Sparta (15 page)

He would call Claire. He raised his head. This was the moment—right now, when everything was quiet. It wasn't that late. It wasn't even three. Quarter of, not even. Eighteen of, nearly twenty. Practically two-thirty. She'd definitely be awake. They'd stayed up this late lots of times.

He couldn't make the call from here; his cell phone was dying. He'd use the phone in the kitchen, no one would hear. She'd definitely be awake, she'd answer on the first ring. She'd say,
Where are you? I want to see you.

Is that what she'd say?

He didn't know what she'd say, or what he'd say.

*   *   *

They had been together, at Williams, when he signed up for the Corps. They were still together when he finally went in for good. They'd agreed then that they were separating, sort of. It wasn't clear. The agreement was that they were not tied to each other, that they were both free to connect with other people, but for a while it seemed as if nothing had changed. In the beginning Claire's letters were full of her thoughts of him, and how much she missed him. She never mentioned seeing anyone else. Gradually that had changed, and she stopped saying how much she missed him, or that she loved him. He was sure she was seeing other people, because why wouldn't she, and if she was, he didn't want to know too much.

When he came home after Ramadi, things had changed further. He saw her for a few days in New York, but it was awkward. They spent the night together, but it seemed as though they hardly knew each other. Their bodies were still familiar, but they didn't seem to share a common language. He didn't know what went on when he wasn't there; he didn't want to know.

After that, Claire still wrote to him, but she told him that she had to take a break, whatever that meant. He hadn't argued because you couldn't argue with that, because if she wanted to stop she would stop, and because he didn't want her to say anything more. He didn't want her to tell him anything he didn't want to know.

And he didn't want her to stop writing. In-country, getting mail, real mail, was not something you'd give up. Getting real mail was the way you knew you had another life, that you'd go back to it.

Standing outside the command post, the sand blowing in pale, whirling skeins across the open ground, tiny drifts of it rising around your legs as you opened the letter under the flat, hot Iraqi sky, reading the words and breathing in the black, burning stink of Iraq but being in another place because of the letter, which was from Jenny, about swimming in the reservoir in the late afternoon, the smell of the flat green water, the sun going down through the trees and the way it looked on the water, flickering, gold, stretching in a shimmering path right up to you. Mail was one of the things that kept him sane.

In the beginning, Claire had written about everything. About school, when she was still in school, and later about her job—she was working in the Porcelain Department at Findlay's, the auction house—and about her two roommates and her boss, and things she saw on the street in New York. How much she loved him and missed him. After Ramadi she just told him the other things, nothing about love.

He had told Claire it was okay, they would write however she wanted them to. He didn't want to break up with her, and he didn't want her to stop writing to him.

They all got mail from the send-a-soldier-a-letter programs, letters from teenage girls at Catholic high schools who wrote generic notes full of smiley faces:

Hope you are keeping your spirits up, tho' I know sometimes it must be hard!!! I can't even imagine. You are doing good work and we all apprecaite what your doing. Thank you! I look forward to meeting you when you come back!!! Lots of love, Rosalie.

Most of these letters were thrown out unread, but some of the girls enclosed pictures and some of them were kind of hot, or anyway you could persuade yourself they were, and some guys took the pictures and used them for jacking off. Some of the guys even wrote back to Rosalie and Traci and Tiffany and Lori, and if you got no mail from anyone else, which was true for some guys, then teenage Catholic girls who were complete strangers and writing letters for credit in school or in heaven or both were still better than nothing.

Mail was a fine line connecting you to the life you'd once had. Paper mail was best because it had been held by the person who wrote it. Not just letters from a girlfriend, which you always sniffed, but ones from your family: you knew that when this letter was written, your mother was sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window at the garden in winter. The paper itself had been there in the room while garlic sizzled in a pan; it was there when your father came in the back door from the train, his face and hands cold. You could hold the piece of paper and read it over and over, wherever you were, and it reminded you that the other place was real and that you'd go back there.

That June, in Ramadi, insurgents started sending rockets and mortars onto the base. The perimeter fence kept them at a distance, so they couldn't see where they were sending them. They just lobbed them over at random. Sometimes the mortars missed everyone and everything, exploding harmlessly, and sometimes they were duds and didn't explode at all, and sometimes they took someone's leg off, like Kuchnik, who was in their sister platoon and was on his way over to the mess hall with his buddy Colbert.

Halfway there, Kuchnik remembered a letter he wanted to mail to his girlfriend. He went back for it, and Colbert went on ahead. Kuchnik got the letter and started back to the mess hall and was nearly there when the rocket landed. It didn't hit him, though, it landed right beside him. It hit a utility pole, and the impact detonated the rocket's hot-metal penetrator. White-hot metal shards pierced Kuchnik's thigh, severing the femoral artery. Kuchnik lay in the sand outside the mess hall, screaming and bleeding out, still holding the letter. Doc Whitman came running, but he was on his way to the shower and was wearing only his PT shorts, and he didn't have a tourniquet.

They finally got Kuchnik tourniqueted and medevaced out to Landstuhl, in Germany, where the trauma hospital was. But by then he'd lost a lot of blood, and even though they got him stabilized on the flight over, two days after he got to Frankfurt, he died of organ failure.

He was twenty feet from the door of the mess hall, which had sandbags around it to protect it from blasts. Colbert had already gone inside and was standing in line. Afterward it was impossible to get all the blood out from the sand, and for weeks after, going in and out of the mess hall you walked over a dim stain on the ground from Kuchnik. At the beginning, when he was still alive, you thought of it as blood, but after he died, you thought of it as Kuchnik.

Email and phone calls were not as good as actual letters. In Ramadi at first, there weren't enough computers to use for email, though later they could use one sometimes. At Sparta things were more basic, and they rarely had Internet access. They could almost never use phones, but in any case everyone knew by then that phone calls were never as good as you hoped they'd be. They had those electronic gaps, overlapping voices, the ringing sounds of distance, starting and stopping, misunderstandings. Both of you were trying to put too much into the words, more than was possible. You could never say what was really going on, so you were left talking about scraps of nothing, and you couldn't hear very well. And the calls were always over too soon, before you'd said what you meant to say, and afterward they were gone completely, no way to remember exactly what had been said, what the tone of voice was, and no way to rehear them.

But letters you carried with you, you kept them in your pocket or under your pillow, if you had one. You put them inside your helmet, or just inside your seabag, or in your boot or your locker, someplace where they were safe and you could touch them. Sometimes you just wanted to run your fingertips across the envelope, that was enough; sometimes you wanted to take the letter out, unfold it, and read it again so you knew you'd had another life once, been part of another world.

 

8

Conrad had met Claire Ingersoll during the fall of his junior year at Williams. They were both in a seminar on Homer. The class was small and hard to get into; it required permission from the professor, who was a medium-well-known classical scholar and majorly finicky. He accepted only upperclassmen who were majoring in classics, and he was fussy about even them.

When he accepted Claire, who was a sophomore planning to be a lit major, everyone knew she had to be smart. They could see that she was beautiful—dark, straight eyebrows and dark blue eyes, a surprisingly red mouth, wide and calm. A broad forehead, narrow, elegant nose, winged nostrils.

After their second class, Conrad asked her out for coffee.

“So how'd you get into Hodgson's class?” Conrad asked. They were at the snack bar, sitting at a table in the back by the big windows. He twisted the top from his water bottle. “It's for classics majors. I thought underclassmen weren't even allowed to apply. How'd you do it?”

Claire shook her head. “I don't know. I love Homer, so I just asked Hodgson if I could apply. I gave him something I wrote in high school.” She was drinking green tea, and she raised it to her mouth.

“You wrote about Homer in high school?” Conrad was trying not to stare. She gave off a muted radiance: he felt everyone could see it. It was like sitting with someone who had a spotlight trained on her.

“Not about Homer. Greek myths,” she said. “The gods. I've always been interested in them since I was little. Did you ever read those D'Aulaires books?”

“All of them,” Conrad said. “Did you have the one about the trolls?”

“We had all of them,” she said. “I can't believe you had them, too. I loved them. Remember how everyone kind of glowed, like the sun was behind each figure?” She held her cup in both hands, her fingers wrapped around it. “Anyway, I read that book about the Greek myths, and it hooked me. In high school I read Edith Hamilton. I wrote a paper about Zeus and Hera, how their personalities were complementary. That's what I showed to Hodgson, and here I am.” Her smile was faintly asymmetrical, her mouth rising slightly more on the right side.

“Yeah, but the
Iliad
? Kind of a guy's poem, isn't it?” He couldn't stop looking at her. He took a swig from his bottle.

“I guess,” she said. “But it's so
major.
I feel like I have to know it. I need it in my head.”

“Just so you know,” he warned, “it contains violence and some adult material.”

“What?”
She looked shocked. “I had no idea.”

“Fact,” he said.

The table next to them was being colonized. Two guys set their backpacks on the floor, dragging the chairs out. They were jocks, in torn sweatshirts and jeans. One glanced over, and Conrad saw his gaze settle on Claire. Conrad leaned across the table, proprietary. He spoke again, wanting to keep her attention.

“You're brave. How's it feel to be the only girl in the class?”

“I'm not,” she said. “There are two juniors. Women, actually,” she added delicately.

Conrad hadn't noticed the other girls—okay, women—but he didn't want to tell her that. He didn't want to tell her that he actually couldn't take his eyes off her, the way she looked up at Hodgson, her grave brows lifting attentively, and the way she set her lips together and the smooth angle of her wrist when she took notes. He didn't want to tell her that he hadn't even seen the other girls, because then he'd sound either like a complete bullshitter or a complete dork. He leaned closer.

“I didn't see any other women there,” he told her.

She looked at him, then laughed. “Conrad,” she said.

His name in her voice: he felt a tiny jolt of excitement.

“Claire,” he said. Her name in his mouth.

“So what did you say about Zeus and Hera?” he asked, leaning back. “I'm actually writing my thesis on them. How they're both transgendered.”

She didn't know him well enough yet to know when he was joking, or what kind of jokes he'd make. But she would come to know him, and they would learn each other. They had that to look forward to, and the idea gave Conrad a giddy lift. He leaned toward her again, to speak; she leaned toward him to listen.

“Kidding,” he said.

“I knew that,” she said.

Claire's hair hung down her back nearly to her waist. She wore it loose, sometimes outside her parka, where it spilled and drifted, full of static electricity, across the whispery fabric. Sometimes she kept it inside her jacket, a soft, secret mass pressed against her warm back. Just the thought of that, the hidden shimmery mass shifting across her back, used to give him a hard-on. Nearly everything about her gave him a hard-on. The fine, ridged edge of her upper lip, the way it articulated the line of her mouth. The shallow indentation along her upper arm.

Her neck was long and graceful, and when she spoke, sometimes she took her hair in both hands, lifting it away from her face to toss it down her back. As she did so, she raised her chin, lengthening her throat, while looking steadily at him. When she smiled, she looked at him sideways, shyly.

Conrad could make her laugh. She nearly fell off her chair, helpless and twisting, her hand over her mouth, when he told her the story about his roommate and the pizza delivery guy. She liked country music, but he forgave her for that because she liked baseball and was a Sox fan. Her fingers were short and stubby, like a little girl's, and they were double-jointed. She could bend her thumb backward, nearly touching her wrist, and that gave him a hard-on, too.

Six weeks later, they had their first fight. They were on their way back to Conrad's room after a long evening with friends. It was late, and they were walking uphill.

“I don't know why Josh even likes her,” she said. “She's an idiot.”