Via Dolorosa(30)

And that sound, that voice…

Lieuten—

But he was on the island, in the grass, in the dark.

“My poor, funny Nicholas,” Isabella sang.

And his memories now were as faint and as hopeless as the ghosts of children.





—Chapter VIII—





Later, back in the hotel room, all was black and timeless. In the darkness he could hear Emma’s breathing in bed. It was not the deep, untroubled breathing of someone asleep. He did not say anything and did not turn on the light. Instead, he went directly to the bathroom, shut the door, turned on the shower. Stripped out of his clothes, he sat on the edge of the tub. The water was cold and would not get warm. The entire hotel could not get warm. Not since the storm came. Sitting there, he could not stop thinking of Iraq. It was because of Isabella, and all the damn talk of war. He could not stop thinking of Iraq and he could not stop thinking of Emma, either. Both things had become connected in some ubiquitous mental ceremony and he found he could not separate the two. Wetly, his thoughts slipped into one another. He could not separate them. And he could not stop thinking, either. Why couldn’t he stop? Why couldn’t God be kind for once and just allow him to stop? It was all here in his mind and in his soul, and he could not shake any of it. He recalled the Iraqi children. Passively, the children had watched as he and the rest soldiered into the village. Most of the children mastered ways of disappearing, of slinking away rat-like. Those who remained were sentinels of the refuse of their village—protectors of all the unwanted things that defined their lives and the lives of their families and now defined only the war—their souls depleted, their faces taxidermic, vacuous, undead. These children would sometimes peer around corners or out of gaping, toothless portals carved along the bombed alleyways. They buzzed around you like flies. He remembered standing ankle-deep in crushed debris and burnt sawdust, the expressions on the faces of the children who remained (when expressions were in attendance) flushed with a confusion of mistrust and false hope. A film of powder had textured the air, and a rising conical of black smoke defined the horizon. Everything was gray and like bone. Myles Granger had attempted to befriend a piss-scared, shaking mongrel: a hand extended, the mongrel snapped at it and hobbled brokenly away. (In the sand behind it, the creature left asterisks of black, diseased blood.) And the whole village smelled of disease. He’d witnessed dead children, injured children. He did not feel sorry for them. He couldn’t. To feel sorry was a weakness none of them could afford. Feeling sorry could get you killed. As Karuptka had been fond of saying, “Kids here would eat an American kid alive.” Pitying others was signing your own death warrant. But it wasn’t difficult to avoid feeling sorry, they had found; not really. Because to feel sorry also required a sense of reciprocated empathy, and he knew that did not exist. It was an unspoken universal understanding, even with the children of the village—that here loomed death, black and inevitable for some, stark and capering and not hiding, and that was just the way it was, and no one expected anything to be different. The soldiers certainly knew it. And the civilians had been raised to adopt notions of militia from youth, so they certainly knew it, too. The children knew it as well. In fact, the children probably knew it better than anyone, because it was all they had ever known. They should have been so lost and frightened and confused, but they weren’t, and that only confirmed that they knew it better than anyone.

Nick knew it, as well. You died a long time ago, before you ever pulled on your cargo pants or strapped your rifle over your shoulder; you checked out, bought the farm, long before you ever started out overseas. Knowing this made it easier to move along and to function and to follow things through, because when you physically died, it no longer mattered as much, as you were already dead, and your spirit was already dead…or at least you had come to terms with death as a possibility, a reality. This made survival less of a chore. You made your peace with it that way, too, Nick had come to understand. You made your peace with it long before you were ever truly confronted by it.

He tested the water in the shower. It would not get warm. Touching it brought gooseflesh to his arms.

He recalled the face of the man he’d mistaken for Myles Granger at the Club Potemkin earlier that evening. And in recalling that face, his mind summoned the real face of Myles Granger, and of all the men from the platoon. A reconnaissance mission, they’d hit the village close to dawn and spent most of the day in a confusion of cold steel and white flame. He could not remember any order to it—his memory of Iraq was provided to him now in only brief, snapshot images and disjointed conversations despite the frightening clarity of all he did remember. Everything in his mind floated disembodied and unanchored to anything else; it was like thumbing through a history textbook and stopping to read every twentieth page. He recalled Karuptka lighting a cigarillo with a silver Zippo, his fingers brown with mercurochrome. He remembered, also, Bowerman stretching his calves on a pile of debris, his boots initiating little avalanches of stone while he moaned about the heat. At his feet, the pages of a thick paperback novel rifled in the wind. He remembered Myles Granger looking too young and wet and nervous and sickly—what they all called a “cherry”—and Oris Hidenfelter standing beside him, mumbling, “I’m counting four…five…six,” his lower lip starting to quiver, “you can tell by the shots, and the way the smoke rises,” and no one was really listening to him because they’d all had enough for the moment, “five…definitely five, six…”—and even Hidenfelter had had enough but he could not help himself and he could not stop. “I was always shitty at math, but out here, I mean, you start counting an’ hell if you can stop,” he rambled, “and wouldn’t you goddamn know it, but I’ve gotten to be pretty damn good at math, counting and math, just, you know, keeping track of numbers and all.” Someone else got tired of him counting and said it was bullshit, that you couldn’t tell by the shots, no one could tell by counting the goddamn shots, and then Hidenfelter had become suddenly somber and said no more.