Via Dolorosa(20)

Roger pressed his lips together and shook his head. It was a universal reaction—what more could one do?

“He was the only guy I saw still moving around in the dirt when the smoke cleared and I could see anything at all. I made my way to him and grabbed him and carried him down an alleyway. He was screaming and wanted me to kill him, to put my gun to his head and kill him. He said he knew he was going to die and he just wanted it to hurry up, so why couldn’t I put my gun to his head and bring it to him as quickly as possible? He was trailing blood in the sand, in the dirt, and I remember the way it looked, falling there. As I carried him, my footsteps kicked fresh sand over the stains of his blood, and it was covered up so quickly, it was as if there was no blood at all, and nothing of the sort even existed.” He heard himself snort. “Funny, the stuff you remember…”

“Christ…” It seemed all Roger was capable of saying. Either that or it seemed the only appropriate thing to say. “Christ, man…”

“The attack came from a nearby mosque. They hit us hard and fast.”

“Yeah?”

“Sometime later, an F-16 came in and razed the mosque.”

“Everyone was killed?”

“Yes.”

“Everyone but you and Myles Granger,” Roger said, and it was not a question.

“Yes,” Nick answered anyway.

“Is that how you hurt your hand?”

“Sort of. A wall fell on it.”

“How did you get out?”

“Out,” Nick nearly muttered. “Out. We got out. It’s—we got—we just got out.”

“I can’t imagine,” said Roger.

“We just got out,” Nick went on, almost not hearing the bartender.

Thankfully, Roger had no more questions. Nick did not think he could answer any more, anyway. Yes, he and Myles Granger had been in the same platoon . . . he had been platoon leader, first lieutenant, and he had walked them straight into the ambush. The shelling had started from the windows of the mosque. It shook the ground and many men rolled in the muddy ditch between the road and the giant stone wall. Some were all right. The wall was very large and looked strong but would not provide full protection against the shelling. Further ahead, pressed low in the dirt, he could see Myles Granger with his head down and his hands laced together at the back of his helmet. He looked very dark and small pressed into the dirt. He did not move. No one moved for a long while. At the time of the ambush, Nick found himself thinking of the men that had gone down ahead of them during their campaign from Ramadi and into the city, ambushed by soldiers pressed against the flanks of the high road, and he found he could not take his eyes away from Myles Granger. Even when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded just several yards to his left, he could not take his eyes away from the boy. Later, much later, there would be questions about who had actually instigated the shooting, and accusations that their squad had been the aggressor, had perhaps opened fire on the mosque first. Nick, who found no rationale in such thinking (what were the odds that they would have happened to open fire on a mosque which just happened to be rife with armed Muslim insurgents? He should play the lottery and find himself so lucky), had paid the accusations no mind. Anyway, nothing ever came of it. Nothing, he understood, had come of any of it. He used to think wars killed only the bad, but that quickly proved to be a child’s presumption. Then, after a time, he believed that wars killed both the good and the bad alike. But that proved wrong, too. How could he have been so ignorant? Now, he understood, there existed no good and no bad, and that they were all just lost and broken and weak and, perhaps most importantly, they were all uninformed. He, too, had been uninformed. No one ever becomes informed, he told himself. When you fight, you have no impression of the fighting. Nothing is sustained in you. You are broken and unable to be mended… which lessens the impression of debilitation and heightens the constant ailment of who you were for that brief period in your life, and how it never truly occurred to you that you would ever be there. War—who would ever be there? Who ever imagines themselves dying like a dog without purpose?

It was an uncontrollable fix, sanctioned by the propriety of youth and youth’s willingness to forfeit. Youth always forfeited, Nick had come to understand. It was akin to those fumbling, constipated groanings associated with adolescent sexual encounters: existing because there was a need for it to exist and, even if you did not understand it—not completely, anyway—some feral, ingrained part of you knew it to be true, and knew it to be a part of what it meant to be human. Or was that all too much? No…he did not think it was too much at all…

Abruptly, he did not want to think about Iraq, about Myles Granger. Turning away from the bar and looking behind him, he could see the night beyond the wall of windows. With the veil of trees blocking out the moon, it was the darkest night he could remember seeing. Still, in his head, he could see Myles Granger, dying Myles Granger. “Is the island still dead?”

“Dead?”

“The power,” he said. “It’s still out?”

“We’re still on the backup generators,” Roger told him, “but I came back from taking my boat up the beach about an hour ago and I could see lights further up the shore.”

He teased his drink, not truly, heartily, dedicatedly drinking it, but just tasting it enough to know what it was and to know that to truly, heartily, dedicatedly drink it would be to do so quickly, feeling the smoky burn of the scotch and hoping that he could just stop his mind from thinking for a minute. Just a minute. Was that asking too much? But he didn’t drink the scotch quickly at all, knowing damn well the scotch itself was the real tease, and that there was no magic bullet to forget and to stop thinking. Instead, he set the drink down on another handbill for the Club Potemkin that someone had left on the bar, and looked out over the restaurant. A young couple was seated at a table, the man talking severely with his dark, full eyebrows knitted together and his hands placed palms-down on the tabletop. Across from him sat a young woman. She looked diet-trim and amphetamine-nervous. Both her legs bounced beneath the table as she listened to the man, rapt, and watched him with intensity, as if to do so in any other fashion would equate to some sort of personal surrender. She had both her palms pressed flat against the knobby white bulbs of her kneecaps. She was like a bird. Sitting across from her, watching her, Nick could almost imagine her heartbeat—racing, fluttering, thumping blindly behind her narrow ribcage like a hummingbird caught in an aluminum mailbox.