A Hard and Heavy Thing (38 page)

It was hardly Levi's fault that Chris asked him to demonstrate some hand-to-hand combat. And it wasn't his fault Chris was so drunk that he wouldn't give up. He didn't remember much, but he remembered being unable to control his laughter after she began shrieking that the kids were asleep. It was too ironic. He assured her that the cries of, “You're almost thirty, for Pete's sake!” and “You need to get help!” were far louder than the wrestling they were doing in the basement. He didn't remember putting a hole in the drywall, but Chris fixed it the next day; so what was the big deal?

“You know,” said Levi to his dad. “I don't think she trusts me around the kids.”

“She just needs to see you more. She never sees you. We never see you. She doesn't know how to act.”

“What, and I do?”

“None of us do.” They watched Prince Fielder take ball four and lumber to first. “I'd like to talk about that.”

Brad placed a plate of roast beef and vegetables in front of Levi's dad.

Levi's dad picked up his knife. “I know how it is. I know how easy it is to get a bit rough around the edges, and I know things haven't been easy.” He set his knife down and scratched his beard. Levi turned away from the game and toward him. “I've been there myself, which is why I've tried to give you some distance. Sometimes a guy just needs to work things out for himself.”

“Exactly.” Thinking they had reached some sort of understanding, Levi turned back to the game.

“Are you thinking of suicide, Son?”

The suddenness of the question caught Levi off guard. “What? No.”

Rather than accept his answer, his dad gazed into his eyes as if he were searching for something truer than words. Levi's mind flickered to the debacle in Afghanistan that got him put on the first plane back to Fort Drum. He tried to keep his eyes steady so as not to betray anything to this experienced interrogator. “Hell no. Why even ask that?”

“It needed to be asked.”

“Nick say something?”

“I've talked to Nick, sure. But he's never spoken a single ill word of you. This isn't about him. Let me put it bluntly.” He put his hand on his son's shoulder. “I think the time has come for you to talk to someone.”

Levi let out an exasperated sigh.

“I have some pamphlets in the car.”

Levi removed his hands from his glass and laced them behind his head. He looked up at the ceiling, contemplating the idea.

[Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I pretended to contemplate the idea. I had been on that stage before in forced visits to the mental health clinic at Fort Drum, and before that, the joke of a system in Afghanistan, where they made me video-teleconference on some crappy satellite connection with some prick on Bagram. They cleared out the single concrete room in this bombed out UNICEF school on Sperwan Ghar—the same room where we all lived together—and they did it so my discussion with the shrink would be considered “confidential.” Could anything get more degrading or humiliating than having your entire platoon uprooted to go stand on some mountain in the middle of nowhere so you can have your forced visit with the shrink? And how could I ever lead any of those guys again after that?]

No. Levi was done with the government's idea of mental health care. And the thing now was that even if he quit being a slug and got out to talk to a group, some veterans' support group or something, it would only be for one meeting. Just the one. Because this is what would happen: He'd go to the meeting and everyone else would have something to share, the essence of which would seem so platitudinous or like, trite. He had seen every character already.

He could imagine that each meeting would be filled with the same bromidic long-winded narrators, and each one would be identical to the characters he already knew. He conjured images of the night he got home when he had been trapped by Robert Wright and his stories of his air base. The star of the show at the meeting would be a similarly quintessential Vietnam vet with the “Look-What-I-Did-Thirty-Six-Years-Ago” baseball cap adorned with campaign ribbons and mini-medals. A graying ponytail would hang out the back of his baseball cap. Just like Wright, he'd be the broken-record type who probably didn't say a word to his family, but every weekend he went to hang out with his brothers-in-arms at the VFW who couldn't let go of their history—a history Levi would just as soon forget—and in the presence of his fellows he felt it was okay, necessary even, to rehash his battles.

A few months earlier he had paid a visit to Nick at Oma's Pub. The same kind of guy—sans ponytail but with the campaign hat—told all his stories. Nick had abandoned Levi, feigning work to excuse himself.

Levi couldn't take it. The guy continued to tell his stories. He kept pulling poor Shirley the bartender over to the conversation. With every calculated pause and well-time choke-up, with every attempt to connect or convey some real sentiment, Levi wanted to scream and tell the man how sentimental it was, and didn't he know that sentimental stories were inherently bad? And the stories were always so didactic; and didn't he know that audiences wanted to be entertained, not instructed? Didn't he know that audiences didn't want to be dragged down with the wisdom and moral lessons he was seeking to impart? He wanted to scream, but that wouldn't have been polite, because this man—this storyteller—was an American war hero after all, at least in the sophistic sense of the word; so he never screamed out his frustration, never put a stop to the narrative, and so the war stories, of course, continued. Would always continue.

[Don't think for a second that the irony here escapes me.]

“Like what then?” Levi asked his father. “Support groups? Therapy?”

“Sure. Could be. There's no one-size-fits-all approach.”

“Let me tell you how that will go down.” The alcohol had loosened Levi's tongue and the confrontation got his blood going. “I'll go to some meeting and some guy who spent his whole tour at Salsa Night or in the morale tent on Balad or Bagram or somewhere like that—some guy who's never ever been outside the wire for even a second—will corner me. Then I'll be stuck between politeness and the coffee table that holds the stainless steel coffee urn; and when I don't, like, placate him with a concerned response about what he's been through—which may as well have been an all-inclusive Sandals Resort getaway, comparatively speaking—he'll try to keep the conversation going by asking where I was and what was my mission? And how long were you in? And what made you get out? And man, don't you just miss it sometimes?

“I'll have to wait there with a crazed and impatient look in my eye, not wanting to further damage this already emotionally wounded character.”

“Character?” his dad interrupted. “But these are real people with real feelings.”

Levi ignored him and lit a cigarette. “To make it worse, we'll have to sit through these AA-style confessionals in which all I'll want to do is escape or smoke, but I can't smoke, because the VA is a government building after all, and so all I'll be able to do is bite little chunks of Styrofoam from my coffee cup. I'll pray that it will all end. That it will all be over. It's the type of thing that will make me literally wish for death.”

When Levi paused to catch his breath, his father waited to make sure he was finished. He said gently, “Are you sure you aren't thinking of suicide?”

“Geez, Dad. It's an expression.”

“So then what? You don't think any of the guys there, anyone trying or needing to get help, will really be—what did you call it? Emotionally wounded? Maybe they haven't been through as much as you've been through, but don't they still deserve our empathy?”

“I don't know, Dad. The drinking, the fighting, the stories, the failure to adjust. It's all just so cliché, don't you think?” Levi felt like anything he said would be wrong.

[I still feel like anything I say would be wrong. The truth is, he was right, but I still couldn't/can't help feeling this (misplaced?) anger. Guys like that—guys, who, by virtue of the fact they're there at a meeting at all, or writing a blog about their experiences, or publishing their memoirs before they're forty, or having an open-forum panel to share their experiences, or sitting at the bar telling their war stories—these guys obviously don't have a problem telling their stories and recounting their heroes and going through the whole terrible and painful process of facing their demons with all the necessary emotional upheaval, if you will. All in the hopes of finding some redemption. And isn't that the problem with coming home from wars like this? We're all seeking redemption as mythical as the reasons they sent us over there in the first place.

But unlike them, I do have a problem telling my story. This generation: It's not like Grandpa or my dad—hell, or even you—who didn't/don't talk about war. No, we can't stop talking about it, blogging about it, tweeting about it, and updating our Facebook statuses about it. So what is there even left for me to say? There's nothing left. It's all been said, and it's cheap, and we're frustrated, and we're all tired of it.]

“Not to mention, Dad, it's not like the Greatest Generation who fought a great evil like the Nazis. So what kind of heroes can be in my story? I mean, really, what did our friends die for? Huh? What did I get my ears blown out for? Why did you go over there and get shot? And why did Nick get his ears blown out, his leg snapped, and all his flesh burned? Why did we go over there to fight and kill people? Not the threat of WMDs; that's for sure. And we're sure as hell not fighting for freedom. If anything, they're sending us to fight these useless wars to scare people, because when people are scared they'll give up anything. If we were actually defending freedom, the people we're fighting would actually have to threaten our freedom, and no one in Iraq or Afghanistan has ever threatened that. Not al-Qaeda, not the Taliban, not any of those primitive dirt farmers, and not even those maniacs that flew those planes into our buildings. The worst those radicals can threaten is our lives. The truth is, the biggest threat to freedom is our own corrupt government, which is bigger and scarier now than it's ever been. But hey, let's deify the troops and thank them all for defending freedom, right?

“Assuming arguendo—to use your language, Dad—that I go sit in on this Kumbaya circle-jerk to appease you, Liz, Nick, and everyone else who thinks I need help; well, once again I have to be surrounded by all these deified American vets. These guys who are walking talking clichés of the movies they see about themselves. These guys who are, sadly, just like me. And is it really even our fault? It's not like we know how to act apart from how books, movies, and the Internet tell us to act. We're all products of our generational influences, that's all. And perhaps that means there's a certain lack of culpability here, but at the same time, it makes any kind of change or rehabilitation absolutely impossible. It makes me crazier than the PTSD or whatever else you think I must have. We're all trying to boil down our meaningless experiences to fit this tiny little conventional, three-act, linear narrative to, like, somehow explain or even validate what we did over there. And of course, each story is bigger and badder and more sensational than the last, and we're all trying to impress upon people how bad it was, how high the stakes were, how damaged we now are, when the truth is, our stories aren't all sensational. They're sad in their ordinariness and they're depressing in how common they are. Each one of us hitting a climax too soon and then riding out the slow boring burn for the rest of our lives.”

[And you know what? It's the denial of that, it's the attempt to give meaning to it all, or to create drama where there is none, it's that kind of blatant one-upsmanship, that kind of attention-grabbing instinct—all that ugliness that I feel and recognize in my own self—that fills me full of all this existential angst and saps me of all my goodwill.]

“So you're terrified your own story will just turn you into a cliché? Is that it?”

Levi clenched his teeth and looked at the television. Tying run at the plate in the ninth with only one out. It started with such hope. A fresh season. A new start in front of an adoring and supportive crowd.

Game over. Home team lost.

His dad continued on his dinner. “Do I seem like one of these clichés you hate? Does Nick? Do you actually
know
anyone who embodies this parody of a veteran you complain about?”

Levi shook his head and downed the rest of his beer. He was starting to feel like his flight of fancy was running out of places to go. “You know what? I don't know. I don't know anything. Maybe it would be great. You know, I'd probably walk out of the meeting, stroll to my car in the parking lot, and I'd probably even whistle. I'd feel the summer winds on my face and I'd start noticing things again. I'd see that someone took a lot of care in watering, fertilizing, and edging the nugatory island of grass in the parking lot. I'd feel that things were looking up, that there were people in this world who cared about things, and for a second, I'd probably feel something like gratitude.” He lit another cigarette.

“And then what would happen?”

Levi didn't know. He didn't have an answer. What would happen then? The beer made him tired. The conversation made him tired. There had been an upswing there, a short time where he had been riffing and enjoying himself, enjoying that he was drunk and talking and letting things out and someone was listening, even if it was all nonsense, but then he had run out of answers. Or he realized his answers were no answers at all. He felt like going home and snuggling up in the patchwork quilt of anhedonia that had become so comfortable.

[And the further I get into chronicling all this, the more I realize the real problem is none of this. No amount of therapy and no amount of psycho-babble can cure what's really wrong with me. No amount of writing, self-reflection, or emotional upheaval can wash my own black heart. And I know I lack empathy here, and worst of all, I lack love, but bear with me, because I can't sugarcoat it or in any way let myself off the hook. Not if I'm going to get through this.]