Via Dolorosa(46)

The arm continued to spasm. Yet he willed it and, after a moment, it was still. His fist remained. He did not even know if he could unclench his fingers. And when he finally did, he saw that his fingernails had cut crescents into the flesh of his hand. His goddamn ruined hand…

By the time Emma returned with a fresh carafe of demitasse, Nick was not feeling well. She set the carafe on the table and felt his brow.

“You’re burning up,” she told him.

“It’s just the heat.”

“It feels like fever.”

“The heat,” he repeated.

The afternoon was mild and cool; the remnants of the storm still hung wet and bleak over the island.

“Maybe you should go up to the room and lay down,” Emma said.

He pushed himself away from the table and balanced, standing, on legs that felt like wet cornstalks.

How did I get here? Who am I and how did I get here?

And another voice, this time not Myles Granger’s—this time completely unrecognizable to him: How the hell should I know?

What should I do?

—Go shit in your hat.

What should I do?

—Go take a flying leap, you piss-scared coward.

What should I do?

—Play possum, why don’t you?

Back up in the room, Emma pulled his shoes off and unrolled his socks from his feet. He climbed into bed and tried not to move after falling back into the pillows. There was no moving now. Emma went directly to the double doors and pushed them wide open. A good, strong breeze filtered into the room. Nick felt his sweaty body break out in gooseflesh.

“How’s that?” Emma said, still standing by the double doors. “I don’t want it to be too much on you.”

“It’s fine,” he said.

She crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at him. He could not meet her gaze. Again, he could hear her voice echoing in his head: I can’t live with myself if you don’t know, Nicky. I can’t live with myself if I keep this from you. Those goddamn words. Why had she felt the need to absolve herself? Why do that to him? Goddamn it, why?

“This is my fault,” she said. She was crying.

“Some of it,” he said.

“I hate this.”

“So do I.”

“Then what do we do?”

He could give her no answer. What answer was there? Then what do we do? He thought, We take it back, that’s what we do. We summon some supernatural powers and go back in time and take it the hell back. Can you do it? Can you do it?

He said, “Let me sleep for a bit.”

She did not say anything. She did not stop crying and did not remove herself from the bed, either.

“Emma,” he began.

She bent and kissed him hard on the mouth. But before he could react at all, she had finished, and was rising from the bed and moving across the room. She picked up one of her poetry books from the desk and pulled half the drapes closed over the patio doors so the cold would not be too unbearable. From seemingly out of nowhere, something about her presence reminded him of their early courtship, before both their relationship and his hand became tainted by the war. It was nothing specific this time, though. Perhaps he had just glimpsed the simplicity that was her, and that he had fell in love with (in a time that now seemed very far away), and it was a powerful and lingering sensation. He tried to recapture it fully then, right then, as he remained unmoving on the bed with his head pressed into the pillows, sweating on himself, his mouth tasting old and bad and sour. He tried to recapture whatever it was that made him recall their uncorrupted time together, but he could not do it quick enough.

She left the room, leaving him alone.

Limbo, he thought, and it was as loud as a gunshot in all that silence. How low can you go?





—Chapter XIII—





He remembered everything about Fallujah. Every detail.

They had seen much fighting. It was not uncommon for the platoon—for any of the platoons—to engage in six, or seven, or eight-hour battles in the tiny villages and outside the mosques. There were four squads split into eight teams. By February, each functioned independently. Nick D’Nofrio, First Lieutenant Platoon Leader, would keep track of the passing hours by watching the drift of shadows across the sand. They were good boys, all of them, the whole sick crew. That was what Oris Hidenfelter dubbed them: the whole sick crew. He carried with him a tattered copy of a Thomas Pynchon novel and it seemed he was always associating or attributing references from the book to the squad and its members.

At night, they set camp.

“I was hoping you could help me, Lieutenant,” Bowerman said. He was spread out in the dark, his hands folded behind his head, his head down on his pack.

“I could shoot you.”

“Yeah, that would be it.”

“Shoot you in the ass, send you home.”

“That would certainly be it, boy.”

“We could do it. We could set the whole damn thing up.”

“Could you make me a hero?”

“I suppose I could make you anything you want.”

“Who would refute it? It’s almost a miracle I haven’t taken one in the ass yet.”

“They’d just patch you up and send you back out.”

“What about in the leg, then?” Bowerman said. “Anyway, the ass would be too embarrassing.”