Sparta (34 page)

On his way back to Claire's apartment he passed a crosshatched metal trash basket. He flipped the
Times
neatly into it. Fucking Bush.

By now the street vendors had set up their folding tables along the avenue, colorful spreads of costume jewelry, fake African masks, odd-lot books. Passersby leaned over the tables, picking up earrings, staring at a carved mask. No one seemed interested in the books, which were actually strange nonbooks about coming to Jesus or getting your child's test scores up or how to decorate your house in the South of France, by nobody famous. Behind the book table sat a young black man with toned arms, wearing a knitted watch cap. He was slumped on an empty crate, bored. He wasn't going to recommend any titles.

Passing the tables, Conrad walked on the inside of the sidewalk, near the buildings. He didn't like getting too near the tables, which were covered in long, loose cloths, boxes concealed beneath them. The people near them carried bags and knapsacks.

Almost everyone was carrying a bottle of water, just holding it in their hands as they walked along the sidewalk, taking a swig in midstep, twisting the top back on.

Jesus,
he thought. Why were they all carrying water, here in New York City, as though they were at constant risk of dehydration? How long would it be before they could get to a faucet if they needed one?

*   *   *

When they first arrived in Ramadi, there was no local source of water. Later they rigged up a purifying system and drew from the Euphrates, but at first they used bottled water. It was shipped over from the States through the Mediterranean to Kuwait, then trucked into Iraq. Deliveries were erratic. By late March the temperatures were well over a hundred, and heatstroke was a big risk. People died from it. Conrad couldn't send his men out on patrol without water, but he was often told he wouldn't have enough to give them.

One afternoon Conrad was on guard duty downtown at the government center. He was with Stone, a lance corporal from third squad: he liked doing shifts with his men. They were up on the roof, where they had rigged a camouflage net overhead, which broke the brunt of the sun, though it didn't cool off anything. The temperature was around 110, and Conrad and Stone were crammed into a plywood sentry box, watching the streets below.

Stone was a nineteen-year-old from Atlanta, good-looking, with carved features and dark eyes. He didn't talk much except to swear, and he swore all the time. He always seemed angry, though not toward the other men. They liked him. He was a good Marine, always ready to step up. He was just pissed off.

They sat under the net, looking out over the souk and sweating. The heat pressed against their lungs like a huge, soft creature. It beat against their minds, draining their energy, swelling their limbs, and slowing their hearts. Sweat pooled and trickled; Conrad felt it everywhere, moving down his chest, into his groin, slicking the back of his neck. He felt the prickle of salt against his skin and the suffocating soft powdery sand everywhere.

“Ever notice how slow everyone walks here, sir?” Stone asked. “It's like they're fucking underwater.”

“It's the heat, Stone,” he said. “You can't walk fast when it's this hot.”

“You think they ever dance, sir? They do anything fast? These fuckers are, like, hypnotized.”

“Yeah, they dance,” Conrad said. “But not like dancing at home. Not like what you're thinking of. You can't make hot moves wearing robes. No one could see them.”

“Then what would be the point, sir?” Stone was a Metallica fan.

“It's different here,” Conrad said. “In robes, the moves would be in the footwork. The women do belly dances—now, there are some hot moves—but they don't do them for you. With the men, it's the footwork.”

Stone shook his head disgustedly at the idea of hot footwork, and they fell silent. Below, the narrow streets were crowded with stalls. People moved slowly among the makeshift tables, ducking under the clothes hanging on lines, picking up produce, bargaining.

“Ever gone deer hunting, sir?” Stone's voice was intent, as though this were an important question.

Conrad said no, and Stone nodded, scowling.

“Any fun?” Conrad asked.

“I've never done it, sir. I just wondered what it was like.” He scowled harder.

“Does your dad go deer hunting?” Conrad asked.

Stone took an audible breath. “I don't exactly have a dad, sir. The fucker left before I was born.” He was taking strange breaths, long, deep ones, like gasps.

“I'm sorry, Stone,” Conrad said.

“It's okay, sir,” said Stone. “He was an asshole.” His face was bright red, and crumpled. He looked furious.

Conrad thought Stone was upset about his father. He looked away, to give him privacy.

After a moment Stone said, “Have you ever done any kind of hunting, sir?” His voice had risen. It seemed strangled, and it was then that Conrad realized something was wrong.

“What is it, Stone?” Conrad turned to him, but Stone didn't answer. He leaned forward to kneel on the tarry roof. He began to retch, slowly but violently, going into a spasm. Then he collapsed, sprawling sideways. His eyes were shut, his face purple.

It was Conrad's first heatstroke.

He called Molinos on the radio, then knelt beside Stone on the scorching roof, pulling the rifle off his shoulder, tugging the blouse from his sweaty skin. Molinos came pounding up the stairs, and they got Stone downstairs, out of the sun. They stripped him and sprayed him with water and called a corpsman. The doc used the silver bullet on him, the rectal thermometer, dreaded by all Marines, to see if he needed to be medevaced out and packed in ice. Stone wasn't that bad, and after a while he came around, but for a time he was dazed and confused and couldn't stand up.

What had bothered Conrad was that he himself still had some water left in his CamelBak. It was one he'd bought back home, the commercial kind, which held more than the military issue. He should have offered some to Stone. It was a shock to realize that Stone might have died because of his thoughtlessness. It kept coming back to him. Your men trusted you: you took responsibility for their lives. That was your first task as an officer. In the Marines, officers eat last.

After that, Conrad kept thinking of how people used bottles of water at home. How they talked and drank idly from them, taking long gulps, tipping up the bottles, not finishing them. There were those plastic bottles all over the place, on benches in parks, on sidewalks, on counters. Still partly full of clean water, like little comments, little boasts, saying,
See! We have so much of this we can afford to waste it.

Even after what happened with Stone, the platoon still wasn't issued enough water when they went out on patrol. Often Conrad had to send someone into the mess hall to steal extra bottles.

*   *   *

He let himself into the silent apartment.

The refrigerator had different hums, different notes and keys, some soft, some very loud. The sound of the city outside was always loud, day and night, though at night it had a different quality—faster, more muffled and secretive. The daytime sound was a roar, rushed and imperious.

The living room was lit by the harsh light from the big plate-glass windows. Another dingy white apartment building stood beyond, with its horizontal lines of windows, the slice of shifting gray river to one side. He didn't want to go into the bedroom, where he had held Claire's beautiful arm so tight that she had pulled away as though he were going to hurt her. Shame spread through him.

The room, with its bright slumped pillows, its tall lamps, was full of a life lived by other people, one that had nothing to do with him. He was invisible here. He had no place here. And what about Kuchnik, Carleton, Olivera?

 

17

Out on the sidewalk, he turned left, heading south. Traffic was heavy; it was midmorning now. Trucks were heading uptown toward the bridges off the island, great square-cabbed behemoths roaring up the avenue, air brakes gasping, diesel exhaust pipes spewing stench, gears thudding and stuttering. A convoy of city buses groaned along one side of the street. Trucks and vans studded the lines of cars.

A fence of orange netting cut off part of the street and sidewalk. A blue and white Con Ed truck was parked there, its rear doors open. Inside the fence was a hole in the pavement, where men with blue helmets were working belowground. At street level a man in an orange jumpsuit was working a jackhammer, making a driving rattle like gunfire. Farther down the avenue a siren started up, high and whining.

Conrad watched the faces coming toward him. Usually people stayed to the right, just like cars, but not always. Some fast walkers tried to pass slower ones, dodging in and out of their own lanes. Or they appeared suddenly on the wrong side, in your lane, right in front of you, heading at you. Or they walked steadily and heedlessly along in the wrong lane; there was no way to address this. Or they walked along in front of you and stopped abruptly, suddenly seized by a thought.

Conrad didn't like it when they stopped in front of him. He didn't like any of this. Everyone was too close, and they were changing their minds and directions and speeds. He particularly didn't like people stopping right in front of him.

When you were out on a convoy in-country, all other traffic had to pull off the road so that suicide car bombers couldn't drive up next to you and detonate. And because IEDs were usually planted on the side of the road, military vehicles drove straight down the middle. They could use any lane, and that fact had saved one of the Humvees driving on Route Chestnut, Haditha. The sergeant in command was in the fourth vehicle, and just before the blast, it pulled out into the left lane. So the explosion missed his vehicle, though it got the one in front of him, the third, in the right lane. Conrad saw it afterward. The whole Humvee was split in half and blackened, its front end nosing down into the crater the blast had made. Two Marines who'd been in it were killed.

Ahead, First Avenue sloped down toward the dip around Sixtieth Street, where it rose to meet the tall pylon of the gondola to Roosevelt Island.

He began to walk faster, maneuvering around the people on the sidewalk. Impatience drove him. He nearly walked into a woman talking on a cell phone who made a sudden left turn without looking.
Look where you're going!
He wanted to scream it into her face. He didn't say it. He was used to walking as he wanted.

His cell phone chirped, and he pulled it out and looked at the ID. He clicked it on.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Con? How are you?”

“Good.” He paused at a stand selling kebabs, to let someone move past him. The spicy, smoky smell rose at him:
prick on a stick.
He turned to look at the man enclosed in his tiny cabin: dark, honey-colored skin, a thick mustache, black, piercing eyes. Conrad met the man's gaze, holding his phone to his ear. He nodded, as though to a friend. The man nodded back, aloof but courteous. Conrad thought of stopping and asking the man where he was from. Maybe he was Iraqi. He could be Iraqi.

“What are you doing?” Lydia asked.

“Walking,” Conrad said. “Going down First Avenue.”

“That sounds nice,” Lydia said. He could hear the uncertainty in her voice. “Anywhere in particular?”

“Nope,” he said. “Just out for a walk.”

“I wanted to tell you that I sent for some brochures.” She sounded apologetic. “You said you were thinking about graduate schools.”

“Right,” he said.

“Well, I asked for some of them,” she said. “They arrived. So whenever you come out, I mean, they're there.” She was embarrassed.

“Thanks, Mom.” He couldn't think about it. “That's good.”

“So,” she said. “When do you want to come out? What about this weekend? Do you want to bring Claire?”

“Don't know yet,” he said. “I'll let you know. Thanks, though.”

What filled him, when he talked to his mother, was a sense of failure. A sense of how great the divide was between them now. He remembered himself sitting at the breakfast table years ago, telling his parents what he was going to do. He'd been like them then.

“Mom?” he asked now.

“What is it?”

“It's hard for me to come out there.”

There was a silence, and then his mother began to cry. “I know that,” she said. The crackle on the line made it hard to hear. He hated hearing her cry. “We want to help, Con. Please don't stay away.”

“Mom, I'm losing you,” Conrad said loudly. “I can't hear you. I'm hanging up. I'll talk to you later.” He hated hearing her cry, hated knowing he'd made her do it.

*   *   *

Impatience drove him. In-country you knew what you were doing. You planned the missions and then carried them out. You knew what you were doing. You had a purpose.

He walked faster, moving in and out of the crowd.

He wasn't meant to be here. He shouldn't be here on the street, among all these people who didn't have these things inside their heads. He was separate. He wanted to get these things out of his mind: the pattern on the wall, the boy in the striped pajamas. Olivera whispering from the driver's seat.

*   *   *

That day they had been on their way to the government center. They were driving down Route Michigan, the American name for the big east-west road across Ramadi. Olivera and Conrad were in the second Humvee in the convoy. The platoon commander was not meant to ride in the lead vehicle, though Conrad would have preferred to be there. He changed the order on every mission so the muj wouldn't know which was the command vehicle. He planned all of it, varying the configuration of the vehicles, the route they took. Mix things up, keep the muj off guard. Michigan was swept every day for IEDs, so theoretically it was the safest road. But it was also the most targeted, since it was the one most used by the Coalition Forces.