Brief Encounters with the Enemy (20 page)

“What’s the word today, buddy?” I asked the man on the corner selling newspapers.

The word today was not different than the word yesterday. The word was that it was seventy-eight degrees over there and it was minus two over here.

“What’s the word today, Zeke?” my fellow commuters on the train asked me.

The word was that they had four hundred and twenty-six casualties and we had three.

Above my head were the same government advertisements, and outside my train window was the same frozen landscape, except for the American flags, which were blowing fast. We pulled into the station at 8:34, just like we always did. And
just like we always did, we crowded through the train door, every man for himself, and raced up the stairs because we were cold and because we had snoozed too long and cut it too close.

In front of us were our office buildings all lit up, including mine, and which, in a few minutes, I would be entering and riding the elevator to the forty-eighth floor, the elevator that went almost as fast as the train, as if I were being transported somewhere urgent.

But today, when the crowd turned left, I turned right. I took the side street that led to the boulevard that led to the waterfront. I was going to be late for work, but that didn’t matter. Years ago I had cut school with Wally and we had come down and hung out by the waterfront and taken off our shirts. He’d been flabby and I’d been muscular. It had been a strange feeling to be free when everyone else was captive, and I’d had the idea that this was what it meant to be an adult.

Now sheets of ice were floating on top of the river and the wind was coming off hard. I had to bend in half against the wind that went under my coat and around my suit and tie. I walked fast and my breath came out white. My fingers felt like they were burning in my gloves.

The sign was plainspoken and unadorned.
CAREER CENTER
, it said. There was an American flag in the window, the window was fogged. I pushed open the door and entered a room where a man sat at a desk. He was sitting cockeyed to the desk, because he wasn’t cut out for office work. He was dressed in a uniform. His hat was off and his head was buzzed. On the wall behind him was a picture of young men with their arms around each other’s shoulders.

He looked up at me. He put his pen down. He stood. He smiled. He said, “I’m proud of you, son.”

Everyone was proud of me. That was the first big change. The guy I bought the newspaper from in the morning was proud of me. “Bring him back dead or alive,” he said. That was the only thing he’d said in months. The commuters on the train were proud of me. So were my parents, including my dad. My landlord was proud of me. He said, “You won’t be needing any weather-stripping where you’re going.” I said, “I sure won’t,” because I was giving up my apartment anyway. And everyone at work was proud of me. The managing director came over to congratulate me, to shake my hand and let me know what he thought of men like me, to let me know that my job would be there when I got back. Later on, Amber and Melissa and Tiffany stopped by, waving those little ninety-nine-cent American flags like they were at a parade. They said, “We get to have another party!” Brittany even came by. “Are you going to send me a postcard?” She made a pouting face like I’d been the one to break her heart once already. “You know I will,” I said, winking. When the phone rang, I imagined that the people on the other end were proud of me, which helped me help them, each and every one of them, even the rude ones, even the dumb ones. I went out of my way to help them. I could feel myself transforming, morphing into someone new. My senses seemed to be heightening as I sat there in my swivel chair—sight, sound, empathy.

When Wally came by with the mailbag, he congratulated me and then said right away, “I’m wondering if you could do
me a big favor, Zeke.” Shifting from foot to foot, he asked me if I wouldn’t mind putting in a good word for him with the managing director. It was all about him. “I can answer phones,” he said. He made it sound like anyone could do my job.

“I’ll put in a good word for you,” I said, but I was done putting in good words.

I had five days to go, five days before I shipped out for basic training, and the joke around the office was that I had better ship out before the war ended. We were closing in on their man. He was in the forest for sure. Or the mountains. The joke was that I might not get my office party after all. “You might not even get a tan,” the girls said.

I stayed up late, packing my stuff. There were boxes everywhere, filled with clothes and dishes and mementos from all those extracurricular activities in high school that made the teachers hold me up as an example of someone who was “more than just a student.” It was past midnight by the time I’d finished packing, but I was filled with energy. I took off my shirt. It was cold and the windows breathed, but I felt impervious. I dropped and did push-ups right there, right there on the kitchen floor, because I figured I might as well get started with basic training, might as well start getting back in shape. I hadn’t done push-ups in years, but I was able to do eighteen, no problem. Ten thousand hours with a headset on my head and I still had muscles in my arms, or the potential for muscles. There were some muscles in my legs too, because I did twenty-eight jumping jacks, no problem, working up a sweat and wondering if my neighbors, at midnight, were trying to trace the path my footsteps were making on their ceiling. I
wound up going to bed at three o’clock, dreaming symbolically, and waking before my clock went off.

But when I woke, it was to something unsettling: the previous day, we had sustained nine fatalities. We’d never had nine. We’d never even had seven. It’s nothing, I told myself, tomorrow it’ll be back to normal, tomorrow we’ll continue the hunt. This was Tuesday.

Wednesday brought the news that we had lost nine more. The newspaper guy, his face crisscrossed with scarves, peered at me with concerned eyes. There was an article that day, front page, about one of our soldiers, twenty-four years old, who, in the middle of the forest, had become separated from his company while looking for potable water. In his confusion, he had wandered into a town where he was set upon by the locals. Stripping him of his flak jacket, they dragged him on the end of a rope through the streets before displaying him in the square. They were going to try him, they said. After they tried him, they were going to hang him. There was a photograph of the soldier. His face frightened and dehydrated. He looked apologetic, regretful. Staring at his photo on the train ride, I couldn’t get past the fact that there had been no potable water.

Thursday the news was worse, the news was unbearable. The balance had somehow swung in the opposite direction: we were the ones being pursued. The war was going to last longer than we thought. Maybe till summer. Maybe till fall. The experts could not agree. We would persevere in the end, of course, but for now, we were fleeing and they were chasing. The reports came in randomly, if at all. At last count, they had twenty-two casualties and we had seventy-seven. In addition, two of our companies were unaccounted for, and there was
news that a general had been shot in the face. Of the soldier who had been captured while searching for water in the forest, there was no news, there were more pressing things with which to concern ourselves. Water was the least of it.

At work, no one said anything. I made it easy for them by staying in my cubicle. The only person who came by was Wally. His hair had grown even longer than before he left. It was in shaggy fashionable curls. His hair was an affront. I didn’t know whether he was coming to see if I had put in a good word for him. I made a point of staying on the phone with a customer who wanted ten tickets to the expo. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I can do ten tickets for you, ma’am.” He stood by my desk, hovering. I wanted him to witness my composure. I wanted him to witness my commission. When he left, I hung up because there was no one on the line.

That night I took my stuff to my parents’ house. Sixteen boxes of stuff. My whole life in those boxes. It was freezing and my car wouldn’t start. It rattled and coughed for a while, and then the engine caught. No one was out on the street. The only things on the street were the flags, blowing so hard they looked like they were going to fly away. They had lost their celebratory quality. They had lost their sense of unity. Now they were holding on for dear life.

“It’s like you’re moving back home, Zeke,” my dad said when I arrived.

It wasn’t like that at all. He was dressed in suspenders because he was a lawyer. My mom was dressed in an apron because she was a stay-at-home mom. My sister was dressed in torn jeans and purple eye shadow because she was a teenager.

I put the boxes in the cellar where my childhood toys were, my baseball card collection, my comic book collection, my coin collection. I’d been a hoarder as a child. Now I would learn to live with nothing.

“Stack them alongside the wall,” my dad said, referring to the boxes. He wasn’t going to give me a hand.

It was cold and clammy in the cellar. I thought about whether the barracks were going to be cold and clammy. That was something I could ask him. There were a lot of questions I could ask him. I thought about how, if I was killed, my mom and dad would have to come down to the cellar and sort through all my stuff, trying to figure out what to keep and what to throw out. I’d want them to do what we did with my grandmother’s possessions. We didn’t bother to look through any of it, we just loaded it all into a truck, mementos and everything, and gave it to Goodwill. My beer can collection, my stamp collection, give it all away.

At some point I realized that it wasn’t going to be cold and clammy in the barracks because it was seventy-eight degrees where I was headed. This failed to hearten me.

My mom had cooked a special dinner. “Chicken with stuffing, extra stuffing,” she said. That was my favorite, but I didn’t have an appetite. I hadn’t had an appetite in four days.

My dad said a prayer, “Dear Lord …” He said some things about the past and the future, generic things that could be interpreted in a number of different ways. “Amen,” he said.

“Amen,” we said.

“Dig in,” he said.

I ate to be nice. I picked, really. Moving the chicken and
stuffing around on my plate, hoping somehow to diminish the portion so my mom’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt. I could hardly swallow. I drank plenty of water, though. Four glasses of water.

“You sure are thirsty,” my sister said.

“Is the chicken too salty?” my mom wanted to know.

“It’s just right,” I said.

“It’s more than
just right
,” my dad said. He was always correcting me.

My sister wanted to catch up on everything, including her special activities in school, especially for the war. Like writing letters to soldiers.

“Are you going to send me a postcard?” I said.

“You know I will,” she said. I thought I might weep. But for her it was exciting. She told me about a soldier she’d been corresponding with. I half-listened. She ended by saying, “You’re going on an adventure, Zeke!”

This was Thursday.

Friday the news was worse. We had stopped fleeing because there was nowhere left to flee. It was official: we were surrounded. All we could do was hope for the best and wait for reinforcements. Friday was also the day I had my office party.

I was late getting there because I didn’t want to go. If it were up to me, I would have canceled. To cancel, however, would have been to exhibit my fear. Or despair. I hung out in the bathroom, not doing anything, just standing in front of the mirror, letting the water run over my hands and staring at myself, wondering what I was going to look like with my head shaved and a flak jacket on, wondering what I was going to
look like dehydrated. I already looked gaunt and hungover. I didn’t have far to go.

After a while, Wally opened the door. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said. He was standing in the doorway with a sad face, like he knew the end was coming.

“Can’t talk now, Wally!” I said, as if bursting with enthusiasm. “I have a party to get to!”

There were one hundred people waiting for me in the conference room, standing shoulder to shoulder. It was so quiet it could have been a vigil. All that was missing were the candles. To their credit, they had spared no expense: there was cake, there was soda, there were signs on the walls that the girls had spent the morning making, and which, through either oversight or intention, all said the same thing:
GOOD LUCK, ZEKE! ZEKE, GOOD LUCK! WE WISH YOU LUCK!

Luck was the thing I needed now.

As I took my place among the refreshments and decorations, the silence of the room deepened in that uncomfortable way, like when an audience doesn’t know if the play has ended. I was trying to look happy for the fun party, but I could feel my eyebrows raised unnaturally. I was sorry to have put the crowd through this. The crowd was sorry too. Two hundred sorry eyes staring at me.

Then the managing director began to clap, and the rest of the room took that as their cue to get going with false enthusiasm. They tried to applaud with the same gusto that they had applauded for Wally, but it sounded scattered and hopeless. No one was calling my name.

Somehow I summoned the energy to raise my hands above my head as if victorious, and basking in the acclaim of tepid
applause, I yelled, “Let’s eat cake!” That got everyone stomping and shouting, no doubt out of relief that I was able to show some zest for life. The managing director handed me a slice of red-white-and-blue cake, the biggest slice, of course. I ate it off a red-white-and-blue plate. And when I was done, I ate another. This was my party. The men came to shake my hand, and the girls came to kiss me on the cheek. “See you in twelve months,” they said optimistically. Brittany put one of those American-flag pins in my lapel. She leaned in close and touched me. “Good luck,” she whispered.

At one o’clock everyone got back to work, and I went to my cubicle to pack up. I had imagined it would take me all day to get everything organized and sorted and thrown out. I’d been in that cubicle two years, after all. It took about fifteen minutes. There were some odds and ends, including a couple of photographs of me and my coworkers on bowling night, when one of the guys had taken the initiative to schedule some work outings, since “work shouldn’t be all about work.” Almost everything else in my desk belonged to the company. I thought about stealing something, a keepsake, but that’s not the kind of person I am. I sat down in my swivel chair one last time, aware suddenly of how soft it was and how well it swiveled. I was going to miss my chair. I was going to miss my desk and headset. My headset smelled vaguely of sweat from having been on top of my head for ten thousand hours. I put it to my face and inhaled. On Monday morning, bright and early, someone new would come, someone who didn’t know me, someone who didn’t know how good he had it. Maybe it would be Wally, after all. Maybe it would be Wally who would
sit in my swivel chair, and thumb through the instruction packet, and shake hands with the managing director, and joke with Brittany about his new career. If they mentioned me, it’d be in the past tense. And at ten o’clock on the dot, my phone would ring, and Wally would put on my headset, and he would say for the very first time, “Good morning. My name is Wally. How may I help you today?”