Sparta (14 page)

The table was covered with after-dinner detritus, an air of modest dissipation: the stained wineglasses, the last, near-empty deep green bottle—when did wine bottlers stop using real corks? now they were plastic—the bright Italian pottery water pitcher, the wicker bread basket, still holding a rounded nub of baguette, pale crumbs littering the patterned mats, softened butter collapsing slightly in its dish, everything sinking into a terminal state, declaring the end of the evening.

Murphy lay on Jenny's lap, her body still, her eyes alert for leftovers. There was still a plate of cheese, leaking the semiliquid yellow center from its white patterned crust. Murphy stretched out an idle paw, touching the table as though by chance.

“No cheese, Murph.” Jenny stroked her. “You're not getting up there.” Murphy yawned elaborately, declaring her disinterest. “Remember the time Mom and Dad were upstairs asleep and Murphy went into the dining room in the middle of the night and started walking on the piano keys, and they woke up and thought it was burglars?”

“Burglars playing the piano,” Ollie said, laughing.

“That famous gang of musical thieves,” Conrad said, “known all over Westchester.”

“Very famous, but not, really, all that good on the piano!” Jenny leaned over Murphy, stroking her. “You're not, Murpho! Sorry!” Murphy closed her eyes.

“And often outdone by that group with the slide guitar and the kazoo,” said Ollie.

This was how they reconnected, through family stories. The time the raccoon got into the kitchen and climbed up the wall of pots and stood on the shelf at the top, peering out between the mixing bowls at Lydia in her nightgown. The time Dad opened his wallet at the tollbooth and there was a bee trapped in it and it flew out and he was stung and started swearing, and the toll collector thought he was swearing at him and threatened to call the police. The time Ollie nearly drowned, bobbing for apples at a Halloween party. But Conrad could feel them waiting for more stories from him. He had more: he told them a Marine joke.

“Two guys are arguing in a bar, a Marine and a sailor, about which is the better service, the Marine Corps or the Navy. The Marine says, ‘We had Iwo Jima.'

“The sailor says, ‘We had the Battle of Midway.'

“The Marine says, ‘Not all Navy. Some of those pilots were Marines. Henderson Field, in Guadalcanal, is named for a Marine pilot killed at Midway.'

“The sailor says, ‘Well, we had John Paul Jones.'

“The Marine says, ‘We were born in Tun Tavern, during the Revolution.'

“The sailor draws himself up and delivers the killer, ‘Here's the thing: the Navy invented sex.'

“The Marine says, ‘Maybe so. But Marines introduced it to women.'”

Everyone liked that joke; Jenny and Ollie nearly choked.

Then he told them about Carleton.

Carleton was the radio operator for the platoon. He was a solid kid from Nashville, with one thick, dark, bristly eyebrow that went all the way across his face like a caterpillar. His father was a car salesman and his mother had an online cosmetics business. Carleton himself liked snakes. He liked jokes about snakes, and songs with snakes in them. He either had a python at home or he was going to get one, it wasn't entirely clear which.

When they went out on mounted patrol, Carleton would take caffeine tablets and get stoked, and once they were under way, he started talking about snakes.

“Between a python, boa, and cobra, sir?” he said to Conrad. “I'd take a python, any day.”

“Is that right, Carleton?” Conrad said.

“Cleaner and safer, sir,” Carleton said. “Also big. Largest snake in captivity is a python. Also beautiful. Ball python, sir? One of the great serpent beauties of the world.” He gave a thumbs-up.

“I'll show you a beautiful snake,” Morales said. He was riding behind them in the back of the Humvee. “Right here in my pants, you want to see it?”

“I thought you already had a python, Carleton,” said someone else. “You talking a real python or conceptual?”

“All pythons are real,” Carleton said. “Same as all assholes.”

That had been in Haditha, and they'd been driving up to the command center, at the dam. The sand blew in fine clouds, twisting and swirling under the endless sky.

“So, Con, do you feel you're back—you're home?” Jenny finally asked.

He leaned back, raised his arms, stretched. “Yeah. Sort of. Hard to say.”

“I know it's hard to talk about a lot of stuff,” she said.

“I don't talk about the stuff that's hard to talk about,” Conrad said. He smiled at her, so as not to sound mean.

Jenny nodded. “Because you think we can't handle it or because you don't want to?”

“I guess both.”

She nodded again. “So, well, if you ever want to talk about it, I'm ready.” She spoke carefully. “I mean, you can tell me anything.”

Ollie nodded, solemn, respectful, leaning back in his chair, his eyes large. “Yeah.”

Jenny lifted her wineglass to sip from it, looking at him over the rim. He remembered watching her, drinking steadily from his concoction. She and Ollie waited.

“Thanks,” he said. “I mean it.”

As a kid, he'd once watched a polar bear at the Central Park Zoo. The bear was close, only fifty feet away. He was walking across a huge outcropping of stone. Conrad was mesmerized by him, his huge padded feet, his narrow, snaky muzzle, his creamy pelt, his massive, dangerous size. The bear stopped and turned, looking straight at Conrad. The small rounded ears were pricked, the black eyes focused. For a long, locked moment they looked at each other. The deep gaze seemed to link them. The watching boy returned the look. He felt an awed kind of kinship, a primal recognition.

But he'd misunderstood. Between them was a sheer granite drop and a deep chasm, a high metal fence, wire netting. They were in different worlds. The bear, seeing Conrad and pausing in his endless quest, had thought, simply,
Prey.
Conrad realized that later. There was no kinship. Now, when Jenny told him he could tell her anything, there was that same kind of drop between them. A chasm.

Conrad pushed his chair back and stood. “But I'm going up,” he said. “I'm kind of whacked. I've got four years of sleep to catch up on. I'll see you in the morning.”

They smiled without reproach: they were younger siblings, they were his subjects. They were happy at his return, happy in his presence. Trusting.

He thought of taking Ollie's throat in his fist.

You stupid fuck,
he told himself. That was the kind of thought that would do him in. What was the matter with him?

When Carleton was killed, Conrad had to write to his parents. He had wondered then about the python—if it existed and what Carleton's parents would do with it if it did. How did you get rid of a python? Carleton's Humvee had been hit by an IED, but it wasn't the explosion that killed him. He was alive at first, but he couldn't get out. The doors had been soldered shut by the heat of the blast. It was one of the new Humvees, heavily armored, with a new locking system and windows that wouldn't shatter. They couldn't get him out. He was screaming and shaking the door handle, and at first they tried to open it from the outside, trying to unlock the handle, and then to smash the windows with the butts of their rifles, but the fire had bloomed quickly, overtaking them all, and they had to fall back and stand there watching, and hearing him. By then the fire was burning too fast and too hot for anyone to get near enough to work on the door.

Climbing the stairs, Conrad felt exhaustion drop suddenly over him like a muffling blanket. When he reached the landing and faced the next flight, he nearly stalled, and he took hold of the wooden railing, wondering for a moment if he would actually make it to the third floor. He was poleaxed. It felt good.

Four years, two deployments in Iraq—Ramadi and Haditha—and an honorary discharge. He was through, back at home. His parents were asleep in their room overlooking the darkened lawn, and his brother and sister were sitting at the kitchen table, yawning, and he was climbing the stairs to bed, and this made some kind of full circle, the completion of a mysterious equation. As though his family had a deep connection to what he'd finished, or that what he'd done was done in some way for them, and now, because of being here, because of their being here and safe in the sleeping house, he could give in to exhaustion.

He held on to the notion of exhaustion as if it were a reward. He would get into bed and turn off the light and he would lie on his back in the dark, peaceful, closing his eyes in surrender, knowing that this time, finally, as he lay in his room under the eaves, his whole family beneath him, the willows whispering outside his windows, sleep would drift easily over him. It would slide across his mind in a dark, soft tide, carrying him down into a deep silence.

But when he turned on the overhead light, everything sprang again into existence, the low ceiling, the twin beds, the high bureau. Everything was now raked in shadow, and the room looked somber and claustrophobic, something harsh and judgmental about the light. The windows were black holes.

He hadn't actually accomplished anything all day.

He still hadn't unpacked his clothes, they were still lying in piles on the bed. He hadn't called Claire. He'd dialed the number twice, but each time he hung up before it rang.

He sat down on the bed and looked at his hands.

He was too heavy for the bed; he was too big for the room. He felt he might break something if he moved around in it—as if he'd become a giant while he was gone. His younger self inhabited this place. The person he'd become was an intruder. This was like a room in a museum. It was a room he could not use, one he could only disturb. The night was silent, the air motionless.

He thought of that other world: the dawn sweep through the streets of Ramadi. The big black bats flickering through the air like thoughts as the sky went from dark to pale. The gritty sound of footsteps in the empty street. The burning, cindery smell. The rows of date palms along the river in Haditha. The sound of his pulse beating in his head, of Olivera whispering. The spattered walls.

He tried to keep Haditha from his mind, but how could you keep a thought from your mind? The thoughts lived in his mind. The dark spray on the wall. So much of it, so high up. The limp bodies on the bed. The terrible limpness. The boy in the stained pajamas, the girl's arm curled around him.

He looked at the windows and willed himself to think about something else. Just beyond the screens, in the darkness, were the willows, their narrow leaves nearly brushing the house.

In the fall, these silvery leaves dropped messily everywhere. Once, he'd seen a thin, whippy twig draped on a tall boxbush in the garden. At least he'd thought it was a twig, but it was a striped garter snake curved into a serpentine shape among the dark green leaves of the boxbush. Its neck stuck straight out into the air, the mouth wide open. The long, forked tongue waving like a flag, trolling for insects.

That was a good thought, the snake in the bush. You could focus on it safely. If you could keep Carleton from getting in. There were good thoughts, but they ran out. You got to the end of them, and then the others came back.

He sat still and let the silence move in. In a moment he would get up and undress. He looked down at his hands. They lay on his knees, palms down. They looked strange, unfamiliar.

He got undressed and into bed. He lay waiting, the room black, for sleep. Anxiety began rising, and the space around him took on a massed and hostile presence. It seemed as though the ceiling were lowering toward him. Images he had no wish to see began to flicker inside his head. He rolled over, as though he could leave them behind, but his mind had entered a state of crazed alertness, connected now to a jittering web of filaments that led him to places and moments he did not want to visit. Olivera whispering, the pattern on the walls, the girl on the bed, Jesus.

None of these were things he ever wanted to see again or even think of, and how could he erase them from his mind? Wasn't there some kind of therapy that blotted stuff from your memory? Or was that a movie? Wipe it smooth, wipe it all clean of this stuff. How was he meant to get rid of it? Wait until he forgot it? How could you make your brain forget something? There must be a way to force it to forget. There must be something. He'd been trained to make things happen. What you did was carry out the mission: get it done. No excuses.

This was what he had to look forward to; this was every night for the rest of his life. He was lying rigid, eyes open, every muscle locked tight. His jaw was clenched, his calves and shoulders taut, his breath quickening, his pulse rising. Tension had taken him over as completely as exhaustion had earlier. He kept seeing the face of the girl, the little boy's head falling back.

He turned on the light.

He'd gotten another thriller, this one by a better writer. It was about drugs in the projects, with a beaten-down black woman policeman going after a criminal. At least this was a real kind of war, and the characters seemed real. He read until after one; Jenny and Ollie were long upstairs and the house was quiet. When his eyes turned heavy again, he tried turning off the light, but the same thing happened, his brain jumped alive at once, headed for things he didn't want to think about.

It was like an alarm system activated by darkness and silence: as soon as the lights went out, everything came crowding in on him, packed and massing, things he kept out during the daytime. Things he didn't even think about during the daytime, things that should be gone and over and done. Christ.

He turned on the light and sat on the side of his bed. The house was silent. He held the mattress with both hands. He squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head, swinging it from side to side, bending over low, as if he could somehow get away from his mind.