Sparta (36 page)

So what had they been doing over there for three fucking years and no end in sight, while people in-country were getting their arms blown off and their faces torn apart and losing their wives and girlfriends and their marriages and their lives, and then coming home to people who were all saying,
Like I care.

He couldn't say any of this, because really, most of what was wrong was his fault. It was his fault that he had those pictures in his head, the things he didn't want to see ever again, that rose up every night, screening out everything else, and he wondered if this was how it would be forever.

“I don't know what would help,” Conrad said.

“Can you talk to your mom?” asked Marshall.

Conrad shook his head.

“Claire?”

“Some. Not really,” Conrad said. “I can't stay there anymore. I'm moving out.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“Jenny's.” He had just thought of this.

Marshall nodded. “What about a therapist?”

“It wouldn't help,” Conrad said. “The stuff in my head is permanent. It can't be erased.” He hadn't meant to say that.

Marshall watched him. “Have you talked to any of your friends? From the Marines?”

“There isn't really anyone I want to talk to.”

His platoon was dispersed. They were gone, though he could still feel them, like a phantom limb. He couldn't talk to the men he'd led, though, and his officer friends were scattered, too. Some had extended their active duty to redeploy, some were out and through the EAS. None of them were nearby, and he didn't want to tell this to any of them. Fear was a secret you kept forever.

Marshall nodded again. “This must be hard.”

Conrad looked up. “Did you talk to Mom?”

“I did. Why?”

“She always says that. ‘This must be hard.'”

“Well?”

“Nothing.”

“I'm sorry you're going through this.”

Conrad nodded.

What was happening was that the air around him was building up. All this calm, light Japanese air was building up, denser and denser. It was becoming intolerable. What would happen if he could no longer breathe?

He drank some water. The restaurant was beginning to fill up. It was mostly men in suits. The table next to them was taken by two young law firm associates, from the look of them. Dark suits and white shirts and dark silk ties, an unmistakable sense of self-satisfaction. They were a few years older than him, not much. They seemed completely at ease, talking and laughing. What had they ever done in the world? But here they were, in suits, unfolding their napkins, ready to order sushi-grade tuna steaks, and headed for long and rewarding careers. This was the parallel universe, where he was absent.

How could he start over? He was at the bottom of this ladder. Claire was right; he had left the world. Now that he was back, he couldn't get in. And he didn't want to get in here, with these fucking flap-eared monkeys congratulating themselves on their salaries.

“Dad,” he said.

Marshall looked at him. He smoothed his tie, laying it down against his concave chest with restless fingers.

“What if I don't know how to say any of this?” Conrad said. “What's on my mind.”

“We can wait until you do,” Marshall said. “I can wait. I'm only worried that you need to say it, not that I need to hear it. You can say anything to us.”

The waiter arrived. He had an oval face and narrow, merry eyes. His thick black hair fell jauntily across his forehead.

“Do you like to order?” he asked.

Marshall ordered chicken yakitori, Conrad the sushi-grade tuna steak.

When the waiter left, Marshall folded his hands again on the table. “It looks as though you feel bad about something,” he said, “but everything you've done you should feel proud of.”

“Yeah,” Conrad said. “Thanks.”

Pride was not a possibility, since Carleton and Olivera were in his mind, and he had lost them. He was their platoon commander and he had allowed them to die. They had died in his charge. To say nothing of the other deaths that stayed with him: the family in Haditha, the father and children in the car, and Ali. He had vanished. One day he didn't come in to work, and no one seemed to know what happened to him. Conrad had asked the other terps, but no one would tell him. Forty percent of the translators who worked for the Americans were killed by the muj as traitors. They were killed horribly.

He could tell his father none of this. None of it.

At the next table, one of the young lawyers ordered something more. Conrad couldn't hear what he was saying, only his voice, which was so courteous that Conrad wondered if it was ironic. Or was it patronizing? He couldn't tolerate someone being patronizing. The waiter stood still, head cocked.

He's a real person,
Conrad thought.
He's your fucking equal, you stupid prick. He goes home at night and takes off his suit, like you, and talks to his wife. He has dinner and makes jokes about his day, he teases his daughter. He laughs, he has stomach problems.
Conrad felt as though there were a monstrous drum around him, the drumbeat echoing through him everywhere, his mind and body.

*   *   *

After lunch he called Jenny.

“Hey,” he said.

“What's up?” she answered.

“Can I come stay with you for a while?”

“Of course,” she said, so quickly that he wondered if she'd heard from Marshall. “I'll be home around six. Meet me at the apartment.”

“See you there.”

“Con,” she said, “are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” he said. “Why do you all keep asking?”

Now he wanted to be gone before Claire got home. Back at her apartment, he packed his clothes. He took the towel off the bed, folded it, and hung it in the bathroom. He made up the bed with tight Marine corners, smoothing the bedspread exactly. He realized it was the first time he'd done that, made the bed there.

When he was through, he called Claire at work.

“Hi there,” she said. She sounded distant and wary.

“I'm sorry about this morning,” Conrad said. “You were right.”

“I'm sorry I sounded like—so picky.” Her voice was now warm. “It's just—”

“No, you were right,” Conrad said. “I'm moving out.”

“Con,” she said. There was a pause. “What's going on?”

“It's not fair for me to stay here,” he said. “Sorry I was so rough.”

“But don't just leave,” Claire said. “That's not what I meant.”

“I'm going to stay at Jenny's,” he said. “Across town. I'll be in touch.”

Now he couldn't wait to get out of the apartment, with its bottles of shampoo, its steamy mirror, its fridge full of soy milk and strawberry yogurt and ice cream. Now he felt trapped here. He couldn't explain that to Claire; he couldn't explain anything to Claire. He had to move on; something was hurrying at his back.

At six o'clock he was on the sidewalk in front of Jenny's building.

 

18

Conrad sat on a battered folding chair in Jenny's kitchen, holding a beer and watching her cook. He leaned back, tilting the chair against the wall.

Jenny stood at the stove; she was wearing a loose yellow blouse and black tights. The sleeveless blouse exposed her birthmark: a small, dark strawberry shape on the back of her upper arm. The tights just covered her rounded knees, leaving her smooth, pale calves bare. On her feet were flip-flops with glittery straps; her toenails were painted dark blue. She held a spatula in one hand; the other was set on her hip. Steam rose from the pan, and the sound of sizzling.

“You crack me up,” Conrad said.

She glanced at him. “Me?”

He pointed with his bottle. “Blue toenails. When I left, you were wearing footed pajamas.”

She laughed and looked back at the pan. “Blue's nothing. I used to paint them with cocaine.”

Conrad took a swallow. “Did you?”

“No,” Jenny said. “Joke.”

He waited. “But you've done some drugs.” She had to have. Another thing he'd missed—his brother and sister growing up.

“Just weed in college. Nothing drastic.” She looked at him. “You checking up on me?”

“I guess I am,” he said. “Trying to figure out who you are. You're so grown-up. I'm not used to it.”

“You've been away,” she said. “We're both different now. It's kind of weird, trying to get to know your own brother again.”

“You feel like you don't know me?”

She looked at him. “Do you think I know you?”

He didn't answer.

“I feel like you want to make sure I don't.” She lifted a lid and stirred. “You don't want anyone to know you.”

“No,” he said, “that's not what it is.”

But that
was
what it was, as if something had slammed shut deep inside him. He didn't want anyone to come near. But how would he live?

“Up to you,” Jenny said. “But it makes it hard for the rest of us. Hard on the parents.” She looked at him again. “We all know you're having a bad time.” He said nothing, and Jenny looked down again at the stove and changed the subject. “What about drugs for you? You used to smoke some weed, as I recall.”

Conrad shook his head. “Not many drugs over there,” he said. “It's a combat zone, plus it's a Muslim country. For R and R you go to another Muslim country, like Qatar. Though not us, not combat units. The Vietnam War was different, it was full of drugs. Iraq's not. Sand, yes; drugs, no.”

She nodded. “So what'd you do for fun?”

“Nutty stuff. On the base, guys would think up practical jokes. They'd have costume contests. Dance contests.”

“Dance contests? Really?” She smiled.

“Yeah. They'd have routines. Sometimes costumes.”

“Would you compete?”

He shook his head. “I was the boss. Sometimes I'd watch.”

“So they have no idea that you can't dance.”

An old joke. He shook his head and took a swallow. “I see you haven't moved out of here yet.”

Jenny sighed. “I can't bring myself to give up this place.”

“What's Jock say?”

Jenny narrowed her eyes against the steam. “I don't know what he says. He's so tired all the time, we don't talk about it. When we do, we fight.” She unscrewed a bottle and shook some flakes into the frying pan. “He says, ‘What's the big deal? Why is an apartment more important than we are? What's your message?'”

“And? What is your message?” Conrad asked.

“How do I know? Why should everything have a message? He's coming over for dinner tonight, by the way. He has a night off, and he's going to stay here.” She shook her head and stuck out her lower lip, blowing upward to lift her bangs from her eyes. They fluttered, then settled again on her damp forehead. “How's Claire?”

Conrad shrugged. “Good.”

“So what happened? Why'd you move out?”

“The Roommates were getting restless,” he said. “Time to move on.”

“More real estate issues.” Jenny nudged the spatula against what was in the pan. “You can stay here as long as you like.”

“Thanks.”

The tall window beyond Jenny overlooked the street. This was a galley kitchen—the stove, sink, and fridge all in a row. Green-painted cabinets hung over the sink and counter. On the facing wall was a board hung with pots and pans, over a narrow wooden table.

Jenny's apartment was the third floor of an old brownstone. The house was made of solid chocolate-colored stone, with wide steps and heavy double front doors. It had once been a dignified one-family house, but now it was cut into apartments, and had long been in a state of benign neglect. Decades of grime had settled into its cracks and interstices. Inside, all the cornices and moldings had been blurred and muffled by decades of paint, the edges softened as though by snowfall.

The front hall was dim and lofty, with high ceilings and gloomy wooden trim. The walls were a sooty white, with huge faint stains on them, like continents. The black-and-white marble floor tiles were stained and cracked. The space had its own mysterious smell, burning, slightly acrid.

Outside, along 103rd Street, cars were parked tightly along the curb, bumper to bumper. They looked as though they had been neatly set in place forever, solid and motionless, not as though they all dispersed magically each day during ticketing time. Then the street was empty for the huge, lumbering street cleaner that came bobbing and whirling along the curb, while the adjacent blocks were full of double-parked cars, their drivers waiting patiently for the moment of return.

All the houses along the street made brave gestures toward nature. Some of the doorways were flanked by pots of geraniums, now shrunken and wizened after a summer of erratic watering, or faltering neon-pink impatiens, fainting in their planters full of baked earth, or, more trendily, stands of tall dead grasses, which, even dead, rustled beautifully with every breeze. On one house a clambering wisteria had taken stealthy possession of the entire façade, throwing out what had been tiny friendly green tendrils but had become, over the years, giant brown python-size trunks, covering the whole building with a shaggy green pelt.

Jenny's apartment, two stories above the high-ceilinged parlor floor, was long, narrow, and modest. The kitchen overlooked the street, as did the living room beside it, with its bay window. In the middle of the apartment, halfway down the hall, was the bathroom, and at the back was Jenny's bedroom. This was large and square, with two windows overlooking the backyard, and it was the reason she could not give up the apartment.

The front door slammed. “Hello!” Jock called.

“Yo!” said Jenny.

Jock appeared in the doorway. He was tall and gaunt, with pale skin and short, thick reddish-brown hair. He had a narrow, pointed nose and wore small round metal-rimmed glasses. His neck was long, and he had a prominent Adam's apple. He was somehow cool, with an easy, quizzical manner. He grinned at Conrad, who stood up. They clapped shoulders.