Out There: a novel (10 page)

He
took his time, allowing each story to pull at him as it would. When possible he shared a detail he’d known about the person who had died, something she’d said just before the explosion, the expression in his eyes when he made a truce with the pain, a smile that reminded Jefferson of a friend from elementary school or of a season of the year. Some stories tugged at internal body parts—his esophagus, his inner ear, the ocular nerve attaching his eye to his brain—and others threatened to annihilate his various extremities—the thumbnail of his left hand, the callus on his right heel, the tip of his nose. Because each loss played uniquely upon his mind, Jefferson housed each one in a different place. Although he had a list, some stories were still hard to find.

The boy who’d told him about his grandmother’s pierogies made him cry for Esco’s hands as she wrapped tamales. For the young woman whose left ear was blown off prior to her mortal bleeding, he cried for her first favorite song, for all the time she must have spent on her bed as a middle-schooler listening to songs via headphones, for her first iPod and earbuds that, he imagined, her mother had given her as a high school graduation present. For the older guy whose helicopter went down less than an hour after he handed Jefferson a fistful of good-luck bubble gum, Jefferson cried for his own good and fortunate life and for the man’s sweet tongue and his teeth and his lips. Some of the stories were more difficult to tell than others—the old man with his goats, the family in their Toyota, the seventeen-year-old and the hound. He told each one, and he cried his unique set of tears to the alert one-person audience on the white couch before him.

In all, there were forty-one stories in twenty weeks.

He
was a high school dropout, approximately two hundred pounds overweight, a fact that caused his eyes to almost disappear into an expanse of perspiring skin. Almost exactly a decade older than Jefferson, he was an unlikely optimist who appreciated the hard questions brought on by life. Later, as Jefferson was accounting for all the small miracles that had helped him heal, he realized that it was his cousin’s subdued hopefulness that had lifted him out of harm’s way at a critical moment. Nigel’s mindset—that life was made up of puzzles, not problems—was part of the life-saving recipe.

During Jefferson’s first several weeks home, Nigel had laid low, telling his cousin to take it easy, to listen to music, to give it time. He listened to Jefferson complain about Esco’s incessant gentle knocking on his bedroom door, her constant offer of fake chicken soup, as if it could heal him. Nigel told Jefferson that he understood that Jefferson’s problem had nothing to do with soup or fake chicken, or, for that matter, any food item their grandmother might prepare.

This went on for weeks, all through that summer of 2009, and then the aspens turned yellow up in the mountains and the light took on that nostalgic low slant. Winter was coming, as it always did, and aside from his having told Dr. Monika a bunch of stories, Jefferson thought, nothing much seemed to have happened.

Then came the morning Jefferson finally decided to contact Ray Soto, his friend from Iraq who also loved García Márquez, to see if he wanted to get together now that they were both survivors back in Santa Fe, and discovered that Ray had hanged himself in his apartment off San Mateo, a whole year earlier.

Jefferson slouched in the metal chair, drinking his fourth Dr Pepper of the day, alternating mindless slurps with fistfuls of Cool Ranch Doritos, as his cousin changed the spark plugs on the Kawasaki. It was a breezeless, mosquito-less October evening, the kind of evening white people call Indian summer, whatever that means, and yet Jefferson could not erase the image of Ray hanging from his ceiling fan less than a mile from where Jefferson now sat. It was as loud as a mortar explosion in his head, as unexpected as hiccups and as difficult to forget. He felt he might be sick.

Nigel was smearing away the corrosion and grease from the bike’s engine with a dirty rag, paying attention in an inattentive manner. Jefferson fully assumed that his cousin was not listening. This was okay. What Jefferson felt he most needed on that evening was to be solitary without being alone, to talk without his words having any consequences, and somehow miraculously to arrive at a decision about which fork in the road to take. There seemed to be two options: sign up for another tour of duty or get on with things as best he could back in Santa Fe. An explosion sounded in the near distance—a car backfiring on Cerrillos, or a handgun over on Hopewell Street—shaking Jefferson’s skin against his bones. Could he do it? Go back out there again?

“Isn’t there anything you’d like to do with yourself, dude?” Nigel asked.

The question interrupted Jefferson’s consideration of the option Ray had chosen, to end his own life after making it home alive. It was unbelievable news—such a nice guy, a guy who’d loved Gabriel just as Jefferson loved him.

Jefferson remembered the night a shrill whirring had heralded the arrival of a mortar in their barracks—in truth it had hit the next building, not theirs, but who could tell the precise landing point of such fiery violence?—uprooting Jefferson and Ray Soto and all the other guys who were on the verge of sleep, slamming their bunks into each other and spilling the contents of their drawers into heaps of disarray, snatching their cell phones and laptops, smashing their skinny arms and legs and butts onto the cold, hard floor. There was a pause of intense silence, and then there was moaning and tears. Jefferson had been thrown against Ray, both alive, thank god, but Ray had cried into Jefferson’s shoulder and clung to him like a child. No blood on either of them, but then again, blood wasn’t the only sign of a wound.

He hadn’t told that story to Dr. Monika. He’d forgotten that one.

Nigel was looking at him, waiting for something, it seemed.

“I got some bad news today,” Jefferson finally said, unable to look his cousin in the eyes, staring instead down into the dirt.

“Yeah,” said Nigel. “Sorry to hear, cousin.” His large frame hovered, motionless.

“Yep,” said Jefferson. “I found out a friend of mine died. Not too far from here,” he said, pointing to the ground. He was preparing to go on, to tell Nigel about Ray, about how they’d shared a love for the great writer García Márquez, when he realized his throat had closed up and that he would not be able to speak anymore.

“I can’t talk about it,” he said finally, sobbing into his hands as he thought all the sad thoughts about why any of it had had to happen.

Nigel could not have been further from understanding his cousin’s infatuation with the famous writer, but he knew Jefferson was a dreamer who rarely acted. And he knew Jefferson, who had seemed extremely weird and disconnected when he’d first returned from war, had calmed down a little bit over the past months, but was still not at all well. Nigel had watched Jefferson jump and cower at the sound of a shopping cart rattling across the grocery store parking lot. He had seen Jefferson’s finger-crochet projects hanging from the clothesline next to the van in Esco’s backyard. From his spot in his sleeping bag on the floor, he had witnessed Jefferson’s screams in the night and had documented daily the thickening glaze over his cousin’s eyes. He appreciated, as only an obese man can, the large quantity of Doritos Jefferson consumed, along with the increasing bagginess of his clothes.

“Come on, cousin,” Nigel said now. “It’s gonna be okay.”

An intuitive naturalist, Nigel believed in neither talk therapy nor antidepressants when it came to mental health. Perhaps nothing would help his cousin, he thought, but staying in Santa Fe was probably the worst thing he could do. Although he did not think Jefferson was suicidal, whenever he saw that faraway glaze across Jefferson’s eyes, he imagined it had something to do with death fantasies. He had a smirk and a standby line:
Come on, man, eat some ice cream or somethin’. Go ride your bike down to the stadium.
It might not have been enough to help everyone, but for Jefferson—who loved Nigel and who, despite the murkiness of his solitude, despite the pain of his memories always found himself wanting to live—it was just enough to see him through a bad moment.

“Come on, man. Eat some ice cream or somethin’. Go ride your bike down to the stadium,” Nigel said now.

So far it had worked every time, but now Nigel was sensing a deeper level of grayness in his cousin’s blank face, a degree of absence he hadn’t seen before. Something close to unreachable. He knew he had to keep his cousin engaged—conversant and awake, so to speak. All the brochures from the VA talked about how family members needed to pay attention to their loved ones once they returned home, not to ignore subtle changes in expression or skin tone or general energy level. And so, though he generally tried to avoid using his own large body to intimidate other people, Nigel decided to make an exception. He was out of options. So he heaved himself down onto the ground in front of his cousin, bent his knees under himself, grabbed Jefferson’s bony wrists, and brought his meaty face right up close. Pressing firmly into Jefferson’s hands and ignoring his attempts to pull away, Nigel told him to shut up and listen in the harshest tone he could muster.

“Now this is what you’re gonna do, Jefferson, ya hear? You’re taking the Kawasaki, and you’re going to drive it far away, out of Santa Fe somewhere, do you understand me?”

Jefferson did not answer, just sat there with his chin against his chest, his eyes closed. It was difficult to tell whether he’d heard.

“You can go wherever you want—to Las Cruces or El Paso or Phoenix—I don’t care where you go. But you gotta get out of town. You gotta find yourself, man. You gotta do what you gotta do. You hear me?”

Nigel was sweating, and his knees seemed to be buckling under the weight, so he took a deep breath and stared way off in the distance, out of the shed and toward where he knew the Jemez Mountains rested. He’d dreamed himself of riding the Kawasaki off and away somewhere, someday, perhaps a lady friend along to share the journey. It was a dream that could still happen. But for now Jefferson needed help, and at least one thing was clear: Jefferson needed to get out of town. And Nigel’s bike could make this happen.

But Jefferson was thinking about Ray, and how it had all unfolded. How he’d been wanting to contact Ray for weeks, see what he thought about going off on a road trip to find Gabriel García Márquez together. How he’d gone on Facebook that morning to send him a message. He knew it was probably a dumb idea, unrealistic at least, but maybe it would feel good to talk to Ray about it in theory.

But why was Nigel so close-up and in his face? What was he saying? Something, it seemed, about the Kawasaki. Something about getting out of Santa Fe.

All of it was almost too much for Jefferson to bear. He’d had this idea about finding the great writer, and he did believe it was a decent idea, and he’d thought about sharing it with his friend who he’d now discovered was no longer alive. What was he to make of it all? He looked straight into Nigel’s big face, into his long, narrow eyes, and he tried to make sense of everything that had brought him to that moment. It was almost too much.

And then he found the words to say the thing he needed to say.

“You think it’d be insane for me to go find Gabriel García Márquez down in Mexico City?”

Nigel sat back down on his stool and wiped his brow with a rag. What was Jefferson talking about?

“I mean, he’s had cancer for over a decade,” Jefferson went on in a rush, “and he’s super old anyway. If I could get myself down there, you think I could just knock on his door? You think he’d answer?”

“Who are you talking about?” Nigel said, but he liked the energy he was hearing in Jefferson’s voice. It was a bit of the old spontaneous Jefferson.

“I told you. Gabriel García Márquez.”

Jefferson was speaking faster with each new syllable in each new question. The glaze over his eyes had begun to dissipate, though, so Nigel stopped trying to make sense of what his cousin was saying and just stared at him with newfound hope.

“I mean, did you just say something about your bike, Nigel? I could borrow your bike? I’d take good care. I promise I’d be careful—do you really mean I could take it? Are you serious, I mean? Do you think it’d make it all the way to Mexico City? I mean, you wouldn’t mind if I tried?” Though the excess sugar from the four Dr Peppers accounted for part of Jefferson’s excitement, Nigel recognized the larger part as genuine hope. A trip on the Kawasaki. A chance to talk with some old dude who was obviously a big deal, maybe a musician he’d never heard of?

“Look,” said Nigel, his slow, deliberate eyes finding their way out through his good thick skin. “I have no idea who this Gabriel Montez dude is—someone you met in Iraq who’s in Mexico now?—but given how bad off you are, you really have no choice, man. Sounds like you need to go find this dude. Maybe it would help. You won’t know unless you go.”

“Gabriel García
Márquez
,” Jefferson said. “His name is Gabriel García
Márquez
.”

The
47
th
day. Ramon, 20, from Las Cruces shot in the throat next to me.

Adair, from Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. 22.

Dudzinski, 22, of Mangilao, Guam, who died in a Humvee crash. I was in the vehicle behind him. He called me “buddy boy.”