We Come to Our Senses (10 page)

I
can never relate the brutality: 4:17 a.m., awakened by the Ophelian babble of a young white woman. I lay in bed, staring at my ceiling as her whispers rose into garbled questions, then rose into sobs—and, finally, into mindless, screaming pleas: “
Help me, please. Somebody. Help Me, Please. Somebody. HELP ME! PLEASE! SOMEBODY!
”

Alongside anguish, the woman's cries also conveyed a plain-as-you-please disbelief that absolutely nobody cared. Cares.

As she stumbled beneath my alleyside window I ran into the bathroom. I tried to vomit, but couldn't. I couldn't call the cops either.

SPEC
has this German shepherd with smashed hips. You can tell the dog's injury is a couple of years old by the way it hops. By the way its pale tongue hangs, and its eyes hit the ground. Spec has to yank the dog outside by this harnesslike device made of old belts and duct tape. He cinches it around the animal's neck and chest—taking the weight off the back legs—then lifts it up by the duct-tape handle and lugs it down the front steps of his building.

Dog looks like a piece-of-shit suitcase. Placed in the strip of sidewalk snow, it ambles sideways, as if drunk. Spec stands beside it and smokes while the shepherd coils around, then quakes as it defecates. He looks away from the dog, and to the
industrial F
OR
S
ALE
sign, red letters on white, newly bolted into the side of his house, a rental.

I'd be embarrassed if it was my dog. Spec doesn't acknowledge the disfigurement. He just flicks down his smoke when the animal finishes, yanks up the silver-tape harness, and lugs the shepherd back up the front steps. Goddamn dog. I bet it used to be the most gloriously mean motherfucker in the alley.

LAST
night, drunk, coming home from the VFW on South Wallace, I emerged from the train to a neighborhood on lockdown. Nobody walked, loitered, cruised; there was nothing but the sound of the train gears squeaking away, then the flitter of tumbling trash. I shuffled past shuttered liquor store and Title Loan, Carnicería and Orthodox Church. Stapled to power poles were new Health Department signs in Spanish with a picture of a target over a cartoon rat's head:
Ratón
. I cut into the alleyway, leaned into the razor wind, and marked progress by yellow streetlight spheres. I imagined an insurgent rupturing my capillaries, his fists bashing the blood vessels of my sclera. I knew that I was being watched, yet there were no beautiful neighborhood kids to save me, to serve as witness. No romantic cat analogy. No war narrative to claim.

No. That's drama. There was and is exactly one war narrative: Benefits, rightly mine. Health. Retirement. Education. Home ownership. Cheap meals at Applebee's on Veterans Day. Ten percent discount at Lowe's.

The rest of it? The cause? The memory and terror? Sanctimony. Total bullshit.

I clapped my gloved hands and laughed at myself, my boots crunching bottle shards as I walked towards my dog-shit-littered alley door.

Stepping through a cone of security light, I heard a series of metal clinks from the adjacent darkness. I darted into shadow and crouched against a wall, grasping for a rifle I haven't carried in years. I keened to the source, a black void of open crawl space, a haven of cats and gas lines.

“Spec?” I whispered. “Specialist?”

Nothing.

“It doesn't have to go down this way,” I stated. “I mean, think about it. There are guerrilla garden plots to plant. Or we rehab the neighborhood rec center. Or . . . or hell, man, let's occupy a red
X
house. I mean, just take it over. We'll occupy, then gut and rehab, and then give it away to an evicted family. Teach the kids how to do the same, then unleash them on the neighborhood. We can fight, Spec. Can retake the land. And your house, even. We can buy your house proper and establish a base of . . .”

From the crawl space came the waft of rotten eggs, of the mercaptan fused to natural gas. “Specialist? The opening of gas lines is not an acceptable tactic. In fact, this is selfish, a shortsighted campaign. And you know what? I get it. I do. I know what it means to stand next to death. I crave how it feels to be made alive by violence. But it won't work like that anymore. Not here, anyway. I promise you, man. The law won't turn their backs on this. It'll take about a day to figure
out someone blew this building up, and another to figure out it was you. And then?”

Still, nothing.

“Spec?” I called out. “Let me in. Please.”

I waited for a few seconds, then turned and marched home. On my doorframe was a newly scrawled hobo symbol. A diamond shape with a line pointing up from the top corner:

A diamond on a noose? A diamond with a fuse? Whatever it meant, there was no mistaking the threat.

“Roger that!” I shouted, then spat into the blackness. I went inside, sat at my lighted table, in my lighted kitchen window, and filled out that VA loan app.

THIS
morning I woke to a rhythmic clash of metal on metal. It sounded like a chain gang, or the grinding track gears on an APC. I got up, put coffee on the burner, looked out the small window, to my Hermosa and Humbolt Parks version of Rome. Two brown men in layers of plaid flannel shirts were tearing down the first of the ancient cupolas. Blue-sky-blue surrounded them. The process of destroying both domes took about an hour.

I dread the idea of walking up on the old cat's carcass. Best-case scenario, one day, one week, I'll realize she's gone. This will be enough.

Colleen

LAND

COLLEEN LAY AWAKE
the nights, staring at the popcorn-textured ceiling. Her bedroom window was propped open by a box fan, its draft blowing out against the thick Mississippi air. She smoked in slow, labored sighs, a glass ashtray on her tummy as she sprawled on her old twin bed. Now twenty-two, she'd gone from high school straight to Basic Training and AIT, then on to deployment, before circling right back to that rural, postwar starter home, and to her childhood bedroom, a chorus of graduation tassel and sapphire-paneled basketball trophy, her parents biting back the demand that she smoke outside.

She'd get her own place soon. A job and whatever. Sometime.

She could picture the desert, barren and pocked by missile char. Fighter jets rented the vast gray horizon, cracking the sound barrier, shredding the calls to prayer. She had watched them deliver payload on the beige city in the distance, a city
almost shorelike against a gulf of sand, and with minarets capped in turquoise. From her platoon's staging area she saw the explosions, and the tufted clouds that rose silently afterward. At distance, it took several seconds before the concussions of the blasts had arrived to buckle her knees; the space between visual and physical was like being stuck in a riptide, a schism of cause and effect. Colleen could not get over this dead interval. She was terrified of it, but more than anything wanted to find it again. To somehow crawl inside.

The beige city in the distance. The goat herd that wandered onto the edge of the formation. Their bellies distended, their hip bones propping hide. Gray and black goats with stringy beards. Their shepherd, a lanky teenage boy in a beige caftan, wielded a dry reed. His face was smooth and feminine. One troop had laughed about the goats acting like stray dogs, trotting in a pack, starving, their dusted tongues bobbing from the sides of their mouths. Their shrill bleats and neck bells. Starving and trotting toward the soldiers.

Colleen and the platoon had loitered in the sand, having exited the vehicles despite orders to stay put, to remain on the outskirts and wait. They were heavy with equipment, tactical armor to tempered steel plate; their sweat was quickly shed to the oven-dry air. The guys pissed at the back bumper, and cut up, and listened for the order to engage the city. Now and again they'd seen the small, muted blooms of smoke rise from a frag grenade or IED.

They had spot-welded scrap metal to the floorboard of the Hummers. They had not live-fired their A4s. They were staged at distance from the action, on the periphery, waiting. And the goats had charged at them for food. And
pop-op-op
,
brass casings hit the sand. They dropped half of the herd within seconds, and then Colleen and Van Dorn and the rest of the squad had held the shepherd kid back at gunpoint, his face a squall of
Why?

This was early in the tour. They still held indoctrinations of faith, honor, manhood, love, remorse, reunion, memorial. Yet after the episode, the simple killing of goats, Colleen had sensed something sensational about herself, about all of them: They were free. Of obligation, code, or history.

Of land. Day upon day, staring into the void of sand, surrounded by it, coated in it, the talc-like granules circulating in her lungs, deposited, expelled, she was divorced from her lifelong relationship to land: how it had defined her, and her parents, and even how earth itself had been defined by others before she was even born. How the passing down or manipulation of soil determined both who you were and what you weren't.

Yet looking across the desert, ridiculous in its capacity, all direction marred by only what was temporary, truck to tent to trailerlike CHU barracks, to the drift, even, of landmass, the dissolution of history by wind, Colleen understood that for the first time she was rendered landless—but with total authority. There was nothing to accumulate, to pay down, to pass on. No demarcation, save sand and rock and horizon, and the ability to navigate it at will.

The void was lawless, and gorgeous with opportunity. They were able in theory and by firepower to traverse the space as deemed fit.

It was strange to her that the majority of her unit still stoked the narratives that they felt relied upon them: the things they owned or could potentially own; the foods they had always
eaten, or the women and kids who depended on them. The talk was not of transcendence, but of combat pay and mortgages and church; of the predetermined highways that would guide their new, postwar pickups. They yammered about GI Bills and VA loans, and the fixed-rate rewards of making it home in one piece.

Again, this was early on. By the end of the tour most of them didn't care if they ever redeployed.

One morning, a few months into that first tour, Colleen had requisitioned a Deuce-and-a-Half truck, then veered off of the asphalt two-lane and into the gut of the desert, alone, carving the sand, fishtailing wildly. She looped the vehicle a time or two, marking great quarter-mile circles, and then cut deeper into the expanse, weaving in snakelike curls. Her vision and hands forged new pathways with the wheel; her tires left ruts where none had rutted. She ran out of gas in the middle of everything, and then watched the sand-drift devour her tracks. She was scared. Thrilled. She wriggled out of her clunky, ill-fitting body armor, and she squatted and pissed in the sand. Laughed so hard that she teetered onto her backside—and then laughed even louder, and applauded for nobody.

The roads, she thought now, as she stared at that popcorn ceiling. “The land,” she whispered as she looked to her pink bedroom walls.

She got out of bed, and tiptoed across the room. Chewed on her thumbnail and looked out the window, to the moonlit pines that walled the edge of the property. In memory, she again heard the bleating of the goats, the hobbles, the
pop-op-op
. She remembered the balance of the herd trotting over their dead.

They had given the kid a wad of USD for the damage, joked, “Get along, now, little haji.” When he had continued to protest they waved him back with rifle barrels. Corporal Van Dorn then razor-wired a nanny to the hood of the Humvee.

Picturing Van Dorn made her eyes well. Colleen shuddered, and wiped her palms against her cheeks, and then rocked on her heels to try and strangle his memory—though she knew this would never, ever happen. She smoked another cigarette, and stared at the lighter. She flicked it and flicked it, then hurled it across the room.

CRIED, BEAT EACH OTHER

SHE
had come home on a chartered United 777, landing at Fort Bragg after a stopover in Ireland, a layover at an airport terminal full of whiskey kiosks, and with windows that showcased a green landscape shined by rain. It was the loveliest place she'd ever seen—a judgment aided by the daze of jet lag, and the lens of the Occidental: lipstick, skirts, 3-D movie ads. Colleen, swollen with optimism, swore she would return to Ireland one day . . . if she could remember the name of the town.