Dancing in Dreamtime (7 page)

Standing by the roadside with my thumb jutting in the direction of the airbase, I sense each car a moment before it approaches, foresee its make and color. After twenty minutes or so, when the cold has made my undamaged foot as numb as the reconstructed
one, I realize that the next vehicle to appear—a battered van, reeking of paint—will stop for me. I hear what the driver will say as I open the passenger door.

“Damn fool day to be hitching,” he says.

“You going near the airbase?” I ask, knowing his answer.

“That's exactly where I'm going. Hop in.”

“Much obliged.”

The man turns to me a face already familiar, right down to the broken front tooth and the bruised skin under his left eye. “What business you got at the base?”

I tell him about my synthetic ankle, and the X-ray that will decide whether it is healed well enough to suit the army.

“Got a titanium rod in here,” he says, tapping his gas pedal leg, “thanks to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.”

I wince. “It must hurt in this cold weather.”

“Hurts like hell,” he says. “Every twinge makes me cuss the sons of bitches who sent me over there.”

Hearing his words, I am delivered back into ordinary time, not knowing what will come next. We talk about his folks and mine, about where each of us played high school basketball, about truck stops and hunting dogs. Just as I am preparing to ask him what he thinks of the war in Africa, we draw abreast of a chain-link fence topped by razor wire. I swallow the question. The fence I have seen countless times while traveling past, but this time I am going inside. We turn in at the main gate, which is flanked by two vintage fighter jets.

“Shame to see those planes rust like that,” the driver says. “Give them a good paint job, they'd look like new.”

Abruptly the switch is thrown again. I know the guard will recognize the painter, ask to see my papers, check my name on his
list, and then will say, “Physical, eh?” before waving us through. His gruff voice reminds me of the water gurgling in the radiator, circling time and again through the closed circuit of pipes.

“You figure that bum foot will keep you out of the war?” the painter asks as we ease forward.

“Not likely. But I'm hoping my conscience will.”

He snorts. “Conscience? Good luck with that, kid.”

Black pipes mounted on posts snake along beside the road. The painter tells me they carry steam from the heating plant, and I imagine the vapor circulating from boiler to barracks to warehouse to machine shop and eventually back to boiler.

“What are you painting today?” I ask.

“The gym in the officers' quarters. It's a bear. Walls thirty feet high.”

“How does that titanium leg do on ladders?”

“Hurts like hell!” he says again, and his laugh rattles through the van.

We pull up in front of the hospital, which might have been blue once but is now drab gray. As I climb out, the painter says, “Don't think killing foreigners makes you a patriot.”

“I won't,” I say. “Thanks for the lift.”

“You bet.”

The van pulls away, trailing a stench of burnt oil mixed with the tang of paint.

I spend most of the day in the hospital, waiting for my exam. Every now and again a clerk calls my name, only to direct me to another waiting room. Meanwhile, I nearly finish
The Wretched
of the Earth
, a disturbing book, with its advocacy for violence by colonized people, but it helps me understand the history behind the current turmoil in Africa.

Eventually, I am summoned from the last of the waiting rooms. As I make my way down a corridor toward the X-ray lab, I can already see the caramel-colored face of the technician, already make out her name on the badge pinned to her white coat, already hear the southern drawl in her voice.

“Enjoy that beard while you can,” she says cheerfully. “They'll shave it off first thing.”

I lift a hand to my chin and pinch a tuft of whiskers. My smile feels as if it has been drawn on my lips from outside.

At her instruction, I pull off my boot and peel away the sock. She has me lie down on the examining table and positions the snout of the X-ray tube over my bare foot. “Now hold quite still,” she says, before disappearing behind a screen. A moment later I hear a brief hiss. She returns, repositions the foot, takes a second X-ray, and then repeats the cycle a third time. Then she escorts me to another room, where a doctor is studying the images of my ankle on a screen.

He turns when I enter, asks me to sit on the paper-covered table with my leg extended. There is a whiff of peppermint on his breath. With gloved hands, he manipulates my foot, rotating it left and right, up and down, testing the range of motion.

“How does it feel?” he asks.

Thinking of Sharon, I am tempted to give the painter's refrain—“Hurts like hell!”—but I feel compelled to answer, “Numb.”

“No pain at all?”

I shake my head—or rather, it shakes of its own accord. I see myself as if from the outside, sitting on the table, my naked foot cradled in the doctor's hands. It is as though I am watching a film of myself, every word and gesture already scripted.

He lets go of my foot and turns back to the ghostly X-rays on the screen. “It's an elegant piece of surgery. This ankle should hold up better than your natural one. Nothing here to bar you from service.”

Leaving the hospital, I walk back toward the main gate. The last light is fading from the sky. I hear the sizzle of pipes overhead, the steam cooling as it circulates from building to building. At the guard shack I pause to show my papers once more, and once more I am waved through.

Near the rusting fighter jets, their engine cowlings clogged with snow, I wait for a ride. As cars and trucks pass, their headlights pick me out of the obscurity for a moment before sliding by. My thumb grows stiff as I wait for the Chevy pickup that finally stops, as I know it will. Likewise, I know beforehand that baby shoes will dangle from the rearview mirror, that the driver, a woman in her fifties, will tell me I remind her of her son, who was killed by a sniper in the Congo, and I know before I speak what I must answer. Hurtling down the tunnel bored through the darkness by the headlights, we exchange our lines, for the film will not stop.

On the bus I am granted a few minutes of freedom. These periods of lucidity occur less and less often, as the spells of foreknowledge lengthen. The view through the window might be of
an alien planet, everything in shades of gray, silent and bleak and cold. The focus of my gaze shifts and I see my dim reflection in the glass—empty sockets where my eyes should be, my mouth a dark slash.

At the final stop before my own, an old woman boards the bus. As she teeters along the aisle, her bag of groceries lurching side to side, I know she will ask to share my seat, I will nod
yes
, and she will settle beside me with a wheeze. As I expected, her bag smells of cinnamon and garlic, and so does her black wool coat.

“No night to be alone on a bus,” she says.

“I'm almost home,” I reply. “My wife's waiting.”

“Count your blessings. My husband died when he was about your age.” She fishes a snapshot from her purse and holds it out for me.

Reluctantly I peer at the photograph in the dim light. It shows a man in white Navy dress uniform, with a woman in a wedding gown clinging to his arm. I feel certain I have seen this image many times.

“Believe it or not, that's me,” the old woman says, pointing to the bride.

I am startled to feel tears welling in my eyes. Hoping she won't notice, I turn away to blink at my reflection in the window.

“A Chinese missile blew up his ship in the Indian Ocean,” the old woman continues. “Where is the war now? I can't keep track. It's been going on since before I was born. Took my father, both my brothers, and my husband.”

I want to ease the hurt I hear in her voice, but I can't speak. So I put on my knit hat and gloves in preparation for my stop.

She lays a hand on my forearm. “Here, let me give you a pomegranate for your wife.”

“That's kind of you, but really—”

“It's full of vitamin C,” she says, drawing the plump red fruit from her grocery bag.

“For good health, then,” I say, accepting the pomegranate and stuffing it in my coat pocket.

As she turns in the seat to let me slip by, she adds quietly, “It also brings fertility.”

I mutter thanks and hurry down the aisle. From the sidewalk, I watch the bus drag its rectangles of light into the darkness.

The snow on our street sounds brittle under my boots. My breath fumes, glistening with daggers of ice. The winter's chill will not let go, nor will the sense of
déjà vu
. I can read the script but cannot change it. Our front door opens without my key, and I am upset with Sharon for leaving it unlocked. I take off my hat and gloves and boots in the hall before going to the kitchen, where I know she is sitting at the table over a mug of tea.

She flashes me an anxious look. “What did the doctor say?”

“I'm fit for war.”

Her lips crimp tight.

I shrug free of my coat, drape it over a chair back, and lift the pomegranate from the pocket. “A woman on the bus gave me this,” I say, offering the fruit.

Reaching out hesitantly, Sharon cups it in her palm. “A woman on the bus?”

“An elderly lady, returning from the grocery store.”

“Why would she give you a pomegranate?”

“She said it brings fertility.”

“Did you tell her I'm pregnant?”

“Of course not.”

“How odd.” Slowly a smile breaks over Sharon's face. “How lovely.”

Before she has a chance to ask, I fetch a bowl and knife and spoon, and set them before her. She slices the pomegranate and spoons out a mouthful of seeds, each one coated with ruby pulp. Her lips take on the color of the juice as I tell her about my sense of prevision, how it began as brief episodes and eventually became an unbroken awareness.

“Even now?” she asks. “You know what's going to happen next?”

“Yes. Each moment is already laid out. I see the two of us here at the table, watch you lift the spoon, hear our voices, as if we're speaking lines in an old film.”

“Well, get up and dance. Stand on your head. Do something crazy to snap the illusion.”

“I've tried. But every time I think I'm doing something truly free, I realize it's what I'm required to do.”

“Required by whom?”

“By whoever wrote the script.”

Although Sharon faces me across the table, her chestnut eyes don't look straight at me. All day other people have focused their gaze a few degrees away from where I imagine myself to be, as if I really am split in two, and my second self is drawing their attention.

There is caution in her voice as she says, “Gordon, this is a textbook case of paranoia. Don't you see? For months now you've been feeling caught up in the military machine . . .”