Afterburn (30 page)

But if he left now, Ellie would only become more irritated. He watched her go into the bedroom and followed her. She sat heavily on the bed, a huge one she'd had shipped from Tuscany ten years back. If I didn't know better, he thought, I'd say she is cracking up a bit. She took one of the photos of Ben off her nightstand and studied it, eyes blinking, mouth slack. There's no safety in the world, he thought, never. She'd made Ben inside of her and he'd died. End of story. She wants a safe place for herself and for her husband, and who could blame her? Trying to set up the last leg home, so to speak, and if he were a decent man, a kind man, he'd appreciate Ellie for this act of love and foresight. Instead, he felt only fear and bitterness and resentment. So here she was looking at the photo of their dead son, asking herself the unanswerable.

After Ben died, she'd lost weight and for a time started smoking again. Meanwhile, Charlie buried himself in work, trying to get Teknetrix into the design sequence of some of the large telecom manufacturers, trying to spec into their products. Chasing success to flee grief. In that year after Ben's death he'd flown almost constantly, mostly to Asia and Silicon Valley, meeting other executives, making bids, taking bids, buying dinner for everyone, ordering cars to the airport, from the airport, wake-up call at 5:00 a.m., please, I'm here today to show you what Teknetrix can do within your cost structure, that's one hell of a nice putt, ours is faster, we can engineer that ten percent smaller. The whole cha-cha-cha. A bad time in the economy, the mid-eighties, but he'd hoped that if he could just get the orders moving for Teknetrix, then eventually the company would climb the vertical face of market share. A hundred sales calls, a thousand cups of coffee, a hundred thousand miles of flying: ten large orders. They bought a smaller competitor, they hired better engineers, they scored four design wins in two months in 1985. All after Ben's death. All because Charlie went on the road. If Ben had lived, Teknetrix might have died, but because Ben perished, Teknetrix boomed, from eighty million in sales to two hundred million in three years, including the strategic acquisition. Eleven hundred employees to three thousand to nine thousand. An amazing leap. The great irony was that Charlie would have showered that prosperity down upon Ben, sent him to any graduate school in the world, helped him get married or start off on the right foot. Anything for his Ben. And now all they had were some photographs and the things in Ben's closet that Ellie could not bring herself to throw away. His high-school letter jacket, his basketball, now gone soft. He wondered if these things would also find their way down to Vista del Muerte. Probably. He'd ask Ellie to put Ben's stuff where he was unlikely to run into it. She could build a special little walk-in closet, if she wanted, a shrine. She was like that, Ellie. Needed to hang on to the relics. Still had Julia's baby teeth somewhere and pieces of hair and tiny wool mittens and Ben's soccer shoes and Julia's retainer from after she got her braces off. It was more than sentimental, it was superstitious. Primitive. He understood the impulse and it scared the hell out of him. For if you were attached to this thing and that thing, then why not everything, why not grab every last fucking fragment of life's passage? But of course you could not. Ellie had held tight to life from the very first, perhaps because she'd lost her parents early. The death of Ben had confirmed her worst fears about the unbearable nature of time and being; suffering arrived in every life, and the only question was whether you understood this sooner or later. He'd often wondered if she'd had an affair when he was in Vietnam, or while he was MIA, out of worry or grief, but her devotion to him when he returned convinced him that he didn't need to ask. If she had done so, then so be it. It was some piece of another man's flesh in her for a few minutes. Maybe it made her happy. He could take that, he really could. In the great flow of things, not such a big deal really. They'd made children together, and that was the singular fact of their union, that was the thing that bound them forever and ever, amen. And anyway, Ellie could live with the truth that for three years he'd killed human beings for a living. If two people's miseries do not overlap, then why should their happinesses?

But although she knew, roughly, what had happened to him as a prisoner, he'd never told her everything about it. Not about the ropes and not about the rice sacks filled with stones. How do you explain torture? Where your mind went? How you hated them but also yourself for what was being done to you? He'd told the psychiatrists at the base hospital enough anyway; they pumped it out of you before you could poison your family. Some guys even required sodium pentathol. Say it, say what happened. Tell us, young fellow. We know you need to talk about it. But they didn't want you to talk to anyone else about it. Don't tell the newspaper reporters, don't discuss it with other active pilots, try not to tell your wife too much. It was fucking political. But he'd done his best to comply. And even then, the Air Force kept him in the hospital for nine weeks, controlled access to him. No photographs, except for internal medical research purposes, no visits from family members until after his bones had been reset, tendons reattached, after he had been tube-nourished, dewormed, stepped down from the morphine, had his broken teeth fixed. In that time they got thirty pounds back on him. Shave, haircut, trimmed fingernails, new uniform, nice crutches, fifty pills a day, back brace. Then, and only then, had Ellie been allowed to see him. Greatest moment in his life, when he hugged her, felt the kids rush against his legs. As for what had happened, she'd asked, of course, begged him to tell her so that she could understand his long silences. But he'd decided talking would make it bigger, not smaller. Would pervert the perversion, lay language on it, never to be removed. She meant well, she was willing to listen, but finally the experience had been his, not hers. He wanted to get on with the raising of the children, the pursuit of the future. And so they'd never really talked about it, and in the shared history of their lives, his POW experience had become, all these years later, just an anomaly, a strange dark patch sewn into a familiar bright fabric. Moreover, the death of Ben had changed everything, recalibrated their notion of suffering. There was simply life before Ben died and after. In the subsequent years they had become so prosperous, the value of Teknetrix's stock rising so high, that it was as if their faith in the endurance of grief was being tested. Once their wealth reached a critical mass, say ten million, it burgeoned and proliferated, rooting itself and spreading, blooming in the long bull market of the nineties. Ellie would say to him sometimes, "We have so much money and it really doesn't—I mean, I like to see shows and I like our apartment, but you know I—" And then she'd stop and her blue eyes would fill and he'd nod sadly and they both would know that there was nothing they could do. Their boy was gone. Sometimes on those evenings Charlie would feel a strange strength to his erection, getting almost as stiff as he did when he was younger, and their fucking beneath the covers became an erotic communion of grief. Ellie would go back and forth between orgasms and weeping, several times, though his own final spasm contained little that was celebratory or even cathartic to it; he would just give in to necessity. Even as they held their pleasure close to themselves, they knew it was fleeting, they knew that it would only later deliver them into sadness, and that year by year they were losing hold on the things they wanted most. Ellie in these times would wrap her legs around him and beg him please to fuck her so that she could just forget everything, everything except that she was alive, and he would try not to feel his back and do his damnedest and sometimes, rarely, it would work, but usually not. When it did, she cried out and he'd bow his head and feel glad for her yet also aware that he was incapable of such deliverance. It's different if you have killed people, it's different because, although you can suffer the death of people you love, you know that you've caused that same grief in innumerable others, and the weight of that is always there, pulls at you like a stone. It didn't matter that he'd done it for his country. It didn't matter that the war was unnecessary. If he had only known then what he knew now. But that was true of everybody. He had gone to war because he'd loved to fly, and although he had been very good at understanding technical procedures and air combat strategy and the argument that he was protecting democracy and all the other monkey-brain complexity the Air Force filled you with, he had not understood time. Not understood that his actions weren't discrete and perishable but that they would become part of him, forever. He would carry them. You carry your own water around here, his father always said, and he was right. There was nothing he could do now about what he had done then.

For a few years, however, he'd hoped that he might understand his experience as a POW as some form of punishment, but now that idea was laughable, nothing more than a lie; after all, he had lived, and lived well, whereas all those people had died. The only thing that came close was Ben's death. But even that was not enough to balance the accounts. It was not enough to remember the way, in his last week in the hospital, that Ben had curled up on his left side, his hands in loose fists near his face, hunched in against the opponent. At times his crusty eyelids opened, but whatever he saw was not before him in the room. He could no longer talk then, but he seemed to be alert within himself, and his staying in the clenched position seemed his insistence on a bit of privacy while he went about the hard work of dying. His thin beard had become long, and a day or two before the end, Charlie brought his electric razor to the hospital to shave him. Ben's neck was like a baby's, too weak to support his head, so Charlie slipped his hand beneath his son's ear and carefully shaved both cheeks and his chin one last time, so that Ellie would be able to see the face of her son, see the face of the boy in the young man who was now almost ancient. Ben's eyes opened at the touch of Charlie's hand and a curl appeared at the corner of his mouth, the curl of amusement and pleasure that always signified how he felt about things. But this tremor of sweetness on Ben's face was no consolation, for its softness only signified that all things died, even a nineteen-year-old prince. Dying more quickly, in fact, because of his youth. Yes, all earthly things returned to earth, some at their appointed time, others not.

There were no last words from Ben, no moments of redemption and grace; he simply disappeared into a soft fit of coughing, his chest rising and falling against the liquid filling his lungs—it was Ben's last race, Charlie had always thought, and it could not be won. He stood next to the hospital bed until the very end, until the nurse took her hand away from Ben's wrist and looked up at Charlie, until they straightened Ben's body while they could, pulled his legs from his chest, pushing down the knobby knees, and set his arms at his sides into the coffin position—society's last formality. As the hospital gown fell back, Charlie had glimpsed Ben's penis, gray and loose in the nest of pubic hair, the catheter tube shoved deep into the pisshole—yet another violation of Ben's youth, as if sucking the life out of him from there, too. Ben's chin was still lifted upward, his eyelids not quite closed, and for a moment his expression appeared brazen, even hostile, daring all comers, which would have been like him. The attendants unfolded the long gray plastic bag and lifted Ben into it with practiced ease, and Charlie stopped them then and asked if they would leave the room for a moment, and that was when he leaned close to Ben, shrouded by the bag, and pressed his own warm forehead against Ben's cool one and said, Goodbye, son, I will love you forever.

HE LOOKED
at the news for a while, then checked his corporate E-mail while Ellie drifted around the apartment in her nightgown. Her feet looked bumpy. She set a book down by her bed table. She was going to sleep earlier and earlier, it seemed. A sign of depression? He remembered the cloisonné bowl in the front closet and wondered if he could cheer her up.

He retrieved the bowl and set it on the bed.

"Hey, wifey-girl," he called.

"What is—Oh, that
is
lovely, Charlie." She picked up the bowl, traced her finger around a dragon's nostrils. "This is quite nice."

"I think it's old enough to count."

"I do, too. Where did you get it?"

"There's an antiques place in Shanghai, in the old city. I had them send it."

She ran her fingers along the dragon's wings. "You know, I haven't heard from Miriam upstairs for almost two weeks. She had something terrible happen. Her son killed himself playing racquetball."

"What?"

"Yes. He ran into the wall, headfirst."

"Broke his neck?"

"He died right there on the court, Miriam said. He and his wife had three children. The wife is just devastated. Now Miriam has to help out. He didn't leave enough life insurance, I guess." She pushed her fingers along the dragon's scaled tail. "Anyway, the problem is, Miriam doesn't
like
the daughter-in-law. They never really—Where did you get it, anyway?"

"An antiques market in the old city." He smiled at her. That didn't mean anything, not necessarily. "I just told you."

"You did? Of course. It's
very
nice. Thank you, sweetie. I was just trying to—" Ellie stood there. "Charlie, I'm—I'm having some problems."

He nodded silently.

"I'm not remembering things. Little things, mostly. I was trying to remember my mother's birthday today and I couldn't. Then I thought I could look it up in the phone book. I actually put my hand on the phone book before I remembered that made no sense. It's things like that."

"We're all doing things like that."

"No, no, Charlie, don't pretend." Her eyes begged him. "I need you to see this now."

"Come here." He held her. "What else?"

"Oh, I feel like putting notes on everything, just to remember. Call Julia. Get the cleaning. Yesterday I drove the car with the emergency brake on for half an hour."