levi looked down at his cigarette, which he held between two fingers on a hand that rested on the floor. He rested a beer bottle on his poochy stomach. He looked like he might fall asleep like that.

His head bobbed like an old man with Parkinson's. “So,” he said. “Two weeks after getting to Panjwai on my second trip to Afghanistan, we got in a TIC. Have you read that phrase in any of your books? TIC? Troops in contact?”

She nodded. She didn't want to know anymore, to drink anymore, or to talk anymore, but it was now obvious that he needed to tell her.

She asked him to go on.

“We took heavy fire. People died. Whatever.”

He said this as if it were nothing.

“We walked out again, and once again, of course, we took contact. The platoon sergeant was on R&R and our LT was this young hot-headed type. He started talking all sorts of nonsense like he was going to raze villages. He was going to go out on the next mission and scorch the earth. It was probably a bunch of blustering bullshit, but there were rumblings in the platoon, and not your typical and perfectly natural revenge-speak rumblings. There were some deep, dark, seriously ominous undertones here.”

He drank and lifted his cigarette to his lips, struggling immensely with the weight of it. When his palm had plopped back on the carpet, he once again stared at the smoke that streamed straight up between his fingers.

He nodded and inhaled deeply through his nose. “I was tired and I didn't want to scorch anything, so I said I was sick. I lied. I was just so tired. So they went out and I was alone. Like a big coward. I was the only one in our little wooden B-hut for hours. I cleaned my weapons. I cleaned my pistol. That nine mil looked so attractive.”

His voice grew soft. “And I was so tired. So tired.”

He put his hand over his face.

She rubbed his back. “That's all in the past,” she told him. “You're here now.”

“I picked it up,” he said. “I was just curious is all. I even cleared it two, three, four times. I swear I cleared it. I stood up and looked in the mirror. Curious is all. I put it to my head.”

He dropped the cigarette into his nearly empty beer bottle. He turned to her. “I put it up to my temple, like this. I wondered how easy it would be to pull the trigger. I tried squeezing and I closed my eyes and I began to squeeze, but I couldn't. I opened my eyes again and saw the placid look on my face and the void in my own eyes and I saw the pistol against my head. What difference does it make? I thought. You're already dead. Have been dead for quite some time. I was going to pull the trigger for real then. I don't know. Just to see if I could. To see what it would feel like.”

Eris exhaled. She reached out and put a hand on top of Levi's. She squeezed his hand. “What else?”

“I didn't get the chance.”

Levi lit another cigarette with one hand. He leaned back against the couch and smoked. He left his other hand under Eris's. “I didn't get the chance. An Air Force captain I had never seen before walked in and freaked out. I guess he was part of some PRT, provincial reconstruction team, and they were stopping into our COP because they had busted a tie rod or something. He came into our B-hut because obviously the COP was nearly empty. He was looking for someone in charge.”

Levi laughed. “A regular deus ex machina,” he said. He shook his head and turned his arm around.

He held Eris's hand.

“Anyway,” he went on. “This prick signed a sworn statement saying I had a loaded magazine with me. But I swear I cleared it. Or at least, I thought I did. But he said I had a magazine and he had two bars on his collar and I had none, so that was that. And that made all the difference between the army calling it suicidal ideation and a suicide attempt. They tried to keep it low key, to keep me in country, but once it's labeled a suicide attempt, the entire army has to have a simultaneous knee-jerk freak-out.”

He waved his cigarette and grew agitated. She tried pulling her hand back, but he squeezed it and held on.

“So they made me do this video chat with a psychologist whose sole purpose—or so it seemed at the time—was to get me to tell the truth to myself. ‘The truth will set you free,' he said. ‘That's a quote from the Bible.' And I told him I could quote it too, and I said, ‘What is truth?' I said it very ruefully.”

Eris tried smiling, but it was a sad smile. “Did he get it?”

“Of course not. He didn't get it. He kept on howling that only if I tell the truth to myself can I heal, but I kept telling him the truth, which was that I had cleared the gun first. It wasn't loaded. I swore it wasn't loaded. And the Internet connection kept going out and he wasn't listening to me. I got so angry at all of it, got so angry that this was their idea of helping me, so I threw the computer monitor against the wall. That triggered an Article 15 Non-Judicial Punishment for violations of the UCMJ, the Uniformed Code of Military Justice.”

“Sounds serious.”

He shrugged. “So they sent me back to Fort Drum. Purgatory in rear detachment. Rear D we called it. Everyone else in Rear D were these guys who had skated the deployment, did whatever they could to get a duty-limiting profile. They were all guys who had never been in combat, so they had no clue. None. So if I was ostracized before, after the reported suicide attempt and Article 15, imagine how I felt in Rear D.”

“I can't imagine.” She didn't know what to say. She stood up and pulled her hand away as she did. “Do you want some water? I could use some water,” she said. “I think you should have some water.”

He spilled beer down his chin. “I drank a lot,” he said. “If you think I drink a lot now, you should have seen me then. Ha. This is nothing. After I don't even know how many days waking up late and smelling like booze, they cut me loose. Yup. That's right,” he said. “They cut me loose. Oh, but quietly, of course.”

Levi spoke with bravado and he stood. He swayed with his chest out against his unseen enemy. He took a step toward her. She lost her balance and fell backward until she was sitting on the couch.

“They could have charged me with who knows how many counts of dereliction of duty and who knows what else, but the PR wouldn't look good if they took a Silver Star Winner, a bona fide war hero to court just for being tired and depressed. And we all know nothing is more important to the military than their precious PR, their precious image, no matter how many of their own they end up eating in the process. So they burned me. Escorted me off the base like a common criminal and said they were doing me a favor. And here we are.”

He plopped down next to her.

“And here we are.”

“Because I got my friends killed and I got Nick hurt.”

She shook her head. She didn't know what he was talking about.

“It's true,” he said. He put a hand on her cheek.

She shook her head.

She shook her head against all the ways he said he was to blame for what had happened to Nick, all the ways he was at fault, all the ways it should have been him instead. She shook her head when he pulled a small stone from his pocket and starting raving like a madman; when he begged her to look at it; when he pleaded for her to touch it so she would feel it too, so she would really know how heavy it was. She shook her head so hard she stopped hearing him.

“Are you even listening?” he asked. “Why some and not others?” he asked. “If it's not my fault, then whose is it? Why did it happen? Why? Why? Why?”

She cried. “Why ask why?”

“You sound like Nick.”

She put her head down. She wiped at her tears.

He took one of her hands. She sniffed, stopped crying.

And she had an idea. She tried her best to sound like the best of Nick. She tried to sound full of grace and kindness. She tried to sound wise and knowledgeable and full of faith.

“When the ancient Israelites were wandering in the desert,” she said, “the priests offered sacrifices to the Lord. There were sacrifices for everything.”

He let his head lean back against the top of the couch, and he turned to look at her, bored, eyes glazed.

His disinterest emboldened her. She would not be deterred. She was—for the first time in her life—possessed by the Holy Ghost.

“In one of these prescribed sacrifices,” she said. “To purify an unclean house? The priest would take two birds. Imagine this priest in his robes and his turban with all twelve ornate stones on his breastplate and the Urim and Thummim hidden away inside. Imagine him carrying these two doves in their rickety wooden cage to the altar where he sets it next to a small block of cedar, a handful of hyssop, a length of scarlet yarn, and clay pot filled with water.

“He did this,” she said. “Picture it. He opens the cage just far enough to reach inside and grab one of the birds and he takes hold of it without letting the other go. He holds this cooing dove over the clean water and he strokes its head and then he wrings its neck. He holds it there and lets the blood drip into the pot while the other bird watches. Then he tosses the dead bird to the side, discarding it like it's less than nothing. Then he turns to the other dove, the one who saw his friend, his mate, his love killed in front of him. The priest grabs the second dove and holds it in one hand, tight enough to feel its little heart flutter with fear. And this bird looks from side to side, his eyes darting around looking for an escape. He tries lifting his wings but he can't, and his heart beats faster and faster. With his other hand, the priest grabs the wood, hyssop, and yarn and he puts them in the water. Then he holds this terrified bird with both hands and he plunges it into the bowl, down under the water, painting his white feathers red with blood. Then he takes it out to the field, wet, scared, shaking, covered in the blood of his friend, and he opens his hands. For no reason but grace, the bird flies free.”

Levi let out an exasperated sigh. “Did you ever consider that bird? What a miserable life he must have led after that?”

She shook her head sadly, her fire now gone. She had no power to make the blind see. “Are you sure you don't want water?”

She stood.

He followed her to the sink. “What then?” he asked. “Is that dove ever the same? Does that blood mark him? Ostracize him? Does he share that story with all the other birds? Would they care if he did? Is he grateful? Or does he live with guilt because he lives and flies and roosts? While the other bird lies limp, broken, dead? Does he ever cry for no reason?”

“Or,” she asked him, “does he savor every moment? Every taste of worm, every ray of sunshine, every gust that lifts his wings and allows him to coast upon the breeze? Does he savor every touch?”

She had read accounts of soldiers in battle being in such grave danger of getting overrun by the enemy that they had no choice but to call in artillery so close to their own position that they risked injury or death from the incoming fire they had ordered. The term for this was danger close.

As Eris ran the tap water at the sink, Levi stood danger close.

Levi fell on his knees at the foot of her bed as if in worship, or in prayer. He cupped the narrow curve of Eris's left foot in his hand, and he inspected her perfectly proportioned toes, each toenail glazed with pomegranate polish. The large toenail had a minuscule chip on the right side, but they were otherwise pristine. He kissed the top of her foot and held her arch against his cheek.

“Don't,” she said. Eris lay on her side with her head half-buried in her bare arms, the plain pink sheet covering her thighs, hips, and torso, up to the top swell of her breasts, just hiding what lay underneath. Levi couldn't see a bra strap, but he could see her cleavage at the edge of the linen. He thought of pulling on the sheet to expose all of her, to see exactly how far he could have gone, but he didn't dare do it.

“What,” he said. “I wasn't trying to do anything.”

She yanked her foot away and pulled her covers up to her neck.