Redeployment (20 page)

“I’ve changed,” I said. “Another was from a guy who’d been in the Yemeni civil war. He told me, ‘Whatever you go through, it is the responsibility of those who sent you.’ And a bunch of the other e-mails were real pro-war.”

“I guess there was a lot of anger among American Muslims toward Saddam.”

“Well, one was so pro-war not even my father could have written it. That guy told me I was going to write a new chapter in history. My dad underlined the sentence.”

“And what’d you think,” she said, “when you saw that?”

“It made me angry,” I said.

My voice was soft, speaking to Zara. It was as though I were saying loving words.

“I didn’t tell him exactly what I told you,” I said. “I wanted to hurt him. I was angry. I’d gotten a lot of Thank You For Your
Service handshakes, but nobody really knew what that service meant, you know?”

“You’re angry with your father because people thanked you for your service?” she said. “Or is he why you’re angry with those people?”

“He’s a part of it,” I said. “That sentiment.”

“So should I thank vets for their service?” she said. “Or spit on them, like Vietnam?”

I thought for a moment and then gave her a crooked smile. “I reserve the right to be angry at you whatever you do.”

“Why?”

“It’s all phony,” I said. “When the war started, almost three hundred congressmen voted for it. And seventy-seven senators. But now, everybody’s washed their hands of it.”

“There was bad information,” Zara said. “You know, ‘Bush lied, people died.’”

“Oh, my God!” I clapped my hands to my cheeks and put on a shocked face. “A politician lied! Then it’s not your fault!”

“You used to kill people with playground insults,” Zara said, “and you think it doesn’t matter what the president says? Or here’s a better question. Did you believe it? Did you support the war?”

“I still support the war,” I said. “Just not the guy who ran it.”

“Is that what you told your dad that made him so angry?”

“No.” I hunched over, with my elbows resting on my knees. “No. He knew the war was poorly run. He’s a smart guy.”

I considered how I could frame what I was going to tell her.

“This is not the sort of thing you’ll like,” I said. “It’s not the sort of thing my father could deal with.”

“I’m not fragile,” she said.

“Now you’ve got to understand,” I said. “In my family, I wasn’t even allowed to curse.”

I paused. After a second, Zara reached over and took my hand, and I let her. She shouldn’t have done that. It made me want to stop. It made me want to say something cruel, to let her know that what I’d been through had made me stronger, not weaker. From down the street I heard laughter. Frat kids from Psi U, maybe. Drunk, maybe, or just walking over to get a calzone at Bruno’s.

“I guess your dad wasn’t too big on you using dirty words to kill terrorists,” Zara said.

Her hand pressed into mine. “My dad thought the idea of the insults was funny,” I said. “He thought it was brilliant. Tribal culture is honor and shame. Like the rural South. Or inner-city America. But eventually we played that trick too much. We’d shouted too many insults, killed all the insurgents dumb enough to fall for it. And I’m telling this to my dad in our living room in their house in Virginia. It’s not the house I grew up in. They’d moved to a cheaper area once I was out of high school, and we’re in this tiny little room with an icon of Saint Moses the Black, who was a thief and a slave, and Saint Mary of Egypt, who was a prostitute, and Matisse’s stupid fish and that goddamn flag and the fake 9/11 steel coin. And he’s leaning forward, he’s listening. It’s the first man-to-man we’ve ever had.”

“And it’s about war,” she said. “That’s what gets him to listen.”

“So I tell him how there’s this one area where intel knows who the enemy is. This little band of Islamists called the al-Tawhid Martyrs Brigade. And my dad’s like, ‘Okay. Al-Qaeda.’ And I’m like, ‘No. Just desert fuckers who didn’t like having
Americans roaming around in their country.’ It was the first time I’d cursed in front of my dad.”

“What’d he do?”

“Nothing. He just said, ‘Okay. So basically al-Qaeda.’ I wanted to smack him.” I took a breath. “Anyway, we knew the name of these guys’ leader. Laith al-Tawhid. Intel had him on the BOLO list and so I had his name.”

I squeezed Zara’s hand, hard. “I had his name,” I said. “In all the confusion, I could call him by name. I could talk to him and he would know it. And so would all his men.”

“That gave you an advantage.”

“Yes,” I said. “And I had a plan. Normally, this sort of thing wouldn’t start with a SPC, but they trusted me. They thought I had the magic knowledge, because, you know, I’m an Arab Muslim.”

Zara was leaning forward, the same posture as my father. Her eyes were on me now.

“Now, Laith al-Tawhid was no idiot. He was fundamentalist, not dumb. He wasn’t going to come running because I called him names. But I knew how to get him. Women.”

“Women?”

“His women were at home,” I said. “Outside of Fallujah. And the old-school guys, guys like Laith al-Tawhid, they treat women like dogs. Like dogs who can destroy all your family’s honor if they act up or show an ounce of free will.”

She nodded.

“There was a Marine company holding an office building in front of Laith’s position,” I said. “I told the Marines what we wanted to do and they loved it.”

“What did you say?”

“Laith al-Tawhid, we have your women,” I said, “your wife and your daughters.”

She frowned. “So he had to come and fight you,” she said.

“I told him we found them whoring themselves out to American soldiers, and we were bringing them to the office building.”

She nodded. “You told this to your father.”

“I told him everything. How I screamed out, in the Iraqi Arabic I’d learned in my private time, that we’d fuck his daughters on the roof and put their mouths to the loudspeaker so he could hear their screams.”

Zara pulled back her hand. I’d expected that. “So that’s how you fought,” she said. There was a touch of contempt in her voice, and I smiled. I’m not sure why, I wasn’t happy.

“I didn’t send it up the flagpole. But the platoon loved it. I stayed on those speakers for an hour. Telling him how when his daughters bent down to pray, we’d put our shoes on their heads and rape them in the ass. Rub our foreskins on their faces. A thousand dicks in your religion, I told him, and in forty minutes, a thousand American dicks in your daughters.”

“That’s disgusting,” she said.

“Everybody laughed as we came up with what we’d tell them. All the Marines had suggestions, but I turned them down. Americans think the best insults are all ‘cunt’ and ‘pussy,’ but in Arabic it’s all ‘shoes’ and ‘foreskins’ and ‘putting a dick in your mother’s rib cage.’”

“I get the idea,” she said.

“Well, this worked,” I said. “They didn’t charge out of the
mosques like idiots, but they still assaulted, and they got mowed down.”

“I don’t care if it worked.”

“I mean, all this guy’s men were hearing him being disrespected. Humiliated. For an hour. This was a violent time. There were a hundred little insurgent groups, a hundred little local chiefs trying to grab power. And I was shaming him in front of everybody. I told him, ‘You think fighting us will win you honor, but we have your daughters. You’ve fucked with us, so you’ve fucked your children. There is no honor.’ He didn’t have a choice. And I never saw him die. I never saw him at all. I just heard the Marines shooting him down. They told me he led his little suicide charge.”

“I get it,” she said.

“But you don’t like it,” I said. “My dad didn’t either. He’d rather I shot them in the face. In his mind, that’s so much nicer. So much more honorable. He’d have been proud of me, if I’d done that. You’d like me better, too.”

“I’d rather you hadn’t done anything,” she said.

“And I told my father everything. Insult by insult. What I said. All the things I’d learned in America, all the things I’d learned from him, all the things that’d been said to me, all the things I could think of, and I could think of a lot.”

“I get it,” she said again, this time in the same tone of voice that my father had used when I told him and he’d said, “Enough.” But with my father I’d kept going, described every sexual act, every foul Arabic word. I’d cursed for him and at him in English, in Egyptian, in Iraqi, in MSA, in Koranic Arabic, in Bedouin slang, and he’d said, “Enough, enough,” his voice shaking with rage and then terror, because I was standing
over him, shouting insults in his face, and he couldn’t see his son any more than I—standing over him and letting my rage wash out—could see my father.

“You think I’m ashamed of it?” I said to Zara, and I saw my father, heard the words he couldn’t even get out of his mouth because the shock of it was too much. His hands had trembled, his eyes were downcast. There was gray in his mustache. He looked old. Beaten. I’d never seen him that way before.

Zara asked, “What happened to his daughters?”

I didn’t know.

“When I think about killing that man,” I said, “I think of that kid with the heat fading out.”

I slumped down into the couch. We were quiet again. I thought about firing up more coals but I lacked the energy. After cursing my father I’d spent the night in a Motel 6, where my mother found me and brought me home. My father and I didn’t talk for the rest of my leave.

“Okay,” Zara said. She paused, looked out at the street. “So . . . what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to forgive you?”

“Forgive me?” I said. “How? For what?”

“And even if I did,” she said, “would it matter? Because I’m Muslim? You think that matters to the kid you watched die?”

I smiled at her. How far from the point, I thought, was that kid’s death. It was at best the point of somebody else’s story, though I guess Zara knew that.

“I tell vets the scope story,” I said. “They usually laugh.”

Zara stood up slowly, anger lighting her face. I didn’t move from my seat. I looked up at her and waited for a response. Even covered up, her body was still lovely under her clothes. I kept
smiling, enjoying her in front of me and enjoying the superiority I knew I’d feel when her outburst came. No one can really cut you when they’re angry. It clouds their mind too much. Better to be like me in Fallujah, lying through your teeth and shouting hateful things with calm intelligence, every word calibrated for maximum harm.

But Zara’s outburst didn’t come. She just stood there. And then some emotion I couldn’t identify moved through her, and she didn’t seem angry anymore. She stepped back and looked at me, considering. She reached up and adjusted her shawl.

“Okay,” she said at last. “It’s okay.”

For the first time since that morning, walking into the Special Assistant’s office and seeing her there, I was the unsettled one. She wasn’t playing any of the moves I’d envisioned for her.

“What do you mean?” I said.

She reached over and put her hand on my shoulder, her touch light and warm. Even though her face was calm, my heart was beating and I looked up at her as though she were passing down a sentence. There was an unearthly quality to her then.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m glad you can talk about it.” Then she walked down the steps of the porch and stopped at the bottom. Behind her were the elm trees and the shoddy clapboard houses of South Whitney Street, housing for the off-campus frats and the few Amherst students who didn’t live in dorms. She didn’t quite belong here, I thought, and neither did I.

Zara stood in the yard, not moving. After a moment, she turned back and looked up the stairs to where I was still sitting by the hookah.

“Maybe we’ll talk another time,” she said. Then she gave a slight wave with her hand, turned, and walked back to campus.

“I’m tired of telling war stories,”
I say, not so much to Jenks as to the empty bar behind him. We’re at a table in the corner, with a view of the entrance.

Jenks shrugs and makes a face. Hard to tell what it means. There’s so much scar tissue and wrinkled skin, I never know if he’s happy or sad or pissed or what. He’s got no hair and no ears either, so even though it’s been three years after he got hit, I still feel like his head is something I shouldn’t stare at. But you look a man in the eye when you talk to him, so for Jenks I force my eyes in line with his.

“I don’t tell war stories,” he says, and takes a sip of his glass of water.

“Well, you’re gonna have to when Jessie and Sarah get here.”

He gives a nervous laugh and points to his face. “What’s to say?”

I take a sip of my beer and look him up and down. “Not a lot.”

Jenks’s story is pretty obvious, and that’s another weird thing because Jenks used to be me, basically. We’re the same height, grew up in the same kind of shitty suburban towns, joined the Marine Corps at the same time, and had the same plan to move to New York when we got out. Everybody always said we could
be brothers. Now, looking at him is like looking at what I would have been if my vehicle had hit that pressure plate. He’s me, but less lucky.

Jenks sighs and sits back in his chair. “At least for you, it gets you laid,” he says.

“What does?”

“Telling war stories.”

“Sure.” I take a sip of beer. “I don’t know. Depends.”

“On what?”

“Circumstances.”

Jenks nods. “Remember that little reunion we had with all the ESB guys?”

“Hell, yeah,” I say. “Way we were talking, you would have thought we were some Delta Force, Jedi ninja motherfuckers.”

“The girls ate it up.”

“We did pretty well,” I say, “for a bunch of dumbass Marines hitting on city girls.”

Jenks gives me a look. Right around his eyes is the only place where his skin looks halfway normal; the eyes themselves are pale powder blue. They never really struck me before he got hit, but they’ve got a sort of intensity now in contrast with the boiled-pork-pink smoothness of his skin grafts. “Of course, that shit only worked because I was there,” he says.

Now I’m laughing, and after a second Jenks starts laughing, too. “Damn straight,” I say. “Who’s gonna call bullshit when you’re sitting there in the corner looking all
Nightmare on Elm Street
?”

He chuckles. “Happy to help,” he says.

“It does help. I mean, you tell a chick, ‘Yeah, I went to war, but I never fired my rifle. . . .’”

“Or ‘Hey, I spent most of the deployment paving roads. Building force pro. Repairing potholes.’”

“Exactly,” I say. “Even the antiwar chicks—which in this city is all of them—want to hear you were in some shit.”

Jenks points to his face. “Some shit.”

“Right. Don’t have to say anything. They’ll start imagining all sorts of stuff.”

“Black Hawk Down.”

“The Hurt Locker.”

He laughs again. “Or like you said,
Nightmare on Elm Street
.”

I lean forward, elbows on the table. “You remember what it was like, going to a bar in dress blues?”

Jenks gets quiet for a second. “Fuck, man. Yeah. Automatic panty dropper.”

“No matter how ugly you are.”

He grunts. “Well, there’s a limit.”

We sit in silence for a bit, and then I let out a sigh. “I’m just fucking tired of chicks getting off on it.”

“On what? The war?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I had a girl start crying when I told her some shit.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. Some bullshit.”

“About me?”

“Yeah, about you, motherfucker.” Now he’s definitely smiling. The left side of his face is twisted up, the wrinkled skin over the cheeks bunched and his thin-lipped slit of a mouth straining toward where his ear should be. The right side stays still, but that’s standard for him, given the nerve damage.

“That’s nice,” he says.

“I wanted to choke her.”

“Why?”

I don’t have an exact answer for that, and while I’m trying to find a way to put it into words, the door swings open and two girls walk in, though they’re not the girls we’re waiting for. Jenks turns and looks. Without even thinking about it, I size them up—one pretty girl, maybe a seven or an eight, with her less attractive friend, who isn’t really worth giving a number to. Jenks turns away from them and looks back at me.

“I don’t know,” I continue. “I was playing her. You know. ‘Oh, baby, I’m hurting and I need your soft woman touch.’”

“You were playing her,” he said. “And it worked. So you wanted to choke her?”

“Yeah.” I laugh. “That’s kind of fucked up.”

“At least you’re getting some.”

“I’d rather go to Nevada, fuck a prostitute.” I almost believe what I’m saying. Using money would be better. But I’d probably just end up telling the hooker about Jenks anyway.

Jenks looks down at his glass, his eyes tight.

“You ever thought of getting a hooker?” I ask. “We could check the ads at the back of the
Village Voice,
see if anybody catches your eye. Why not?”

Jenks takes a sip of water. “You think I can’t get some?” His voice sounds playful, like he’s making a joke, but I can’t tell.

“No,” I say.

“Not even a pity fuck?”

“You don’t want that.”

“No, I don’t.”

I look at the girls down at the other end of the bar. Pretty
girl’s got dark hair slashing down the side of her face and a lip piercing. Her friend is in a bright green coat.

“Think of all those other burn victims out there.” I look back at Jenks and give him a big grin. “And really fat chicks.”

“And chicks with AIDS,” he says.

“Nah, that’s not enough. Maybe, like, AIDS and herpes combined.”

“Yeah, that sounds awesome,” he says. “I’ll put an ad on Craigslist.”

Now he’s laughing for sure. Even before he got hit, when things got shitty he’d start laughing. I keep a smile plastered on my face, but for some reason now I start feeling it, the same feeling I get when I talk about Jenks and I get into it for real. Sometimes, when I’m drunk and I’m with a chick who seems like she cares, I let it out. Problem is, if I do, I can’t sleep with her. Or I shouldn’t, because then I feel like shit afterward and I walk around the city wanting to kill someone.

“There’s plenty other guys like me,” Jenks says. “I know one guy, got married, he’s having a kid.”

“Anything can happen,” I say.

“It’s bullshit anyway.” There’s a bit of hardness in his voice.

“What?”

“Finding somebody.”

I’m not sure if he’s serious.

“I was okay at it before,” he says. “And in dress blues I was a fucking player. Now, it’d be insulting for me to even roll up on a chick.”

“Like, ‘Hey, I think you’re ugly enough you might fuck me.’” I put a stupid smile on my face, but Jenks doesn’t seem to notice.

“Nobody wants this,” he says. “Nobody even wants to have to look past this. It’s too much.”

There’s a little silence where I’m trying to come up with something to say to that, and then Jenks puts his hand on my arm.

“But it’s okay,” he says. “I’ve given up.”

“Yeah? That’s okay?”

“You see that girl over there?”

Jenks points to the pair of girls, and though he doesn’t specify, he’s obviously talking about the hot one.

“Before, I’d see her, and I’d feel like I had to come up with a plan, get her to talk to me. But now, with Jessie and Sarah”—he checks his watch—“whenever they get here, I can just have a conversation.” He looks briefly back at the girls. “Used to be, I could never just sit in a bar with a woman.” He looks at me, then back to the girls. “Now, knowing I got no chance, it’s relaxing. I don’t have to bother. Nobody’s gonna think I’m less of a man if I can’t pick up some girl. I only talk to people I actually give a shit about.”

He raises his glass and I clink mine with his. Someone told me toasting with water was bad luck, but there’s got to be an exception for guys like Jenks.

“As for kids,” Jenks says, “I’m gonna give my shit to a sperm bank.”

“Serious?”

“Hell yeah. The Jenks line ain’t gonna die with me. My sperm isn’t disfigured.”

I have nothing to say to that.

“I’ll have some baby out there,” Jenks continues. “Some little
Jenks running around. Won’t be called Jenks, but I can’t have everything, can I?”

“No,” I say. “You can’t.”

“You should go ahead with it,” he says. He jerks his head in the direction of the girls. “Go tell your war stories. I’ll tell mine to Jessie and Sarah, whenever they get here.”

“Fuck that,” I say.

“Seriously, I don’t mind.”

“Seriously. Fuck you.”

Jenks shrugs, and I stare him down for a while, but then the door opens again and there’s Jessie and Sarah, who’s Jessie’s actor friend. I look up and so does Jenks.

The two of them are like the first pair that walked in the door, one a beauty and one not, though here the difference is starker. Sarah, the pretty girl, is a stunner. Jenks raises a mangled hand to wave them over, and Jessie, the not beautiful girl, waves a four-fingered hand back.

“Hey, Jessie,” I say, and turn to the beautiful one. “You must be Sarah.”

Sarah is tall and thin and bored. Jessie is all smiles. She hugs Jenks, then looks me over and laughs.

“You’re wearing combat boots,” she says. “That to give you extra cred with Sarah?”

I look down at my feet, like a dumbass. “They’re comfortable,” I mumble.

“Sure,” she says, and gives me a wink.

Jessie’s an interesting case. Aside from a missing finger, she doesn’t have any major problems I can see, but I know the Army’s got her on 100 percent disability. Plus, a missing finger is a
good indication of something more. She’s not bad-looking, though. And I don’t mean that to say she’s good-looking—I mean that she’s a hair on the good side of ugly. She’s got a fleshy oval face, but a trim, compact body. A softball player’s body. The sort of girl you look at and say, “You’ll do.” The sort of girl you pick up in a club in the last hour before it closes. But also the sort of girl you’d never want to date because you’d never be able to bring her around your friends without them thinking, Why her?

Except when Jenks first met Jessie at some disabled veterans function, he fell for her hard. He’d never admit it, of course, but why else would he be here, with no one but me to back him up, ready to talk Iraq to a total stranger? This Sarah. This pretty, pretty girl.

“Let me get you guys a drink,” says Jessie.

Jessie always gets us the first round. She says engineers reinforced her ECP two days before an SVBIED attack, so she owes engineers big-time. Doesn’t matter if we mostly did pothole repair. She gets me drinks, the only woman I know who makes a point of it.

I point to my glass. “I’m drinking Brooklyn.”

“Water,” Jenks says.

“Yeah?” Jessie says, smiling. “Cheap date, you.”

“Hey, Jess,” says Sarah, cutting in, “can you get me a gin and diet tonic? With lime.”

Jessie rolls her eyes and heads to the bar. Jenks’s eyes are full of her as she goes. I wonder what the fuck she thinks she’s doing. I wonder what Jenks thinks she’s doing.

Jenks turns back to Sarah. “So you’re an actress,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says, “and I bartend to make rent.”

Sarah’s holding it together well. Apart from the occasional quick sidelong glance at Jenks, you’d think everybody at the table had a normal face.

“A bartender,” I say. “Where? Can we come by, get free drinks?”

“You’re getting free drinks,” she says, pointing toward Jessie at the bar.

I smile a little “fuck you” smile. This Sarah is way too hot not to hate. Straight brown hair, sharp features, undetectable makeup, long pretty face, long thin legs, and a starvation zone body. Her getup is all vintage clothes, the carefully careless look worn by half of white Brooklyn. If you pick this girl up at a bar, other guys will respect you. Take her home, you win. And I can already tell she’s way too smart to ever give a guy like me a chance.

“So you want to talk some war shit,” I say.

“Sort of,” she says, feigning disinterest. “A couple of the people in the project are doing interviews with vets.”

“You got Jessie,” I say. “When she was a Lioness she was in some real war shit. Hanging with the grunts, doing female engagement, getting in firefights. Her war dick is this big—” I throw my hands out in the lying fisherman pose. “Ours is tiny.”

“Speak for yourself,” Jenks says.

“It’s better than no war dick at all,” I say.

“Did Jessie explain the project?” asks Sarah.

“You want me to tell you about the IED,” Jenks says. “For a play.”

“We’re working with a group of writers from the Iraq Veterans Against the War,” she says. “They’ve been doing workshops, a sort of healing through writing thing.”

Jenks and I trade a look.

“But this is different,” Sarah says quickly. “It’s not political.”

“You’re writing a play,” I say.

“It’s a collaboration with the New York veterans community.”

I want to ask what percentage the “vet community” is getting, but Jessie comes back, precariously holding two pints of beer, one diet G&T, and a glass of water, her left hand on the bottom and the other on top, a finger or thumb in each glass. She smiles at Jenks as she puts them down on the table, and I can see him visibly relax.

Sarah starts explaining that the point of the thing isn’t to be pro- or antiwar, but to give people a better understanding of “what’s really going on.”

“Whatever that means.” Jessie laughs.

“So you’re with the IVAW now?” I say.

“Oh, no,” Jessie says. “I’ve known Sarah since kindergarten.”

That makes more sense. I always picked her for the bleeds-green type. I’d bet my left nut she voted McCain, and I’d bet my right nut this Sarah girl voted Obama. I didn’t vote at all.

“IEDs cause the signature wounds of this war,” Sarah says.

“Wars,” I say.

“Wars,” Sarah says.

“Burns and TBIs, you mean?” says Jenks. “I don’t have a TBI.”