Preparation for the Next Life (11 page)

In his dream, the yellow land wheeled by too bright to look at. He saw a woman in a black burka on the road. They drove at speed for several miles and their dust drifted out behind them. They blew by a road sign in Arabic. Nowling shouted up front, Wasn’t that the no-go line? Obviously it was. No one answered. They entered a zone of burned-out gutted houses. Sconyers mouthed what the fuck? You looked in the window holes and saw the sun shining inside, no floors, no roof, just a shell. Sometimes darkness, metal wreckage white with ash. They weaved around a dead truck. A turn was missed. Graziano keyed the radio. Interrogative: Was that Omaha? The sergeant stopped and backed up. They jumped out to pull security, pointing their rifles up at the roofline, blinded by the sun, and mounted up again to make the turn into an alley, the walls nearly touching them on either side. Skinner covered the terraces above them, craning his neck. They bounced over rocks and he held his Kevlar on. There were intersections full of sunlight. They drove into the continuation of the alley, which kept getting tighter until they were scraping the sides. No one was saying anything. The voices on the radio spoke all at once and Graziano said: Battleaxe, say again your last.

Wait one.

The Hell’s Angel’s sergeant started slowing down. The way ahead of them appeared to be blocked by a car spun sideways, the front sheared open, wires and metal things spilling out. He braked and they rocked forward. Fuck me. We’re stuck. Something moved in the corner of Skinner’s eye but it could have been the caffeine. He looked through the holes in the building walls for movement.

Put it in reverse, Graziano said. I’ll guide you.

It was impossible to steer inside the alley. Every time the sergeant touched the gas, they went a foot or two and dug into the wall. It took them three minutes to go two vehicle lengths.

How deep in are we?

Nowling ran back and looked.

Two hundred meters to the last intersection.

What if we just power right through the car up there?

It’s got nowhere to go.

Okay, the sergeant said, steadying his voice. Gimme some security while we unfuck this.

Skinner climbed out, his insides feathery and weak. In his sleep, Skinner tried to say I cannot do this. In his dream, someone punched him hard in the chest—he did not know who—and said: You awake in there? Good to go—and handed him a grenade. It was almost impossible to lift his chest to breathe. He took a knee on his catcher’s kneepad and aimed at the trapezoid of sun between the walls. Behind him, he heard Graziano’s low voice saying straight back, straight back. Straight. Stop. Left. Little left. He heard the humvee dig into the mud stone and the engine revving up. The sergeant cursed, fuck. He wiped sweat out of his face with the green gun-oil rag. The countdown in his head had run out more than once already. The trapezoid changed shape and he blinked and stared downrange, but he could not tell what he was seeing. However, the eye sees shape, shine, and movement first and it was one of these. He looked around for anyone. His nearest friend was hiding in an alcove. Am I seeing them down there? he screamed. His face was a white oval beneath his helmet.

They’ve been there this whole time. We’re dead.

In his sleep, Skinner yelled and hit the bench.

When the firing began, he couldn’t tell how bad it was. The not-knowing lasted one second. Then the air started getting shocked by him and it was obvious he was close to getting killed. He thought someone was grabbing his harness. By this time, he was shooting back. Somebody should be on the 240 in the vehicle, he thought, but that never happened. He kept looking to make sure he saw at least someone in his uniform. As long as I can see them, we’re still here. By this point, when he put his hand on his chest, he was still feeling magazines. But there was not enough fire from us and, the whole time, you could hear the balance sliding like a scale, and it was just getting heavier on the other side. He felt the whole thing was just falling apart, that the enemy had fire superiority. Then he looked again and he couldn’t see uniforms. He couldn’t hear anything when they called him and they had bounded back. So then he had to run by himself, and the closest he came was when he almost ran in front of them while they were covering him—and it was almost another terrible accident in the middle of a giant disaster.

They took cover in a building that they shouldn’t have been in. The enemy was so close, they could be seen as individuals down to the details, pointing out where the Americans were. A fire mission was on the way and then it wasn’t. Seeing tracers was the first he knew how long they’d been there, that an unbelievable twelve hours had passed. That and thirst.

He heard a crack that echoed. Then another crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Pop pop pop pop pop. Then silence. There was nothing to see. Pop pop pop. A string of lights. Then a boom that traveled through the earth and he felt it in his legs, ears, chest. A strange wave that disrupted his pulse.

Graziano low-crawled over and hit him on the helmet and shouted in his ear and pointed from one black jagged formation to another sticking up out of the battlefield. See your field of fire? And crawled away.

Sconnie, he croaked.

Skin, that you?

Are we gonna get air or what?

I think they’re waiting on it.

You got any water?

Then green lights streamed up out of the earth. They spewed up, streams of them, incandescent. The sound hit—roaring screaming
earsplitting. In the arc-weld light, solid forms appeared to shift—the hanging dust. Shadows were running. The drilling deafening thundering never stopped. The razor lights leapt straight across the black, flashed past—he whipped his head around—and they went away and went arcing slowly down like baseballs. The ground and the air were being shocked. He forgot what he was lying on, whether it was the roof or the ground. The reverberating detonating went on. In the pockets of the sound, there was deafness and blindness in the sudden total black. Everything that was not massive was obliterated. The shock-shock thudding got louder and louder like an exercise to destroy the hearing. The green stars were streaming back this way like a garden hose. He felt them in the ground. Hypnotic and kinetic. The zipping energy and acoustic snapping getting nearer.

Then the spot where Sconyers’ voice had been exploded and they were buried in sand.

He scrambled to the floor. When he came to, he was trying to hold his body together and his heart was revving. The McDonald’s made no sense to him at first. He was hyperventilating and attempting to dig into the tile floor with his hands.

His heart kept slamming as if he had been injected with atropine.

When his friend exploded, something had struck Skinner in the back. After the pieces stopped raining down, he scrambled to his friend, he felt him in the sand, and tried to pull him up. Skinner couldn’t lift him. Instead his weight had pulled him down with all their armor. The sand was filling up with Sconyers’ blood. He was letting him die. He was trying to lift Sconyers, and Sconyers tried to help. The sand became a sucking, sloshing pit that soaked them both and overflowed with blood. It soaked his trousers, his PT shorts, his legs, and socks, which squished. The blood wet his hands and arms, it got on his weapon, and got in his face and mouth and eyes, and he tasted it, his friend’s blood. And the blood itself had weight and the sand had weight, and they combined as a blood mud that dragged them down.

Then the others helped him, and Jake’s body came up, and they ran with him swinging between their arms. They put him on a poncho. Skinner had to be ordered to pull himself together. He was sent
back stumbling over the thundering wasteland, barely able to run, to get the rest of his body, and ran ducking and stumbling, wheezing with exhaustion, at a loss to find where they had been. And he collapsed because his body finally realized that he had been wounded too. Graziano ripped out plastic from his butt pack and stuffed it over the hole in his chest cavity.

He stopped.

There was no one here—he huddled frozen rigid, waiting for things to fall into place. Limb by limb, he unclenched himself, dropped his head back against the plastic seat, let out his breath, sat there on the floor blinded by the white fresh sunshine. It was bright and still among the clean, modular tables. A regular, soft, sweeping sound coming in through the thick sealed glass.

Could be a dayroom in an army hospital.

The sound outside was cars going by, in America.

He made the decision to put on his filthy sock, the one that had fallen off. Then his boots. He wadded up his poncholiner and stuffed it away again with his shaking hands, which were going to fly away on him. He used the restroom faucet and took a pill.

After a minute, he picked his gear up and, balancing the weight, climbed downstairs. There was a sea of people surging in the doors and he pushed his way out through them.

He dropped his bags on the sidewalk, stood and smoked a cigarette in the cold sun.

Skinner and Jake had been evacuated and saved. They were alive when they made it back inside the wire. Both of them had heartbeats in the sandbagged field hospital in the battalion camp out in the desert. Skinner in unbearable pain, the convoy delayed for tactical reasons, gunfire pop-pop-pop thudding in the street, a calm voice speaking on the radio as searing hot shell casings spewed on them, the gunner yelling, everyone in panic, Skinner screaming and groaning—the driver shouting that they had to back up and try a different route because they were taking too much fire. Other soldiers were killed outright. They heard death on the radio. They were all going to die. Then they made it to the battalion, and their bodies were dying. Jake, a half body, was thrown on a dripping canvas cot in the green
field hospital, generators running, his genitals exposed between the meat cross-sections where his thighs had been, his flesh being worked over by a spinning brush while a jet of water sprayed at the wound to clean it. The army sent them back to a giant military hospital on the east coast. Jake was kept alive in Walter Reed.

Six weeks later, Skinner joined a rehab platoon in Georgia and stood formation with guys in wheelchairs. He raked sand in the volleyball court and took painkillers for the headaches and shuffled through the chow hall putting gravy on his meatloaf, watching the war on TV. The summer days were dark and storming and the trees blew down on base.

A doctor, a Coloradoan who looked like the captain of a college wrestling team, told him he was better. You’re four out of five. Your unit will be glad to have you back. Good news, right? He called Skinner hard charger. Now you can go strap on an M4, hard charger. He had brown hair, a muscular athletic physique, sunken cheeks, and the insincere niceness of a frat boy. He tossed the file onto the desk in the consultation room, called Next!, and Skinner shuffled out.

No one told him the results of his cranial scan. He had unbearable headaches and double vision. The army gave him reading glasses. There was no mention of PTSD or TBI. When he got back to the war, he was considered a discipline problem. In the cold season, in the blue desert night when the steppe winds came down from Kurdistan and his squad was sleeping bundled in the hangar after an 18-hour patrol, he squatted alone outside smoking a cigarette butt and staring at something-nothing beyond the wire. His speech was affected. He did not know how to diagnose himself. He was disciplined for having a round in the chamber of his weapon when weapons were supposed to be clear. They caught him walking around with his safety off. He was ordered to perform remedial calisthenics in NBC gear and a gas mask.

On leave, he went to see his family and got physically violent with his little brother. His mother threw him out. He went back to base and thought things will be better when he got out of the military. He apologized to his brother and his brother forgave him even if his mother didn’t. The army let him believe he was eligible for the Warrior Transition Program, and he was already planning to buy a car and go visit Jake, when they stop-lossed him. It was fairly devastating news. His mother cried on the phone and said she was sorry.

The battalion was handing out antidepressants like free candy on your way to the PX to get the magazines and iPods and protein powder and energy drinks you were taking with you back to war.

Back in Iraq, he deteriorated as a soldier. He was in a new AO, hard by the Euphrates, and car bombs went off at mosque time. The civil war had started. He could not function. He fell asleep on watch. A rugby playing sergeant known for being hard smoked him in MOP gear in the noon heat, called him a shitbag, a bottom feeder, a retard, etcetera.

Skinner drank five canteens of water and the water kept running out of him, his eyes unfocused, the sun blazing off his sweat, the rubber suit lying on the sand at his feet like the empty shell of himself, a human skin.

Everyone in the war had changed, the war had changed, and Skinner’s strangeness barely showed. It was chalked up to the war, as if it were logical. The war itself was always ever stranger. Within his unit, he became identified with a group of soldiers called the Shitbag Crew. A shitbag was a wag bag, which they called a wookie bag. They said Wookies, Yo, when they bumped fists, and it was like saying we’re staying alive. They had superstitions, rituals, which became ever more involved. A tribal life began. Some of the gangs within the infantry were involved in murder. They dropped wire or weapons on corpses. A gunny from Akron, Ohio, was the capo of a death squad.

Skinner was mentally ill, logging day after day in a combat zone, compounding the damage: cuts that wouldn’t heal, back pain, diarrhea, hearing loss, double vision, headaches, pins and needles in his hands, insomnia, apathy, rage, grief, self-hatred, depression, despair.