Sparta (32 page)

Conrad filled out the first page, then riffled through the rest. The form was eight pages long. Military history, date of entering the service, MOS (Military Occupational Specialties) training, deployments, dates and places where he'd been stationed, commanding officers, all that, and his medical history, description of combat, and finally the questions on The Issue.

Had he been in-country when he first experienced symptoms? What was it, exactly, that he felt? He was to fill in the appropriate box: Extreme anxiety, Panic attack, Mild anxiety, Ambient or free-floating anxiety. Normal fear response to real stress-producing perilous situations. Recurrent flashbacks or vivid memories of particular moments. Sudden episodes of rage or fear. Violent nightmares. Sleeplessness. Weight loss. Weight gain. Breathlessness. Headaches. Raised pulse rate. Disorientation. Feelings of disconnection and isolation.

Reading the questions, he could feel his pulse begin to quicken.

What he felt—“the symptoms”—was exactly what he did not want to describe or think about: the way things turned suddenly dark, the thundering rage, or the avalanche of terror that swept over him. The crumbling free fall of shame, the floor dropping away. The feeling of disconnection and isolation. None of those were things he could control. None of them were things he cared to put down on paper.

You couldn't admit to any of this while you were still in service. There was no way forward once this had been let loose into the spoken air. Everyone felt fear. No one mentioned it. Admission of fear was betrayal of trust. You had to trust one another. You had to trust your superior officers, the chain of command. You had to trust the importance of the mission. That lay at the center of everything—trust and loyalty.

Pride was the prize for never admitting to these feelings, the award for holding the mission above yourself. Pride was the prize for loyalty. Shame was the punishment for breaking trust.

*   *   *

At Quantico, in Officer Candidates School, there had been a candidate named Carrera. He was tall and solid, with a big, fleshy nose and very white teeth. He wore military-issue glasses, BCGs. They were actually basic combat goggles, but everyone called them birth-control glasses because they made you so ugly you couldn't get laid.

Carrera was kind of odd, and kept to himself. He was shitty at making decisions, and making decisions was the whole point of OCS: you were learning to lead. But Carrera couldn't make up his mind, and when he did, he changed it. He couldn't handle pressure, couldn't lead, and didn't project any confidence. Once, during a nighttime maneuver when he was setting up an ambush, he positioned everyone in his team spread out across a hillside. Then he changed his mind and called them back and sent them up over the crest and down the other side and had them set up all over again. You could make a bad decision, but you couldn't let anyone know you thought it was bad. He was made platoon sergeant and given responsibility to see if he'd rise to the challenge. He didn't.

One morning during drill the instructor called him out.

“Carrera!”

“Yes, Sergeant Inspector Drill Instructor!”
Carrera shouted, staring straight ahead.

“Carrera, get your ass up here!”
yelled the instructor.

Carrera broke ranks, moving unhappily up to the front. He saluted and stood at attention.

“Give me a wide stance, Carrera!”

Carrera stared at him, uncertain. He was a nice guy, with something needy about him that made you want to punch him.

“Wide stance! Spread your fucking legs, Carrera!”

Carrera straddled a bit.

“Wider!”
yelled the instructor.
“Nice wide stance!”

Miserably, Carrera shuffled his feet farther apart.

“Good. Now slide your hand down inside your belt.”

No one knew what was coming. This had never happened before. Carrera looked like a beaten dog, his eyes slitted behind his BCGs. He slid his hand down his pants.

“All the way down. Put your hand right on 'em and grab ahold. What do you feel?”

Carrera didn't know the right answer. He knew there was no right answer.

“You feel two of 'em?”

Carrera nodded, then remembered, and shouted out,
“Yes, Sergeant Inspector Drill Instructor.”

“I don't believe you, Carrera.”

There was a pause. Carrera stared straight ahead, his legs still wide, hand down inside his pants.

“I think you're lying, candidate.”
The instructor paused.
“I don't think you have any. I think what you feel is a little slit.”

There was a long hush.

Carrera was gone by the end of the week, and they told themselves it was a good thing. Carrera had shown he wasn't a leader. He was slow and indecisive, he'd have let his men down in combat. An officer can never let his men down. It was better that he was gone.

They didn't tell themselves they'd just watched the use of shame as a weapon. They didn't say they'd just witnessed a public execution.

Describe the incident, if applicable, that is the source of your symptoms. Describe the flashbacks that you experience. Describe any supporting contextual evidence.

What he didn't want to do was call up all this stuff. Write it all down. It was bad enough having the images in his mind; the words would be worse. What he did was try not to let all this get loose in his head; writing it down would be turning it free. He tried to keep the flashbacks, even the thought of them, away from the center of his mind. They'd take up all the space, they'd rise up and take over. His chest was getting tight.

Anything he wrote down would be on his record forever, right up the chain of command. He thought of his battalion commander's face.

An officer's task was to set an example for his men. You upheld a shared conviction. As long as you believe, they believe. Your men depend on you.

Writing any of this down would be failing as an officer. This would be on his record. People would feel disgust toward him the way they'd felt toward Carrera. They'd draw away in disgust. He'd be dismissed.

Conrad looked around the waiting room. The men were mostly in their twenties and thirties, vets from Iraq and Afghanistan, but some were older, from Vietnam, stubble-faced and gray-haired. Most of them were skinny, their bodies slack. T-shirts tucked into clean, faded jeans. The younger men were solid, fresh-faced but somber. Everyone had a problem.

Buzz Cut shifted, setting his ankle on his knee. His leg jiggled.

Across from Conrad, a man took out a pack of cigarettes, stood, and headed out to the hall. He was thin to the point of illness, his jeans and T-shirt hanging on him. His movements were slow and deferential: he nearly tiptoed in his work boots. But everyone there was quiet. No one was in command; they were all supplicants here. Conrad remembered the silent workers lined against the wall in the clearing room at Ramadi.

Conrad lifted the clamp at the top of the clipboard and pulled out all the pages. He crumpled them into his fist with a crackling sound.

Buzz Cut looked at him. “Change your mind?”

Conrad nodded.

“How long you been back?”

“Four months. May.”

“Even if you start today, it'll take three months to get an appointment,” said Buzz Cut. “At Home Depot, you buy a hammer, and later, if you need it, they can find your receipt in ten minutes. I spent four years in the Army, and it takes them three months just to locate my records.”

Conrad didn't answer. He carried the empty clipboard to the counter, the crumpled pages in his hand.

“Thank you,” said the black woman. She glanced at him over her glasses but didn't reach for the clipboard. “Please take a seat. We'll call you.” She looked down again, pursing her mouth.

Conrad turned and left, holding the balled-up pages. His name and ID number were on the form. He didn't want to throw it away here. He didn't want any record of himself in the building.

*   *   *

The whole place was black, crushing in on him. He could feel the walls, or some kind of solidified space, crowding against him and he felt his throat go numb as the noise began. The noise was larger than he could survive, the noise filled his body and his mind, and he heard himself begin to scream, but his voice was soundless in that larger sound, and he could feel the explosion starting, the moment when his body lost control, was no longer in charge of itself, the sense of drift and terror. The shock wave of the explosion coursing through his system, roiling the blood in its vessels, all the liquid matter in his being, the sense of being weightless and blown away. He found himself in a different darkness, a kind of patterned light on a wall, an awful divide between shadow and shining, something soft twisted in his hands, and someone was screaming.

“Conrad.”
It was Claire. “Wake up.”

He said nothing. Now there were two places, and he lay still, trying to distinguish this darkness from the other, the day of the IED and Olivera.
Okay,
he thought,
okay.
His heart was thundering.
I'm here. I'm safe. I'm not there.
He stayed silent, still angry. Fury raced up and down inside him.
What the fuck?
He was holding a pillow, twisting it in his hands. Claire was a little away from him, on her hands and knees, hair hanging in her face.

“Stop it,” she said. “Wake up. You're here. You're okay. Wake up.”

He was awake, he knew that, but he was still there in that other blackness, feeling the roaring wind come through his body, feeling the sound all around him, lifting him up into some lost place. He still felt rage that this was happening, an astonishment of grief that it could. He could hear himself breathing.

“Conrad,” Claire said. She didn't touch him. He rolled over, away from her. She settled back, now kneeling. She put her hands on her thighs.

“I'm awake,” he said.

She didn't answer.

*   *   *

One good thing had happened: sex was back. After the VA he'd moved in with Claire. It was temporary; everything was temporary. Some of the nights were bad, but some were good. Things were getting better.

Claire woke up before the alarm and reached out to turn it off. Her movement woke Conrad; he felt her slide away. He reached for her, eyes shut, pretending to be asleep, curving his arms around her. Claire paused, but when he slid himself closer, pressing against her back and sliding his hands around to her breasts, she began to move again, shifting out of reach.

“Got to get up,” she said. “Sorry.”

She stood, naked, and reached for the bathrobe on the back of the door. Raising her arm made her skin go taut along her side and back. Her ribs stood out like curved shadows beneath the silky skin. She wrapped the robe around herself, then turned.

“Sorry,” she said again.

He shook his head, as though it was nothing. But he thought,
How long would it have taken?

She left for the bathroom, closing the door behind her. The door was lightweight, hollow core, flimsy, like everything else in the apartment. Conrad could have put his fist through it. He sat up in bed, though he couldn't get up until the others had finished in the bathroom and cleared out. He could hardly even stand up in here while he was waiting.

The room was barely big enough for the double bed and bureau. Most of one wall was taken up by the bed and the door. On Claire's side stood a bedside table and lamp, though there wasn't room on Conrad's side. There was barely room for his duffel, which he'd crammed next to the bed. On the facing wall was Claire's bureau, the top littered with stuff: jewelry, little animals, cosmetics. Over this hung a mirror, cards and photographs stuck in the frame, beads and necklaces hung from the corners. Next to the bureau was a chair, clothes draped on it. Facing the bed was the closet, and beside it a framed Matisse poster from some exhibition Claire had been to. Conrad had been in Ramadi then, driving the brown streets, locked and loaded, while she'd been jogging up the steps of a museum, on her way to see art. She took forever going through an exhibition; she stared at each picture. Conrad had wondered if she'd gone to the exhibition alone, or with that guy. He hadn't asked her; he didn't want to know.

Now he heard the thunder of rushing water as Claire turned on the shower. He lay back down, hands folded behind his head. Sometimes he felt good, it seemed that things with Claire were good, things were settling down, that he'd be able to move on. Then something would tip, and everything would be the opposite: the panic would start up again, and it was like the
shamal
, and he couldn't see his hand before his face. Then he didn't know what was going on with Claire, or himself; couldn't bring himself to take a single step, that swirl of panic rising all around him.

The drone of the shower ended abruptly, and after a moment he heard the waspish whine of the hair dryer. When Claire came back, wrapped again in the robe, she looked bright and polished, her hair shiny.

“Hi again,” she said. “Sorry about before. If I don't get into the shower first, I have to wait for everyone else, and then I'm late.”

“No problem,” Conrad said.

“So,” Claire said. There was something prim and careful about her voice. She began to dress, facing partly away from him. Her movements were quick. It seemed as though she were concealing herself as a kind of punishment, or statement. Though he couldn't be sure of that. Hidden modestly by the robe, she pulled on her underpants. “What are your plans?”

“Plans?” he repeated.

She turned her back, took off the robe, and put on her bra. Her hands met deftly at her spine to hook it, shoulder bones flaring out suddenly like wings. “What are you going to do?”