Redeployment(76)

“Do you want me to maybe just read that?” she says, pointing at the papers. “Then ask you questions afterwards? I mean, if you’ve already got it written down…”

Jenks pulls the papers away from her. He looks at me.

“Or okay,” she says. “You read it. That’s best.”

Jenks takes a breath. He sips water and I sip beer. Jessie’s scowling at her friend and squeezing Jenks’s hand. After a moment, Jenks clears his throat and holds the papers out again.

“It must have been worse for my family than for me,” he starts again. “People look at me now and think, God, how terrible. But it was so much worse then. They didn’t know if I’d survive, and I didn’t look like myself. When a body loses as much blood as I did, weird things happen. I was holding an extra forty pounds of fluid in my body, puffing up my neck and face like a bloated fish. I was bandaged and oiled wherever I was burned and—”

“Do you remember the explosion itself?” Sarah cuts in. Jenks gives her a flat look. The day before, when he’d asked me to come, I’d told him that if he gave this girl his story, it wouldn’t be his anymore. Like, if you take a photograph of someone, you’re stealing their soul, except this would be deeper than a picture. Your story is you. Jenks had disagreed. He never argues with me, he just goes his own way. I told him I’d come with him whatever he chose to do.

“I’ve worked hard to remember it,” he tells Sarah, flipping back through his pages but not looking at them. “The problem is I’m not sure what’s real memory and what’s my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I’m sure of my bright light. There was a flash, definitely. There was a sulfur smell, like the Fourth of July, but real close.”

I don’t remember sulfur. I remember meat. Grilled meat. So, yeah, Fourth of July. Barbecue. It’s why I’m vegetarian now, and why the hippie chicks in Billyburg sometimes think I’m like them, which I’m not.

“And black hitting so hard,” Jenks says.

“Black?”

“Everything black and quick, a knockout. You ever been knocked out?”

“Actually, yes.”

I let out a loud snort. There’s no way Sarah’s ever been knocked out. I bet her parents had put her in Bubble Wrap all the way to the Ivy Leagues.

“Then yeah. Black hitting you, like a knockout punch to the head, no gloves, but the knuckle is bigger than you are, it hits your whole body all at once, and it’s on fire. It killed the two other guys in the vehicle, Chuck Lavel and Victor Roiche, who were amazing Marines and the best friends I’ve ever had, though I didn’t know they’d died until later. And then there are scraps of memories and then waking up in another country, wondering where my battle buddies are, and at the same time knowing they’re dead, but not being able to ask because I couldn’t move or talk and had a tube in my throat.”

Chuck and Victor were my friends too, and good friends of Jenks’s, but never his best friends. That was always me.

“So the scraps,” Sarah says.

“I remember screaming,” Jenks says, “I don’t know—from the explosion, from later, in the hospital, screaming. Though I couldn’t have screamed in the hospital.”

“Because of the tube.”

“I feel like there were times I was screaming, or maybe times when I dreamed how things should have been.”

“What do you remember?” Sarah turns to me. So does Jessie. “Do you remember screaming?”

Jenks is looking down at his hands. He sips water.

“Maybe,” I say. “Who cares? My A-driver didn’t hear shit. No sounds at all. A thing like that, if you got ten people there, then you’ll have ten different stories. And they don’t match.”

I don’t trust my memories. I trust the vehicle, burnt and twisted and torn. Like Jenks. No stories. Things. Bodies. People lie. Memories lie.

“It helps to put things in order,” Jenks says, one palm resting on his paper.

“Helps with what?” Sarah says.

Jenks shrugs. He’s been doing that a lot. “Nightmares,” he says. “Weird reactions when you hear something, smell something.”

“PTSD,” she says.

“No,” Jenks says matter-of-factly. “Explosions don’t startle me. I’m all good. Fireworks, light and sound, it’s all fine. Everybody thought the Fourth of July would freak me out, but it doesn’t unless there are too many smells. And I don’t lose it or anything. Just… weird reactions.”