Fire and Forget (10 page)

* * *

The sand buries the moonlight.

Henderson sits in the darkness with his back curved against the inexorable. And as the sand gathers around him, he thinks
the world feeds on us all
. This thought surprises him. He doesn't know where it came from, but as he sits hunched over, the wind and sand shape a dune around him, a transient barchan moon. He takes off his helmet, sets it in his lap. It is a bowl of shadow, filling with the inscrutable world.

He thinks of home, of Anna, of sand pouring in their bedroom window. The slow tide of it all pours in, wave by wave, as the ceiling fan spirals a thin cloud of dust over her. The painted lines on the streets outside begin to disappear. Streetlights dim and go dark. Anna calls out to him in her sleep.

As the wind picks up around him, he opens the door and walks into his home. He snaps a chem-light, which is like holding the last cold remains of a fire, holding it out and away from his body. Anna sleeps in the wreckage, sand erasing her image in the far mirror. Henderson traces her body in the soft light. Sand sparkles red on her eyelashes and the fine soft edges of her lips. He touches her face, but he cannot wake her, and she cannot hear
him when he says her name. He can only watch as her features, yielding, disappear beneath the gathering dune of their bed.

Henderson cups his hands over his face to block out the dust.

He remembers a time from twenty years back, when he was just a kid. Poolside. An apartment complex. Summer smoke and distant helicopters. Laughter. His bare feet on the curving concrete lip of the pool as old man Kelman startled him with what he must have thought was a playful gesture. And Henderson, not knowing how to swim, fell backward wheeling in slow motion. The old man had turned away, not recognizing how the cool waters of the deep end displaced Henderson's small frame before curling back over to push him down, as deep into that blue and unlivable world as his body could go.

O
N BAD DAYS SHE RIDES THE SUBWAY.
She knows the bad days from the somewhat OK days by the tightness that inches slowly across her skin. On bad days the tightness overwhelms her and forces her onto the 7 line, its simple out-and-back path through Queens soothing her a little. Riding back and forth on the train gives her time to think. Watching the western skyline of Queens backed by Manhattan gives her a swinging backdrop to the narrative of her memories. One trip between Times Square and Flushing averages forty minutes. About five months ago, on one of her worst days yet, she rode back and forth thirteen times, before the claustrophobic press of rush hour forced her off. She watches buildings and neighborhoods flow past the window first one way then the other. The blur of outlines and colors soothes her, hypnotizing in a way that numbs whatever follows the constriction and headaches. The tightness announces the flood, those images and emotions lurking beneath the surface of everyday life, the soft buzz from a mistuned radio. A normal day is when she can make it through class and work, but when the tightness comes on, she knows it's not going to be a normal day.

Today, she's on her way to Penn Station to meet her mom for a long trip north to Vermont. It was her mom who decided they would take this trip, a month away from the city. She decided that the two of them should spend a month together at the house, hiking and swimming and “catching up, just us girls.”

“It'll be good for you, honey,” she'd said. “You're so alone in the city, and I'm worried about you. You need fresh air.”

Ten hours on Amtrak to the small town where her mom has a summer home, a barn-like house built in that odd Vermont continuous manner, with one room followed by another and unexpected doors and thresholds appearing out of the shadows drawing a person through the house, floating along without wanting to. She drifted along whenever she was in that house, the rooms choosing her direction for her. She had spent most of her time drifting through the house that last summer before boot camp. Her memory of that summer, hazy in the same way the dust rolled in over the base and made her feel like a goldfish trapped in a bowl, everything looking curved and surreal. She had wanted to go to her bedroom but found herself in the short entryway instead, looking at family photos and small landscapes bought in local shops. The crumbling scent of dried flowers hung around her as the air shifted with her movements. The house was deserted most of the year, cleaned every three months by a woman for hire. Only their possessions there proved that they visited, no other lasting mark. She touched her fingertips gently to the bottom of one of the photographs, a bright fiery orange one, her and her mom shadows against a campfire. If another person ever came through the front door, if they took the time to look at the pictures in their frames, hold their nose close and take in the details, the swirled marks of her prints would distract the eye away from the captured intensity of the flames.

Outside, on the single concrete step, she leaned against the front door and tried to remember why she was there. A smudge of
blue flannel caught her eye. She saw her mother standing in the old cornfield. She walked slowly across the field to join her mother, stumbling over the rough earth. With each step she expected her mother to turn around, to wave and smile like she always did, but she remained where she was, staring at something at her feet. Even when she scuffed to a stop next to her, she didn't move.

There was a dead bird on the ground. She wanted to say something to her mom, but kept her mouth shut at the look on her face. The bird lay on its back, its wings gently spread and feet curled up to its belly, looking for all the world as if it had simply fallen out of the sky, body frozen midflight. A few wing feathers shivered in the breeze, a line of ants moved around the beak and open, staring eyes. Her younger self tried hard to understand why the death-eyes of the bird felt so familiar. She tried to remember where she'd seen them before. And then her older self remembered for her: eyes staring up into the cloudy Iraqi sky and a body so still and she wishing and wishing that the eyes would blink and the mouth say “Gotcha.” There wasn't a single hole or mark on the bird. She couldn't figure out what kind it was; something about the size of a cardinal but dark brown and speckled all over. She imagined it flying some great distance, maybe from the top of Canada, south along the curve of the earth and looking down at the shifting landscape below. The methodical beat of its wings leveraging against the wind, gravity, matching the beat of its heart, maybe became too much. The small, gradual movement along its path too tiring and it simply gave up, let its wings go slack and tumbled to the ground.

Her mother spun to face her. Her eyes were big, scared. “I don't know how to—” she choked out. She didn't finish. Instead, she turned away and crossed back to the house, staring at the ground.

She was the one who buried the bird; she carried the bird before her, the dark body on the spade of the old shovel she leveled in
front of her body, feeling the rough wood and splinters digging into her hands. She couldn't not look at the bird as she walked to the tree line. Her short steps across the fallow field and the shovel swinging slightly with the shift of her hips. Her mother should be with her (she was probably watching from a window) to hug her shoulders and finish what she had started to say. An unfinished sentence. An unfinished migration. She kicked the bird into the shallow hole with her toe and packed dirt over it. Even after so many years she could still feel the soil beneath her foot as she tamped it down. A soft giving beneath the shovel that had the hollow sound of the rusty steel. She wonders what that would sound like from below, from beneath the soil. So often she's thought about it: death. So often the idea fills her head while she's awake that she hardly remembers anything else. Expansion of that single thought until there is no room for others and she is fastened onto the idea of being down,
beneath.
To be underground. To be where Kavanagh was.

She'd been away from Vermont for so long. So much had happened since she'd left. Going back meant catching up with her mom. Catching up meant talking about the four years she had been away—away from Vermont and away from the city—and the two times she'd gone overseas. But open air is always too open. She recalled the spinning dizziness of the desert on a clear, bright day, a vertigo growing deep behind her forehead, standing on the flat-packed sand in the middle of nowhere and feeling like she was the epicenter of the earth's rotation. On those days she felt like a figure skater: extending her arms would slow the spin and manage the dizziness, while pulling her arms close would spin her faster, faster until her body pulled apart.

The train lurches along a curve in Long Island City and the centrifugal force pushes her gently into her seat. She remembers how Vermont feels in the summer, the days cool, the noise of the cicadas high, and she and her mom sitting on the screened-in porch to watch the thunder clouds roll in over the mountains.

Remembering that last summer in Vermont, the dead bird, was so simple for her, just a mere flick of her thoughts and she was back there floating through the last real part of her life. The last solid part of her before the edges of her experience faded into that questionable fogginess of memory, that state in which a person could no longer be sure that what they recalled was true, or even their own. At times, when she was consumed by the tightness of Iraq and barely conscious on the train, she wondered if what she was feeling was even her own, as though she were living someone else's memories, transforming into another person. The tightness could be a metamorphosis, a twisting and reshaping of her body from the inside out until one morning she would walk past the vanity in her bathroom and not recognize the face reflecting back. She wants so badly to remember everything about that day, some clear part of that memory that stands out in a clear way, a part that she can call true. Too much of what she recalls feels false somehow, fabricated or drawn from some other part of her mind. She remembers the cold winter wind blowing unhindered across the open desert and feels her skin erupt in goosebumps as the memory makes her shiver, even in the dead of summer. But everything else about that day seems misplaced, drawn from every other day she spent in Iraq. Every recollection spins together flashes from every part of her tour, flashes of hajjis lining up to be frisked at the ECP, the world swept away beneath a roiling red cloud of sand, the staccato of an M16 firing or the distant
thoomp
of artillery firing that is felt deep in the chest more than heard. Frozen, each of these images floating across her memory, photographs that confuse the true progression of events. Reality on that day couldn't be trusted, because she was no longer sure which parts should be kept, which discarded. There was very little variation from one day to the next. Wake up, shuffle across the chilled sand in her shower shoes to the head. Grains of sand slipping under her toes and caking around the drain of the
shower. In the mornings she was often the only one awake. She enjoyed the quiet and stillness, the vast purple sky with stars just before the sun rose, because it was the calmest part of her days. Nothing to worry about, yet. Every day filled with the crouching and clutching at bunches of clothing. Frowning and snapping at women to stand still, stop talking while she manipulated the fabric of
hijabs
and
chardors
, feeling through linen along the braids in their hair and beneath their breasts for weapons or bombs.

And standing around. The long stretches of time with no women showing up and her feet and back hurting while she and Kavanagh talked and smoked to feel busy. But always shifting her feet and body, hand never far from her pistol grip. Every day feeling like every other and she began to feel stuck, unable to keep track of the weeks turning into months. Holidays surprised her. She was shocked the day she realized she had only a couple of months left in her deployment. In those moments she fought hard to pick out something from the persistent forward blur of days, the memory of anything that stood out from the routine of her life. But all she saw was gray. Looking across the short distance to where the men shuffled one behind the other, their worn-out clothes beginning to look like the gray sky and gray sand. The men's faces beginning to look like the gray sand, and she couldn't discern them from the desert, from every other hajji she'd seen.

Gray surrounded the one day that stood out in sharp relief. A dense, rainy gray that pressed down close over her head, compressed her body into the sandy ground. The low clouds blocking out the sky over the base gate were the clearest part of her memories—the only part that seemed to come back to her whole. The gray clouds that winter day hung so low, and the glare made her squint and tear up.

She stood at the Entry Control Point for the main gate of the base. The ECP was a wide, sandy lane leading out from the main gate, about 100 meters long and framed on both sides by Hesco
barriers, tall, canvas and wire baskets filled with sand built to stop shrapnel and small arms fire. About ten meters from the main gate, concrete barriers narrowed the lane of approach, corralling visitors into two files, all the hajjis coming in and out, going to their jobs at the chow hall, laundry building, or wherever, had to pass through the ECP. The men lined up along one side, shuffling patiently as each waited to be frisked by a pair of male Marines.

In her memory the corridor narrowed and stretched for miles and miles, the Hescos rising into the air, reminding her of the skyscrapers along the spine of Manhattan, like the entire world that day was the ECP and nothing else existed.