Via Dolorosa(26)

“Then what do you feel like?”

“Nothing much,” he said.

“That is the bullshit, Nicholas.”

“It’s just hard.”

“Hard how? What do you mean?”

“Hard,” he said, and found he could only repeat it: “Hard. To talk about, I mean.” And he considered. “You feel like you’re in some sort of purgatory. You feel humbled and weakened by your humility. Oddly enough, you feel peaceful but sad, too, and all at the same time. In some ways it’s like being trapped in an everlasting imperfection—a purgatory. There isn’t the intensity that everyone assumes with war. I mean, there are times like that, yeah, sure, but overall, you’re just lulled by this sense of powerlessness. Like a child being coaxed to sleep in the middle of a house-fire. And for whatever reason, you’re okay with it.”

“Because it’s too much power to have,” Isabella spoke up. “Yes? And you are glad you do not have it, or at least you do not have all of it. To hell with it. Yes? Let someone else have it. Let someone else worry about it.”

“Yes. To hell with it.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, yes.” And he felt himself start to smile.

“Well, for someone so lulled by it all, you certainly do not like talking about it.”

“I have my reasons.”

“What are they?”

“They’re complicated.”

“I can see that. That is what makes me want to know all the more. Those are the best kinds of reasons.”

“But it’s too complicated to put into words. That’s the other thing about war—it’s all so damned complicated. You feel a certain way and you’re confused by it, which is probably the most complicated thing of all. Too often you don’t know how to feel, and when you do feel something—anything—you don’t know why you feel it, which is too confusing to even explain. I mean, I can’t anyway. And it drives you mad, trying to understand the un-understandable.”

They crested the hill. Nick paused, looking out over the black sea speckled with the reflection of a million stars, and could not move. For whatever reason (although he thought he knew the reason; thought he always knew the reason), his mind slipped back to Emma. He recalled coming home from Iraq, and that second night in bed with her. The first night in bed with her she had said nothing and had only wept, and it had been like a session, some session, and something that hurt him too much to ever recall, as she had thought him dead and his return to her had been nearly a miracle, like sleeping with a ghost. He remembered how she had looked at him in the dark and how she had talked to him, half-whispering, every word borne on a wave of a preternatural intensity. We won’t let little things ruin us, will we, baby? she had said, her words now eerily prophetic. Of course not, sweet, he’d told her. Of course not. And what could ruin them? Love—honest, true, genuine love—could not be ruined. Hands, he understood, could be ruined. But love could not be ruined. And nothing would ruin them.

“What are you thinking?” Isabella asked him. She had stepped to the edge of the cliff. Her hair, long and dark, billowed out behind her. Her skin looked white and ghostly against the canopy of night.

“The war,” he said, and it wasn’t a total lie. Since his return, everything he thought about had something to do with the war. He and Emma were no different. Even now, with everything as it was, he found he still loved Emma and still wanted to belong to her. He wanted to belong to Emma and he wanted to belong to himself, too, but he found that, with all things beyond his mortal control, he belonged only to the war. And the war belonged to him. It was as sinful an affair in which one could engage.

“Has it changed you?” she asked.

He set the equipment down in the damp grass. “In some ways. Not all around, but in some ways.” After a pause, he added, “I used to have certain beliefs before the war. Then, after the war, some changed. Some stayed the same, though,” he said quickly, “but some changed, too. And then, since the change, it seems like I can’t lock on anything. Everything seems to change, to shift, over and over again. I find I trust nothing. And sometimes I’m not even entirely sure what I believe in.”

“And your hand,” she said.

“What about it?”

“Your hand has changed, too. It is perhaps the most obvious change.”

“Yes, well—I thought you meant, like—as in—”

“You talk very ambiguous,” she said, cutting him off. “If someone told me to shoot a picture of your words, I would not know what to shoot. You give me nothing to shoot, Nicholas. It is like shooting the wind. Why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Give me something substantial. Something solid. Something to shoot.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The difference is the truth and the reality are in the details of what you saw and what you did and, really, in what happened.” She said, “What happened?” She said, “Tell me something that happened.”

He thought for some time. He thought eventually of the city. There had been a sadness to the old, broken city. He remembered moving toward the center of the city and into a tiny nameless village and bursting through a wooden doorway, and how the frame of the arch crumbled down, and how the gray-blue dust billowed out in a cough. There had been seven or eight flights of stairs slinking down into the suffocating earth. Endless stairs. The risers themselves were made of wood, suspended by railings bolted to the walls, and were sodden and bloated with water. In the dark, the smell was intolerable. The air was stifling and oppressive, like being trapped in the trunk of a car. How many tunnels did they traverse? Back above ground, and in the too-bright daylight, shooting erupted. They had dropped their rifles into their hands and began firing on a tight wedge of insurgents across the empty marketplace. You could never see the details of their faces. They were dark faces, very dark and almost smeared-looking, and it was as if they had no features. (That was how he had dreamed of them each night, too: smeared and slightly out of focus, like a photograph of someone taken just as they moved their head. All of them—they were phantoms, were ghosts. Ironically, it would be the way he would remember Myles Granger to look on his deathbed, too—smeared, out-of-focus, and not wholly there.) They continued to fire and the rattle of machine guns clattered off. Something on the other side of the village exploded in a dry crunch of smoke and debris. The dust was so thick it was a moving, living thing.